Surfacing Craft in the Archive
Join Houghton Library and the Harvard Department of English for an evening of exploring how four researchers incorporate archival evidence of craft in their work and pedagogy. Our speakers will share brief presentations on their current projects followed by a discussion about their pursuits and process, including how one identifies handmade material in archives, the different skills and methods of close-looking they require, and what non-traditional modes of scholarly inquiry are supported by craft.
Deidre Lynch: “Science, Scissors-work, and Mary Delany’s Flora Delanica”
Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard. Her recent books include Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015) and The Unfinished Book (2021, co-edited with Alexandra Gillespie ). She is currently finishing a book project titled Paper Slips: A Literary, Media, and Material History of Scrap, and beginning a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mande Zecca: “Make/Do: Craft in the First-Year Writing Classroom”
Mande Zecca teaches first-year writing in the Harvard College Writing Program. She writes poetry and scholarship about poetry, which she has published most recently in Modernism/modernity, Post45, and Jacket2. Her chapbook of poems, Pace Arcadia, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2017.
Amy E. Elkins: “Intimate Possibilities: Crafting the Queer Modernist Archive”
Amy E. Elkins is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College and the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (2022). Her scholarship and art appear in such places as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Post45 Contemporaries, and Inscription. As a scholar, writer, and multimedia artist, she explores the overlap of archives and feminist/queer theory alongside experimental approaches to humanities research.
Jen Bervin: “On Paper”
Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text, textiles, and material histories. Her publications include Concordance Omission (2023); Silk Poems (2017); and Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems with Marta Werner and Susan Howe (2013).
Image: Detail of "Pancratium maritimum," British Museum.
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Light refreshments will be offered. Registration is encouraged but not required.
We encourage persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access to contact us.
