A talk by research fellow Megan Ward.

Historical research often depends on what is in the archive, on what has been collected and preserved in the past. This way of thinking about archival evidence, though, depends upon a notion of evidence that we get from nineteenth-century theories of collecting and archiving, rather than an objective measure of proof. This talk will argue that we should look to the queer collections represented in the Victorian novel, those outside conventions of archiving such as hoarding, counterfeiting, and wasting, in order to re-examine our archival methods, especially the notion of the archival “find.”

Megan Ward teaches in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. Her research focuses on the fields of Victorian literature and culture and the digital humanities, with interests in narrative theory, the history of the novel, material culture, and the history of technology. Ward’s new project asks how reading the imagined realist archive can help us re-imagine digital collections. Her last book, Seeming Human: Victorian Realist Character and Artificial Intelligence (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), argues that early artificial intelligence gives us a theory of verisimilitude that helps us re-evaluate the realism of Victorian fictional characters, and her essays on realism and technology have appeared in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Configurations, Genre, and other journals. She is Co-Director of Livingstone Online, an NEH-funded digital archive of the Victorian explorer David Livingstone.