45th Annual Conference, "Expanding the Archive(s) of Southern Jewish History"
Conference will be held in Charleston, South Carolina in late October, 2021. Dates to be announced.
The conference theme, “Expanding the Archive(s) of Southern Jewish History,” reflects how archives today are reconsidering the role they play in contributing to knowledge. How might we use archival material—or create new collections—to discover new southern Jewish voices and stories? How might digital humanities and digital archives help us achieve our archival mission?
Besides regarding archives as institutions, we aim to broaden conceptions of “the archive” that we use to understand southern Jewish history. For instance, what does the built environment tell us about Jewish life in the South? What can we learn from material culture? From oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, or literary texts? Possible topics include the history of individual, congregational, and academic southern Jewish archives; southern Jewish materials in non-Jewish and/or non-southern archives; archival efforts to collect contemporary materials and/or those from “silenced” communities; southern Jewish foodways; and other innovative and interdisciplinary methods for studying Jews in the South.