Underground Archives, Hidden Archives, Community Archives

Panelists will discuss recent efforts to identify, process, and acquire archive collections at NYU. Dr. Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and Studies program at NYU and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America is one of the panelists.

What makes an archive underground, hidden, or community-based? Panelists discuss recent efforts by universities and repositories to identify, process, and acquire such collections. This Archives and Public History Brown Bag will consider what is at stake for the marginalized communities within which these archives are often situated, and for the archival materials themselves. Panelists will discuss these, and other issues, in relationship to the archival initiatives and projects that they oversee.

PANELISTS:
Dr. Andrew Flinn is a senior lecturer in Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL) and currently an Allen Smith Visiting Scholar at Simmons College, Boston. His research interests include independent community-based archives and grassroots community history. Recent publications include (with Mary Stevens) ‘“It is noh mistri, wi mekin histri”. Telling Our Own Story: Independent and Community Archives in the United Kingdom, Challenging and Subverting the Mainstream’ in Bastian & Alexander (eds.) Community Archives. The shaping of memory (2009).

Dr. Jacqueline Goldsby is an Associate Professor of English at NYU and Project Director of Mapping the Stacks, which "aims to identify and organize uncatalogued archival collections that chronicle Black Chicago between the 1930s and 1970s." Her work focuses on 19th- and 20th-century American literary and cultural history, and African American literature and culture. Her latest book, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, was awarded the 2007 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association.

Dr. Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is an Associate Professor of History and Individualized Study at Gallatin School and the Dept. of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and Studies program at NYU, co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America, and author of award winning books. Tchen is a dumpster diver and curator. He's built collections and archives, and teaches a graduate seminar "Theorizing Practices: Underground Archives."

Laura Helton, is a doctoral candidate in History at New York University, where she studies twentieth-century United States and African American history and print culture.  She earned an MLIS from Rutgers University and an MA in Archives and History from NYU.  She has worked as an archivist at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, City Lore, and the University of Southern Mississippi, and is an intern at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Her dissertation research focuses on the building of African American archives in the early twentieth century to study how people collectively theorized blackness and constructed historical narratives as a form of movement-building.