THE TEACHING ARCHIVE

April 5, 2021

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.