Thu, February 11, 2021 6:30 P.M.
Virtual

“Reading from Inside the Archive” is a unique opportunity offering an exploration of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s life and work through her published writing and literary archive. Questions throughout center on how public persona and personal experience intersect and the degree to which this dynamic is reflected in the trace records of content creation.

The class includes the following four workshops:

I. New Materialism and Interpretation—a session on Dunbar-Nelson’s published and typescript poetry.
II. The “Dunbar-Nelson” Speaker—an elocution-themed session.
III. Family Scrapbook—session covering the archival nature of scrapbooking practices.
IV. Art of Letter Writing—a session that draws upon Dunbar-Nelson’s correspondence in unpacking letter writing as a practice and discussing the various issues that come up in the contents of a letter.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Reading from Inside the Archive syllabus

About the Instructor

Jesse Ryan Erickson is a researcher in the study of print culture, the history of the book, and special collections librarianship. His specializations are in ethnobibliography, alternative printing and non-canonical textuality, African American print culture, and transnational Ouidiana. He is currently working as University of Delaware’s Coordinator of Special Collections and Digital Humanities, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center. Dr. Erickson earned his Master of Library and Information Science in 2014 and his doctorate in Information Studies in 2016 from UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Having previously served in the position of Programs Chair for the Southern California Chapter of the American Printing History Association (APHA), he served as the Vice President for Programs on APHA’s national Board of Trustees from 2017 to 2019, most notably organizing the 2019 national conference One Press, Many Hands: Diversity in the History of American Printing. His published scholarship includes “The Gentleman’s Ghost: Patriarchal Eurocentric Legacies in Special Collections Design,” in Archives and Special Collections as Sites of Contestation (Library Juice Press, 2020), “An Aesthetic History of the Ouija Board,” in Printing History, 22 (2017), and “Revolution in Black: Black American Alternative Press and Popular Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century,” which was published in the 2011 issue of Publishing History.