Toolkits

We offer a constantly updated sample of readings related to archives and documentary practices.

General

  • Fritzsche, Peter. "The Archive." In History & Memory 17 (2005): 15-44.
  • Head, Randolph C. "Historical Research on Archives and Knowledge Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Wave." In Archival Science 10 (2010): 191–194.
  • Ketelaar, Eric. "Records Out and Archives In: Early Modern Cities as Creators of Records and as Communities of Archives." In Archival Science 10 (2010): 201–210.
  • Brendecke, Arndt. "‘Arca, archivillo, archivo’: The Keeping, Use and Status of Historical Documents about the Spanish Conquista." In Archival Science 10 (2010): 267–283.

Collectors and Curiosities

  • Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
  • Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
  • Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge, 1995.
  • Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.
  • Schwartz, Janelle A. and Nhora Lucía Serrano. Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
  • Pearce, Susan M. (ed.). Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge, 1994.

Museum studies

  • Macdonald, Sharon (ed.). A Companion to Museum Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
  • Knell, Simon J., Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson (eds.). Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed. London-New York: Routledge, 2007.
  • Sandell, Richard (ed.). Museums, Society, Inequality. London-New York: Routledge, 2002.
  • Carbonell, Bettina Messias (ed.). Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
  • Crane, Susan A. (ed.). Museums and Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Karp, Ivan, Christien Mullen Kreamer and Steven Lavine (eds.). Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC-London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
  • Henning, Michelle. Museums, Media and Cultural History. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006.
  • Edson, Gary. Museum Ethics. London-New York: Routledge, 1997.

Memory

  • Huyssen, Andreas. "Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia." In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
  • Assmann, Aleida. "Canon and Archive." In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
  • Debary, Octave. "Deindustrialization and Museumification: From Exhibited Memory to Forgotten History." In Sociology of Education 2 (1996): 105-125.
  • Hedstrom, Margaret. "Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past." In Archival Science 2 (2002): 21-43.
  • Ketelaar, Eric. "Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives." In Archival Science 1 (2001)131-141.
  • Josias, Anthea. "Toward an Understanding of Archives as a Feature of Collective Memory." In Archival Science 11 (2011): 95–112.
  • Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd. "Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream." In Archival Science 9 (2009): 71-86.
  • Bastian, Jeannette A. and Ben Alexander (eds.). Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory. London: Facet, 2009.
  • Van House, Nancy and Elizabeth F. Churchill. "Technologies of Memory: Key Issues and Critical Perspectives." In Memory Studies 1 (2008): 295-310.
  • Bal, Meike, Jonathan V. Crewe and Leo Spitzer. Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.

Genres of documentation

  • Stoler, Ann Laura (ed.). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
  • Blouin Jr., Francis X. and William G. Rosenberg (eds.). Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
  • Riles, Annelise. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
  • Robertson, Craig. “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport.” In Archive Stories, edited by Antoinette Burton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 68-86.
  • Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Forgeries and piracy

  • Bubandt, Nils. “From the Enemy’s Point of View: Violence, Empathy, and the Ethnography of Fakes.” In Cultural Anthropology 3 (2009), 553-88.
  • Fahrmeir, Andreas. “Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-century Europe.” In Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, edited by Jane Caplan and John Torpey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, 218-234.
  • Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books, 1996.
  • Adrian Johns, "Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science." In Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  • Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Enemy of Us All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009.
  • Biagioli, Mario and Peter Galison. Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Micro-histories and close reading

  • Zemon Davis, Natalie. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. “The Archive and Testimony.” In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2002, 137-171.
  • Papailias, Penelope. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.