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• 12:15 – Why Worry about the Interplay of Archives and Emotions?
  Speaker:
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• 13:00 – Q&A session/informal discussion

Admission is free, but it is highly recommendable to reserve a place by email. 

Light refreshments will be served.

Abstract

Emotions matter and have always mattered to both the people whose histories are documented by archives and to those working with the documents these contain. Without thinking about emotions, there are a number of crucial elements that we would simply miss.

Vitally, as professionals, we would not capture the core of our own identities and relationships across borders. We might not imagine what an archivist felt while appraising materials or how a historian’s past or present feelings might dictate what is seen or not seen in those records. Crucially, we would not have the tools to envision the archives of the future as a means for repairing deep-seated injustices, for healing scarred communities, or for moving beyond the dire states imposed on them by their emotionally-laden histories.

This presentation aims at presenting the first study conducted with Prof. Ilaria Scaglia (Aston University) to put archivists and historians—scholars and practitioners from different settings, geographical provenance, and stages of career—in conversation with one another to examine the interplay of a broad range of emotions and archives, traditional and digital, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries across national and disciplinary borders.

Drawing on methodologies from the history of emotions and critical archival studies, this research provides an original analysis of the emotional dynamics affecting the construction and management of archives and the emotions and their effects on the people engaging with them, such as archivists, researchers, and a broad range of communities.

Its main message is that critically investigating the history and mechanics of emotions—including their suppression and exclusion—is essential to understanding how archives came to hold deep civic and ethical implications for both present and future. Thus, this project intends to establish a solid base for future scholarship and interdisciplinary collaborations and challenges academics and non-academics to think, work, and train new generations differently, fully aware that past and present choices have—and might again—hurt, inspire, empower, or silence.

Speaker’s Profile

is Lecturer in the at the University of Malta. She is now International Associate of the Malta Study Centre and leads cataloguing and research projects in Malta, Italy and the Vatican Library.

Her fields of research include the history of archives and institutions (Order of St John and the Mediterranean area), archival cataloguing standards, digital humanities, archival pedagogies, and colonial legacies in libraries and archives.

Her most recent publication is a co-authored article entitled “Pioneers in Maltese Archives and Libraries: People, Contexts and Institutions in 20th-century Malta,”- Archives and Records (2024).