"This seminar combines theoretical reflections on the history, epistemology, and politics of archives with a hands-on experience of working alongside professionals in a unique archive just a few steps away from Lang College. As a means of organizing and preserving historical records, archives are ostensibly neutral sites of historical research. In recent decades, however, the idea and practice of archivization inspired a substantial body of critical scholarship targeting in particular the power relations inherent in archives, ideological underpinnings, their exclusionary tendencies, and service to the state. The concept of the archive has also proven to be a productive tool with which to reevaluate the methods by which our modern historical consciousness is structured and perpetuated and also our understanding of evidence, memory, and identity. How working archives grapple with this set of questions? What is the future of the archives and what potential or challenge they present in the digital age? Our seminar will explore the theoretical considerations of the “archive” and its future but we will also conduct lab-classes and work with historical documents housed in the Center for Jewish History on 16th Street. The Center’s vast collections cover important aspects of Western and non-Western history much beyond its focus on Jewish History. Students work will include 1) a short curatorial project, 2) a critical essay engaging with theory, and 3) a research paper."