Archives and Emotions

Ilaria Scaglia is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Aston University, UK. She is the author of The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (2020), and of numerous articles and chapters on the history of internationalism, cultural relations, and emotions. She is leading the development of the Aston University Archives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Valeria Vanesio is Lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta. She is now International Associate of the Malta Study Center 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).

List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Foreword

Acknowledgements
Note on text/translation

1.. Introduction: Why archives and emotions?, Ilaria Scaglia and Valeria Vanesio (Aston University, UK, and University of Malta, Malta)
2.. Across the national and the international: Exchanges on archives and emotions at the League of Nations and beyond, Ilaria Scaglia and Valeria Vanesio (Aston University, UK, and University of Malta, Malta)

Part I: Emotions and the Shaping of the Archives

3.. True crime in the archives: The eighteenth-century Old Bailey and the emotions of sensationalism, Anna Pravdica (University of Warwick, UK)
4.. Moral exculpation along the archival grain: Self-censoring, war trauma, and the reporting of German soldiers’ suicides, 1914–1918, Matthew Hershey (University of Michigan, USA)
5. ‘The last letter I ever received:’ Managing epistles & emotions in eighteenth-century family archives, Imogen Peck (University of Birmingham, UK)
6. The emotions of expertise: Whiteness and dismissal in the US archaeological archive of 1960s Peru, Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California, USA)
7. A conscious ripping: Emotions in the construction and destruction of Anna Banti’s archive, Annantonia Martorano (University of Florence, Italy)
8. Looking for an objective emotionality: The “rationalized archives” of an Italian twentieth-century artist, Lorenzo Sergi (University of Florence, Italy)

Part II: Emotions, Archives, and Their People

9. Archivists and emotional labor: Preserving personas and personal identities in archives, Kristen J. Nyitray and Dana Reijerkerk (Stony Brook University, USA and Independent Scholar, USA)
10. Memory keepers unveiled: The emotional styles behind the archives, Tijana Rupcic (Central European University, Austria)
11. Unveiling the untold story: Emotions in National Archives, Charles J. Farrugia (University of Malta, Malta)
12. Bearing witness to the historical record: A psychosocial/psychodynamic method for working with archival materials, Iqbal Singh and Kevin Lu (National Archives, UK and University of London, UK)
13. Real and imagined archives: The emotional impact of Zimbabwe’s displaced Rhodesian Army Archives, Forget Chaterera-Zambuko (Sorbonne University, Abu Dhabi, UAE)
14. Future perfect? Affect-aware, history-informed, future-oriented archive-making, Anne J. Gilliland (University of California, USA)

Afterword
Bibliography
Index