Response
Matt Cohen
University of Nebraska
Matt Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author or editor of five books, including, with Edlie Wong, an edition of George Lippard’s sensational novella The Killers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and, most recently, Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (University of Iowa Press, 2017). He’s a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive, and is currently at work on a book called The Silence of the Miskito Prince: Imagining Across Cultures in Early America.
Abstract
In response, Matt Cohen’s investment in the theory and practice behind archival research (and the crucial role that literary historians play in this process) forms the basis of his commentary on these papers. Cohen offers... [ view full abstract ]
In response, Matt Cohen’s investment in the theory and practice behind archival research (and the crucial role that literary historians play in this process) forms the basis of his commentary on these papers. Cohen offers suggestions and questions for the role of archives in the classroom—and how archival pedagogies are themselves ongoing processes that have the potential to preserve information ecologies and the networks of nineteenth- and twenty-first century collaboration therein.
Archival pedagogy, as this panel proposes, incites collaborations regarding how we construct – and manipulate – past and present meaning. When students engage archives as part of their course experiences, they learn to navigate perspectives within moments of individual and sociohistorical crisis. Moreover, by emphasizing the archive as constructed repository, students consider the ways in which archives, too, are shaped by changes in social, political, and cultural climates. Students’ views of the archives as living, ongoing processes, rather than collections for passive reception, may be crucial to contesting a political climate of “post-truth” and “alternative facts.” Difficult though these collaborations may be, using archives in the classroom requires students to develop the critical literacy key to today’s evolving information ecologies.
Authors
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Matt Cohen
(University of Nebraska)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P44 » Untangling “Difficult Collaborations”: Nineteenth-Century Archives in the Climate of Twenty-First Century Classrooms (14:00 - Friday, 23rd March, Enchantment A)
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