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The Â鶹´«Ã½'s Maine Women Writers Collection is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a symposium on  "Women in the Archives: Using Archival Collections in Research and Teaching on U.S. Women," June 11-14, 2009.

This symposium, held on UNE's Westbrook College Campus in Portland, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding in 1959.

It will explore some of the practical and theoretical aspects of using archival sources in research and teaching on U.S. women, such as:

• What are the questions, issues, challenges, and conflicts inherent in locating, accessing, researching, recovering, editing, teaching, and theorizing archival materials?
• What is at stake in archiving and curating these traces of women’s lives?
• What do such practices allow? What do they obscure?
• How do scholars and archivists locate women of color, working women, lesbians, and others who might be misrepresented or elided altogether from the historical record?
• How is difference coded in and by the archive?
• What is the fate of native voices in such institutional settings?
• What are the practical and ethical concerns for those who archive, research, and seek to publish women’s private writing?
• How are archival spaces created, negotiated, or subverted?
• And what might the future hold for archives and archival materials in the digital age?

The Program
Sessions will include such topics as "Recovering Archival Sources," "Collecting, Archiving & Curating," "Material Culture & Ephemera," "Photography & Visual Culture," "Pedagogy and the Archive," and "Private Writing & Biography."

The program includes elite scholars and archivists from around the nation, including Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Johanna-Maria Fraenkel Curator of Manuscripts, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, Harvard University archivist and co-director, Open Collections Program; Laura Wexler, professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies, Yale University; Frances Smith Foster, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Emory University; Karen J. Sanchez-Eppler, professor of American studies and English, Amherst College; Cally Gurley, curator, Maine Women Writers Collection, Â鶹´«Ã½; and Elizabeth De Wolfe, professor of history and chair of the Women's studies Program, Â鶹´«Ã½.

Registration
Registration for the symposium is required and open to all, with a discount for members of the Â鶹´«Ã½community.

Film/Reception
Beyond the academic presentations, on Saturday, June 13th, at 3:15 p.m., the Symposium will feature a documentary film about the history of the MWWC, to be held in the Parker Pavilion.  This event will be followed by a 50th Anniversary Reception at 4:30 p.m. in the Abplanalp Library, Westbrook College Campus.

For more information visit the MWWC website or contact Jennifer Tuttle, Dorothy M. Healy Chair and associate professor, Department of English and Language Studies, (207) 221-4433.