Archival Imaginaries

Anjali Arondekar’s work engages the politics and poetics of sexuality, race and historiography, with a strong focus on comparative empires within South Asian and Indian Ocean studies.
 She is primarily interested in three concepts that have increasingly become the focus of methodological debates within historical and/or literary studies: archives (what constitutes historical evidence), exemplarity (how do we read evidence) and geopolitics (where do we read from). Such methodological concerns bring genealogies of area studies to bear on Anglo-American histories of literature and culture, and ask how such an attention to “area” calibrates questions of race, gender and sexuality.

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University. She graduated from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology with an MA and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, with an MLS. She previously served as Chair of the Archivists and Archives of Color Section of the Society of American Archivists. Her work has focused on the intersections of information science and African American history, ranging from newspaper database research on the earliest mentions of African American concert music performances, to inventory design for the cosmetic kit of Hollywood’s first Black woman makeup artist, to exhibit curation highlighting transatlantic art inspired by African American film.

Ames Hawkins is a transgenre writer and the author of These are Love(d) Letters, an award-winning, genre-bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction that explores the questions: What inspires a person to write a love letter? What inspires a person to save a love letter even when the love has shifted or left? And what does it mean when a person uses someone else’s love letters as a place from which to create their own sense of self? Their work appears in a number of edited volumes, and across a range of academic and literary publications—both print and online—such as Pre/Text, Constellations, Palaver Journal, enculturation, Slag Glass City, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, and Water~Stone Review. A Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development at Columbia College Chicago, Hawkins also co-hosted and co-producted the scholarly podcast Masters of Text (mastersoftext.com). Find out more at http://www.ameshawkins.com.

Kwame Holmes is Director of the Kingston Housing Lab, a Scholar-In-Residence in the Human Rights Project at Bard College, and Cohort Mentor for the Bard Baccalaureate program. He is a critical geographer, historian, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the emotional politics of urban development and inequality. He reads the history of modern cities and social movements through a black queer studies frame. His work has appeared in Radical History Review, Occasion and No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. He is at work revising a book manuscript entitled, Queer Removal: Liberalism and Displacement in the Nation’s Capital.

 

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez, associate professor, is the Program Director for the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English (RCTE) graduate program in the Department of English at the University of Arizona. She is the author of the article “Forging a Mestiza Rhetoric: Mexican Women Journalists’ Role in the Construction of a National Identity,” published in College English. Her book Occupying our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942 was just released through University of Arizona Press. As co-PI on a new knowledge grant, she is currently working on a primary document recovery project – a critical bilingual anthology of the rhetorics of Mexican / Mexican American women journalists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is an active board member of the academic Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition.

Prior to returning to the Texas After Violence Project in 2016, where he previously served as project coordinator and associate director, Gabriel worked as a post-conviction mitigation specialist for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, criminal justice policy researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and project coordinator of the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. He has conducted extensive research on police violence, mass incarceration, the death penalty, and the impacts of violence and trauma on individuals, families, and communities. Gabriel’s writings have appeared in the Oxford American, Scalawag, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power, and Kula: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. Gabriel is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction and served as a prose editor for the 2019 Pushcart Prize selection committee.

Dr. Tonia Sutherland is assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Prior to joining the faculty at UHM, Sutherland was an assistant professor in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information (formerly the School of Information Studies), and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Suther­land’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies (STS)