The first meeting of Archival Kismet was held in April 2021. Check out the original program to get a taste of what Kismet is all about!
THURSDAY, APRIL 8
11:00 am CDT
Welcome and Opening Comments
“Archival Kismet: A Research Philosophy,” Courtney E. Thompson
11:30 am – 1:00 pm CDT
Letters I: What Letters Reveal
Moderator: Melissa Johnson
“Caught Between Two Queens: The Epistle of Poor Pratte,” Valerie Schutte
“Finding Ferguson: Sam Clemens, Jane Sedgwick, and a Healthy Dose of Serendipity,” Erin Bartram
“‘The Truth of a Lonely Life’: Reconstructing the Life of a Doctor’s Wife Thanks to an Archival Confession,” Kelly O’Donnell
1:30 – 3:00 pm CDT
Eating the Archive
Moderator: Alyssa Sepinwall
“‘Dehydrated Whale Meat:’ Or, Three Words that Mean You Should Request That File,” Andrew Muldoon
“Making Marmalade: The Housewife and Technology in Britain, c. 1870-1950,” Katie Carpenter
“Jews in Cincinnati’s Hot Tomale [sic] Trust,” Jonathan Z. S. Pollack
3:30 – 5:15 pm CDT
Images, Moving and Otherwise
Moderator: Matt Lavine
“A Beacon for the Dark Islands: How Lantern Slides Captured the Attention of Audiences from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries,” Deborah Lee-Talbot
“Trouble with Rosie Is, She’s Gone and Got Ideas Above Her Station,” Christine Slobogin
“Sublime Romanticism, Religion, and Saurians: The Two Versions of John Martin’s “The Country of the Iguanodon,” Ariel Segal
“Constructing Kajiwara Kinpachi: Collective Filmmaking and the Question of Authorship and Purpose in 1930s Japan,” Iris Haukamp
FRIDAY, APRIL 9
9:00 – 11:00 am CDT
Interpreting Images, Representing Artists
Moderator: Donna J. Drucker
“New Paths to Beauty: Art and Alicia Keyes,” Jessie Hopper
“In Active Demise—The Archival Trace of Malcom Ross,” Matt Pummer
“An Orderly Desire: The Tuskegee Institute Scrapbooks of Minnie Lee Lyons,” Haley Aaron
“Photographing the Racial Divide: Social Implications of the Historical Images of Dr. Anna Maria Gove,” Kathelene McCarty Smith
“‘Only’ in Photos: Hidden History of Women Workers in a Paper Factory Museum Archive in Turkey,” Meral Akbaş and Özge Kelekçi
11:30 am – 1:00 pm CDT
Objects I: Odd Objects and Unusual Users
Moderator: Nicole Welk-Joerger
“Sign and Countersign: An Artifact of a Clandestine Meeting,” Mark Stout
“Hairy Archives: Money, Moustaches and Masters of Disguise,” Andrew Janes
“The Materiality of Standards,” Elizabeth Neswald
1:30 – 3:00 pm CDT
Music’s Meanings
Moderator: Cornelia Lambert
“Remembering the Haitian Revolution in US Hip-Hop: KRS-One, Talib Kweli, Melky Jean,” Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
“‘You’ll Be Living Rent Free’: Disney’s Villainous Marriage Proposal in “Babes in Toyland” (1961),” G. Vaughn Joy
“Immortal Spells and Ineffable Messages: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Queer Musicological Marginalia,” Kristin M. Franseen
3:30 – 5:15 pm CDT
Letters II: How Letters Feel
Moderator: DeeDee Baldwin
“A Peasant’s Conscience in Letters: Andreas Walch, The Reformation, and Happy Chance,” Dan Gladis
“‘I like you the Best girl’: Friendship in an Institution for the Feebleminded, 1910,” Chelsea Chamberlain
“Dear Father Christmas, My Father is a Disabled Soldier: Children’s Letters in Interwar Britain,” Thomas Stephens
