Monumental Archives
Interested in learning about the 2024/2025 reading group associated with this initiative? Check out the Critical Archives Reading Group page: https://jcblibrary.org/
archives-reading-group-2024-25 .
Monumental Archives is a collaborative project between the John Carter Brown Library and the John Hay Library, led by library directors Karin Wulf and Amanda Strauss.
A critical perspective on monuments and memorials has helped illuminate how monuments are situated not in the past they memorialize, but in the instances of their creation and perpetuation. At the same time, archivists and librarians and scholars working in a host of other disciplines have analyzed and interrogated the meaning and shape of archival collections, illuminating how archives of the past are constituted in the present and reflect the biases and priorities of the moment of their making.
This project brings together these strands of scholarship to explore how architecture and aesthetics have joined with collecting and organizational development to create –and to exclude– particular paths to accessing the past within libraries and archives. The John Hay Library and the John Carter Brown Library are partnering in a series of collaborative ventures under the rubric of "Monumental Archives," dedicated to both creating more accessible archives and to a scholarly and public exploration of exclusivity in institutional collections.
This webpage contains information on the Monumental Archives project, with links for events, information, and associated programming. In 2022-2023 Monumental Archives hosted two workshops, one a day long gathering of scholars and archivists to discuss their mutual work; the second convened colleagues at Brown to discuss archival space and exclusion. In 2023-24 Amanda and Karin published the below reflections. In 2024-25 Monumental Archives will host a campus reading series on archives. As the archival turn has engaged scholars across so many disciplines and the public alike, this will create a space to read and collectively think about what are archives are and do– particularly in colonial contexts. The calendar and schedule of readings will be posted here by mid-summer. Interested? Learn more here.
Reflections published in 2023-24:
Collaboration: A Margaret Bingham Stillwell Imprint Amanda E. Strauss and Karin Wulf January 26, 2023 |  |
Karin Wulf and Amanda Strauss August 24, 2023 |  |