2022 Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies

The UCLA Department of Information Studies presents The 2022 Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies
"The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market"

featuring

Amy Hildreth Chen
Independent Scholar

Join us for an engaging webinar
Thursday, January 20, 2022 - 6pm PST

Register Here

Abstract
The sale of authors’ papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin to Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. In Placing Papers, published with University of Massachusetts Press in 2020, Amy Hildreth Chen described the history of how this multimillion-dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considered what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others had on this burgeoning economy. In her Kenneth Karmiole in Archival Studies Lecture, Chen will revisit the demographic data and trends she analyzed in her monograph from the writers listed in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2007) before expanding her discussion with new data highlighting the unique circumstances faced by the authors of color listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). Chen will conclude with a meditation on the future of the market, including the quandaries that archivists, authors, dealers, and researchers of all backgrounds must face.