Broadening Our Research Horizons: Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs
Our dependence on the past’s valuation of its own cultural products has become increasingly obvious in our ongoing interests in reshaping the canon and in decentering our humanities’ disciplines. Certainly, the availability of digitized primary-source materials increases the range in newly available, even newly discovered texts. However, our reliance on the digitized brings with it an obvious quandary as it can narrow the scope and constrain investigation of other exciting sources crucial to our scholarship but not deemed worthy of archiving. They might be fragile, incomplete, or ill-preserved; they might be undocumented and uncatalogued. How does that neglect in our own time iterate the secondary status with which editors, authors, and contributors then may have regarded the very texts they themselves produced? Our interest in expanding the horizons in the humanities demands we keep our focus on what remains less visible to enrich our disciplines. This roundtable considers the current status and possible future for our different specialties in the humanities. It raises questions about how we approach, highlight, and study the revolutionary, the novel, or simply the peculiar in the past’s cultural productions. It encourages a community exchange about those “eureka” or “alas” moments in our research practices, archival investigations, writing, and publishing. What surprises or stymies, delights or discourages us in our search for primary texts? Submissions may explore but are not limited to the methods most promising in tracing and tracking primary sources; access to private collections of diaries, letters, publication records; justifications for a neglected text’s primacy; the joys and frustrations in the hunt.
Proposal abstracts of 300 words or less must be submitted through the NeMLA CFP portal for session ID 21096; link
http://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21096.
Deadline for submissions is September 30.