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About

The Expanding Archive: Denison LGBTQ Past / Present / Future is an online site for archives of climate and institutional documentation, historical interviews, student work, and faculty research related to the Denison University Queer Studies Program. The act of storing information and creating an archive creates a sense of community for the Queer Studies faculty and students, as well as providing knowledge available for the larger community. The Expanding Archive provides an important opportunity for Queer Studies to have a historical presence through collection of materials related to the concentration, and historical archival documents about the culture and campus climate over time. This information will be available online as a resource for Denison students, alumni, faculty, staff, and all others interested in the historical and scholarly manifestation, challenges, and possibilities of Queer Studies at a liberal arts school. 

The first strand of the project (begun 2015 by Professor Sheilah [Wilson] ReStack), traces the historical moment leading up to, and including, the creation of the Queer Studies concentration at Denison in 2000. To this end the first Queer Studies fellow, Raquel Rico, spent Summer 2015 working on transcribing interviews and digitizing information to be included in the archive. These interviews will form the organizational backbone of history and documents for the archive. Future classes are being planned that will allow students to act as researchers. They will pull documents and research the specific events mentioned in the interviews to provide a fuller campus, local and national context for the emergence of Queer Studies concentration at Denison.

Ultimately, the site should act as a timeline that is constantly growing (expanding) to allow for linkages, research, response, and addition of new information and scholarship. The archive, much like the discipline of Queer Studies, refuses to be static. It will allow a place for storage of historical materials, but its success will depend on continual re-invigoration of those materials through student and faculty engagement, research, and questioning. 

The act of storing information and creating an archive creates a sense of community and provides knowledge around that community. The Expanding Archive provides an important opportunity for Queer Studies to have a historical presence through collection of materials related to the concentration and related archival documents.

 

Project Team & Acknowledgements

Sheilah [Wilson] ReStack, Assistant Professor of Studio Art, Queer Studies

Shannon Marie Robinson, Former Liaison Librarian to Fine Arts, Women's & Gender Studies, and Queer Studies

R. Rico, Class of 2016

Orpheus Peng, Class of 2017

Emily Ball, Class of 2017

Sara Hartsock, Class of 2018

Kristen Pantle, Denison University Libraries

Colleen Goodhart, Denison University Libraries