Overdue Conversations

This episode grapples with the many implications of one big question: what happens to literary archives when most of the work and communications around book publishing now occurs digitally? Columbia literature curator Melina Moe sits down with Lise Jaillant–an author, researcher, and lecturer at Loughborough University–to discuss this. Lise Jaillant’s research lies at the intersection…

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Melina Moe sits down with Trevor Owens, the head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. Trevor is the first person to hold this position because it’s new— in fact, digital content management is new to most institutions. Melina and Trevor discuss the many, sometimes contradictory, challenges…

As the COVID-19 pandemic compelled libraries and archives worldwide to close their doors indefinitely, stranded researchers were compelled to radically reimagine what a visit to the archive might look like. Rather than scrutinizing text amid the dust of decaying paper in a Special Collections Reading Room, these researchers found themselves poring over digitized documents bathed…

Publishing houses make the study of literature possible in more ways than one. Not only do publishing houses make literary texts available as finished goods for our cultural consumption, the archival holdings of these publishing houses also contain evidence of literature in its myriad unfinished, intermittent, exploratory forms before and after publication. Publisher archives house…

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Melina Moe sits down with historian and curator of NYU’s AI Now Institute and author of A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin. Melina and Joy discuss urgent questions about the social history of computing; the ethical dilemmas posed by the power of tech…

Although the meaning of “archive” has always been complicated, an image persists: Vast storerooms with rows of bookshelves and boxes brimming with folders, a physical space that stores books, documents, and records of our collective physical and social world.  Today, though, archives are grappling with a momentous shift. Much of the communication and content created…

Would knowing that reparations were enacted for slaveholders change the conversation around the feasibility of reparations today? Can archives be spaces of repair and reconciliation? This week we speak with Elsa Mendoza, historian at Middlebury College and former curator in the Georgetown Slavery Archives at Georgetown University about the role of archives in the debate about reparations…

Georgetown students made international news in 2018 when they voted to add an activity fee to benefit the descendants of enslaved people sold in 1838 to pay off the university’s debt. As one of the first concrete steps toward reparations, the vote can be traced back to student activism, archival scholarship, as well as a series…

Maya Moretta is a recent graduate of Georgetown University. As a student, Moretta had worked with the Georgetown Slavery Archive to compile a massive database of names of enslaved people owned by Georgetown, and the Maryland Jesuits. She also became an activist working with Students for GU272 to pass a historic referendum demanding reparative justice…

In 1838, the Maryland Jesuits who operated Georgetown University, among numerous other concerns, conducted one of the largest sales of enslaved people in American history. Nearly 300 people were sold, mostly to plantations in Louisiana. The legacy of this tragedy has been at the center of Georgetown University politics for nearly a decade. Students, faculty,…