1-2pm, Friday, 23 March, 2018, DHT, LG.06). A one-hour panel on ‘Lives in the Archive’, exploring the place of archives in literature, life-writing, and cultural history, with visiting speakers Alison Light and Dora Osborne. Position papers will be followed by discussion.

Chair: Jonathan Wild

Alison Light is a writer and currently also Honorary Professorial Fellow in the English Department at Edinburgh University. Alison will talk about some of the different ways in which archives have been central to her work as both a literary critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (1991); Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2006); and Common People: the History of an English Family (2014). She also spent several years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel Centre and Archive in London.

Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at St Andrews. Her research focuses on questions of trauma and memory in relation to Germany’s National Socialist past and her current project considers the role of the archive in Holocaust memory culture. She has published widely on contemporary German literature, memorial projects and visual culture. Dora will talk about ‘Lives in the Archive of National Socialism: Recent German Literature and the Archival Turn’.

Simon Cooke is a Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh. His talk – ‘“The Blank Page”: Muriel Spark and the Literary Archive’ – is on the Muriel Spark archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and at the National Library of Scotland, and the modern literary archive more widely.

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