ANN ARBOR —Throughout the 2000-2001 academic year, the University of Michigan’s Advanced Study Center, part of its International Institute, will explore new ways of approaching the past.

The year-long program, “Archives, Documentation, and the Institutions of Social Memory,” is chaired by Francis Blouin, director of the Bentley Library, and William Rosenberg, the Alfred G. Meyer Collegiate Professor of History.

“There was a time in our world when the accumulation of historical documents was considered a straightforward and even a noble task,” Blouin and Rosenberg say. “The technologies in the preparation and recording of information were relatively stable. There was a general consensus among archivists and historian users that the documents assembled were critical to the pursuit of a historical truth—that is, the idea that the past was a singular conception, out there waiting to be discovered.”

In recent years, however, innovations in historical theory and practice have challenged this notion, they point out. In the process, historical archives themselves have become not so much “repositories” of the past as critical points of intersection between different scholarly approaches to the past, to the cultural practices and politics of different societies, and to a fast growing set of new archival technologies. The nature of the record, the expectations for access, and notions of archival control are changing.

These are some of the concerns to be addressed by U-M faculty and graduate students, as well as more than 50 seminar participants from the U.S. and abroad. They also will discuss how current technological innovations are likely to change what we know about ourselves, how we know it, and why.

Lectures and panels will focus on the ways archives help produce, reproduce and represent varieties of social knowledge, and so create and recreate varieties of social memory. Particular regional and national problems in Western Europe, the emerging and reconstituting states of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, China, South Africa and the Americas will be topics of various sessions.

“During the last 50 years, historians have moved away from histories of individuals and institutions that reflect the dominant culture,” Blouin and Rosenberg say. “That kind of history had been a good match for existing archival collections. In recent decades, historical study has turned toward issues of power, underrepresented minority groups, issues of gender, race, all of which are not so easily studied through existing documentation.”

Seminar sessions are scheduled each Wednesday from 2-4 p.m. in Room 1644 of the International Institute beginning Sept. 6. The Distinguished Lecture Series begins Sept. 28 at 4 p.m. with Carolyn Steedman of the University of Warwick discussing “Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel” and closes April 5 with Dipesh Chakrbarty of the University of Chicago presenting “Democracy and the Disciplines: The Case of History.”

The program is made possible by funding from the Sawyer Seminar program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and contributions from various U-M offices and departments.

For a detailed schedule of seminar sessions and lectures, contact Michelle Austin at 734-764-2268 or at [email protected] or access http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/asc.

Advanced Study CenterBentley LibraryAndrew W. Mellon Foundation[email protected]