“Teaching Harriet Jacobs in the Archives”: Literature professors and ZSR librarians produce C19 podcast episode

Associate Teaching Professor of English Rian Bowie, Digital Humanities Research Designer and Part-Time Assistant Professor of English Carrie Johnston, Special Collections Librarian Megan Mulder, Director of Special Collections and Archives Tanya Zanish-Belcher, and Assistant Director of Academic Technology Brianna Healey recently produced a podcast episode for C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists titled “Teaching Harriet Jacobs in the Archives.”

The episode, which can be heard on Soundcloud (transcript here), “highlights the ways that librarians and faculty can partner in designing assignments that draw on archival records to emphasize the cultural, political, and social significance of nineteenth-century literary texts. Specifically, [they] explore the affordances of using archival records, particularly bills of sale for enslaved people, to teach Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Wake Forest University English faculty and Special Collections and Archives librarians talk about the discoveries students make through assignments that allow them to incorporate nineteenth-century historical documents from slavery into their reading and analysis of Jacobs’s narrative. [They] also consider the significant emotional challenges that this kind of direct material engagement poses, discussing the ways [they] have presented and revised our assignments to account for potentially traumatic triggering.”