The Literary Archive blog is the product of Gabrielle Dean’s teaching in Museums and Society and English. In the spring 2015 version of the class, student contributors focused on three American modernist prose writers with roots in Baltimore: Dashiell Hammett, H. L. Mencken, and Gertrude Stein. In the 2012 version of the course, students similarly investigated three American poets of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe, Sidney Lanier, and Walt Whitman.
Working directly with rare books and archival materials from the Sheridan Libraries at JHU, students in the course grappled with the complexities of literary history through its material remains, examining the value of archives in the digital era–and gaining first-hand experience as curators of cultural heritage materials. Dr. Dean will present their work at the fall 2016 meeting of the Modernist Studies Association.
