A roundtable discussion with Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida)—authors of The Teaching Archive—along with Caleb Smith (Yale).
Moderated by Alice Kaplan (Director of the Whitney Humanities Center).
Whitney Humanities Center
4:30 pm EST
A roundtable discussion of Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s new book The Teaching Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which tells the story of nine literature courses taught at nine different institutions. This new history rewrites what we know about literary studies as a discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. Our event will focus on teaching archives—from the nine literary scholars featured in The Teaching Archive along with those of Yale’s Caleb Smith—and the collaborations between teachers and students that they chronicle.