Volume 42

2025-06-11

DOI: 10.55520/49RSWHQY

§ Micro-editions

§ Voices and Perspectives: Interviews and Conversations

§ Uncovering and Sustaining the Cultural Record

How Private Murray Became “Private No More”

Sharon Roger Hepburn

This essay details the process behind the editorial publication of a collection of civil war letters from Private John Lovejoy Murray, Company E, 102nd USCT. The John Lovejoy Murray collection of letters contain insights into the experiences of an African American soldier and his regiment during the Civil War. John Lovejoy Murray, a private in Company E, 102nd USCT, died of disease in a Charleston hospital on April 12, 1865. Through John Murray’s letters, readers are able to experience the war through the eyes of a literate northern black soldier.

§ Essays

Looking for Merle: Participatory Archiving as Bridge Work

Mich Ling

In this article I share how I went from “looking for” to “collaborating with” Merle and Emily on curating Merle’s papers and donating or selling them to an institution capable of making them open-access to the public, in-person and online. I outline key decisions (curatorial, donation vs. selling, public vs. private institution, etc.) we’ve made in this participatory archiving project, and trace the entangled web of friends, students, colleagues, and conspirators that contributed invaluable time, knowledge and resources and whose politics and desires shape its commitments.

§ The College and University Classroom

Methodologies for Exploring Unknown Archives

Jean Lee Cole and Elizabeth James

The archival materials for the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore (1890-1941) held at the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, is both amazingly complete, and full of frustrating gaps. This essay explores how engaging this archive compelled student, professor, and archivist alike to grapple with how the materials present confounded expectations about both literary history and women’s history, and how absences in the materials and in the historical record required them to approach research and pedagogy in new and innovative ways.

Teaching Tolerance and Empathy through Digital Documentary Editing

Clayton McCarl

This article proposes that digital documentary editing can be deployed as a pedagogical strategy in situations where direct engagement with matters of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is prohibited or otherwise implies professional consequences for faculty. The author connects this study to recent scholarship examining notions of empathy in archival and editorial practice as well as to the current political situation in Florida and elsewhere across the United States. Arguing that digital documentary editing creates opportunities for students to connect with others and explore their experiences, the author seeks to demonstrate the value of this approach as a tool for teaching tolerance and empathy.

Digital Chaucer Pedagogy and Editing: Probing Generative AI’s Reproduction of Hegemony

Sophie Whittle

This paper contributes insight to discussions around the use of generative AI in digital pedagogical editing, and the challenges these technologies present when empowering students to uncover, and recognize the erasure of, marginalized voices in medieval ‘canonical’ texts. The site of investigation is the fourteenth century text, The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I situate critical, scholarly, and digital editing of Chaucer’s works, including queer and intersectional approaches to his literature and its modern adaptations, within pedagogical environments where there is a reported growth in the use of generative AI.

§ Reviews