“The Most Horrifying History of Medicine Letter I Have Ever Read,” Jennifer McGillan
SATURDAY, APRIL 10
9:00 – 10:30 am CDT
Recovering Sex and Sexuality
Moderator: Bridget Keown
“Bastards & Bigamy in Baroque Convents,” Meghan Callahan
“‘Gruesome press terminology’: The Thorpe Affair in the British Gay Press,” Ruby Hann
“Astrology, Sexology, and the Object Legacy of Magnus Hirschfeld,” Rachel Pitkin
11:00 am – 12:30 pm CDT
Making Books One’s Own
Moderator: Agnieszka Czeblakow
“Examples of Collective Ownership of Books in 18th Century Colonial Mexican Convents,” Jose Guerrero
“Marginalia in the Cookbook’s Endpapers,” Rhiannon Scharnhorst
“Poetry Book Turned Scrapbook: An Early Twentieth-Century Reader’s Copy of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Candle Lightin’ Time,” Jolie Braun
1:00 – 2:30 pm CDT
Space/Craft
Moderator: Kelsey Hoekstra
“Typical Activities: Craft in the American Space Program,” Anna Reser
“Injured Veterans, Minors, and Mothers: How Stagehands Shaped Opera and Ballet Repertoire at the Bolshoi Theater (1944),” Lee Gurdial Kaur Singh
“‘Diana Designs’: Interior Accommodations Engineers at Trans-Canada Airlines,” Blair Stein
3:00 – 4:45 pm CD
Access and Absence
Moderator: Martha Attridge Bufton
“Make Sure Your Personal Website Is Updated: Or, How A Rare Books Dealer Found Me on the Internet; Or, How I Accessed a Privately-Owned Revolutionary War-era Encyclopedia Britannica Set for My Dissertation,” Alexi Garrett
“The Real Cancel Culture: Restricted Access in the Archives,” Kacie Lucchini Butcher
“The ‘Forgotten’ Black Book of the Waldorf-Astoria,” April White
“Women’s Magazines and the First Modern Pandemic,” Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
SUNDAY, APRIL 11
9:00 – 10:30 am CDT
Making Self, Questioning Identity
Moderator: Caroline Ritter
“Identity (card) of an African Prince,” Larissa Kopytoff
“Writing Tamil, Speaking French: Transliterated Communication in Colonial French India,” Jakob Burnham
“Mediated Diagnoses, or; Is There Dyslexia If There Is No Reading?,” Sharrona Pearl
11:00 am – 12:30 pm CDT
Recovering Childhood Things
Moderator: Monica L. Mercado
“Hooray for Freddie!: Finding Meaning in a Children’s Book,” Jaipreet Virdi
“Black Boy’s Experience,” Pahtrice Henry
“Lost Children in the Archive: The Ethical Dilemmas of Working with Psychiatric Patient Records,” Kylie M. Smith
1:00 – 2:30 pm CDT
Objects II: Wearable Objects
Moderator: Hannah Zeavin
“Wrapping the World around Your Finger,” Kathleen Crowther
“Disabled Dogs and Their Devices: Animal Prosthetics in the 19th and 20th Century,” Aparna Nair
“The Panther and the Bulldog: May Day 1970 in New Haven,” Laura A. Macaluso
3:00 – 4:45 pm CDT
Law & Order, in and out of the Archives
Moderator: Kylie Smith
“‘Dissecting’ Nineteenth-century Newspapers: What Can We Learn About Discipline and Punishment from Press Accounts of Executions?,” Lindy Marks
“The ‘Album des causes célèbres’: Dr. Wilfrid Derome’s Scrapbook of Murder,” Jamie Jelinski
“Abortion on Trial: The State v. Goodson, St. Joseph, Missouri,” Evan Elizabeth Hart
“This Is (Not) A Paper Bag,” Snowden Becker
5:00 pm CDT
Closing Remarks
Archival Kismet 