P05 It's All Relative: A New Historicist Approach to Archival Instruction for Literary Studies

Upon teaching archival instruction to an upper-level undergraduate English class, the presenter identified a need to tailor instruction relative to the needs of literary studies students. Thus, the presenter opted to incorporate literary theory, more specifically New Historicism, to situate archival instruction in terms that these students already understood. This presentation describes the archivist's basic teaching methodology and highlights examples of this strategy in action.