Image description: Edited typescript of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s manuscript for “The Warm Decembers.”
Katie Carithers, a Spring 2023 Archival Expeditions fellow at Duke University, spent her fellowship working with the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers. As part of her fellowship, she designed a course module intended for introductory LGBTQ studies courses. Her module focuses on Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.
Of her module, Carithers writes:
The overall goal of the module is for students to use these archival materials to situate Sedgwick as a thinker within a cultural history. Through the selected archival materials, students will encounter Epistemology as thinking and writing that is in progress and in dialogue with other scholars and writers. And not just academic writing! There are zines, newspaper clippings, comics, and other written/visual artifacts. The aim is that, by close reading these materials, students will analyze how the taking up of sexuality as an analytic framework is tied to authorial and historical politics — and how that this is true for Sedgwick as well as scholars of LGBTQ studies today. I think that can help students reflect on the kind of questions they want to animate their own work and how they perceive their own writing in relation to their current moment.
A more extensive description of her work and process can be found at the Duke University website. More information about Duke’s Archival Expeditions program can be found here.