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Document Type

Open Access Article

Author Biography

Danielle Spratt (she/her) is a professor of eighteenth-century literature in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge. With Bridget Draxler, she is the author of Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice (2018).

Rachael Scarborough King is an associate professor of English at the Uuniversity of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Ballitore Project. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020).

Deena Al-halabieh is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Arabic and Anglophone slave narratives and has been the graduate project assistant for the Ballitore Project since 2021.

Stephanie Guerrero graduated with her BA in English from California State University, Channel Islands, and received her MA with a concentration in creative writing from California State University, Northridge.

Stephen Martinez (he/him) graduated from California State University, Northridge, with an MA in English literature. Stephen currently works there as a peer writing specialist, where he is also a student in the Single Subject Credential Program.

Quill Sang (they/them; ze/zir) is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are an English major and intern for the Ballitore Project.

Joseph Sweetnam recently graduated with an English degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He currently works at an elementary school.

Abstract

This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call “cooperative critical bibliography,” a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography’s non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates learning and institutional connections non-hierarchically and elevates the material needs and experiential expertise of students to a crucial research skill, this practice offers an inclusive model of student-centered training that makes humanities and archival work welcoming for students of color, first-generation, and early career scholars: all groups who have been marginalized in university settings and in the fields of archival studies and book history.

(In the issue section "Rethinking Catalogs and Archives")

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