al-mofhariz

In keeping with my interest in archives, last week I interviewed Audra Wolfe about her experiences cataloging the papers of geneticist Bentley Glass which are held at the American Philosophical Society. This work is funded by a National Science Foundation Scholar's grant. Audra is a historian and editor based in Philadelphia. When not knee-deep in other people’s manuscripts, she’s working on a textbook on Cold War science for Johns Hopkins University Press and is also a food blogger and canning expert (see here)

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RADIN: Why Bentley Glass?

WOLFE: Bentley Glass is one of those people who shows up as a bit player all over the history of the Cold War. I first noticed him in his role as chair of the Biological Sciences Curriculum study, one of the major post-Sputnik attempts to reform American science education. But once I knew the name, I started seeing references to him in the oddest places: the nuclear test ban debate and fallout, Pugwash, debates over civil liberties and academi…

For many of us, archives are a central feature of our day-to-day work practices. In research practicums we learn about how to identify archival sources and begin piecing fragments into coherent accounts. However, I often find myself thinking about the epistemological (and ethical) status of the archive. This is a gap in our pedagogy that warrants attention. At the most basic of levels -- how did this material come to be available to me as historian and what are my obligations to these material traces?

Cultural critics, anthropologists, and social historians have done important work in this vein -- the translation of Derrida's Archive Fever into English spurred a flurry of scholarship in the late 1990s, including one of my favorites: Carol Steedman's Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Steedman is an interpreter of Derrida, who draws on the archive as source of power in order to probe the politics of doing 'bottom up' history with records that were produced by t…