Interview with the Editors: Archives and Emotions

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ilaria Scaglia and Valeria Vanesio, the editors of the forthcoming book Archives and Emotions available from Bloomsbury Press later this year. 

Please introduce yourself.

We are Ilaria Scaglia, historian, and Valeria Vanesio, archivist, two friends who share the same passion for history but come from two disciplines that seldom talk to one another.

Ilaria earned her PhD in the United States (SUNY Buffalo, 2011) and then taught at Columbus State University, in Georgia, for seven years. In 2018, she moved to the United Kingdom, at Aston University in Birmingham, where she is Senior Lecturer in Modern History—the equivalent to Associate Professor in the USA.

She is interested in international history in the field of culture, and also in the history of emotions. Her first book, The Emotions of Internationalism, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020, focused on international encounters in the Alps in the interwar period. She is currently working on a monograph on the history of photographing and microfilming archival records in Europe and in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. She is also leading the effort to establish the Aston University Archives at her institution. She is thus eager to talk to archivists and to other academics and practitioners in this and related fields.

Valeria earned her PhD at Sapienza University of Rome in 2018. She worked as an archivist at the Magistral Archives of the Order of Saint John in Rome and she was archivist and postdoctoral fellow of the Malta Study Center at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota, USA. Since 2020, she is Lecturer at the Department of Library, Information, and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta. She is still international associate of the Malta Study Center, leading both research and cataloguing projects.

Her fields of research include the history of archives and institutions—especially the Order of Saint John and the Mediterranean—archival cataloguing standards, digital humanities, archival pedagogies, and colonial legacies in libraries and archives. Her most recent publication is a co-authored article entitled “Pioneers in Maltese Archives and Libraries: People, Contexts and Institutions in 20th-century Malta,” which was published in Archives and Records in 2024. She cherishes working with people from various sectors and fields.

Briefly summarize Archives and Emotions.

This book is a collection of essays by archivists and historians—scholars and practitioners from different settings, geographical provenance, and stages of career. It critically investigates all sorts of emotions and archives, traditional and digital, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries across national and disciplinary borders. As a whole, it argues that emotions matter—and have always mattered—to both the people whose histories are documented by archives and to those working with the documents these contain. Emotions affected—and still affect—the construction—or sometimes the destruction or deconstruction—and management of archives; they also have an effect on the individuals engaging with them, such as archivists, researchers, and a broad range of people and communities who interact with them in various capacities.

The main message of this book is that investigating the history and mechanics of emotions—including their suppression and exclusion, being conscious of their effects on people and societies—is essential to understand how archives came to hold critical civic and ethical implications for both present and future.

Why did you decide to edit this book? What sparked your interest in the topic?

The idea originated from an organic chat among ourselves about the chronic lack of communication among our two fields, history and archival studies. We found that on both sides there was an overall reluctance to engage with emotions. We thus decided to organise an online conference on this topic. After sending out a call for papers, we were surprised by the enthusiastic response we received. Clearly, such a forum was needed. When we set to expand on this initiative and to collaborate on an edited volume, we invited a selected group of participants to this conference, together with other scholars whose points of view we solicited in the attempt of representing both the variety of our fields and the ongoing approaches to emotions within and outside of academia. Throughout, we strove to provide a sketch of what many people across borders have been thinking and doing, to lay the foundation for a comparative analysis across multiple settings and contexts, and to inspire future avenues for research.

As you were editing the volume, is there anything that surprised you?

Many things! First, how many repressed feelings are out there! From a historian’s perspective, as it turns out, often archivists and other professionals have more than one bone to pick. This is for good reason. There is much ignorance about what archivists do, and one of the goals of this volume is to encourage others to find out more. For many archivists, it came as a surprise that many in other professions do not think of them as scholars; one of the reasons is that not much is done to explain to stakeholders what archivists do (and do not do), and to make explicit their active role in shaping what archives are and do, in (and for!) the societies in which (and for which!) they exist.

Second, there are important political, civic, and ethical issues at stake. To be sure, we were both aware of these even before we met one another; yet, the response to our call and the contributions themselves struck us for the passion with which they talked about such issues as being critical and urgent, especially in the current political climate and with increasing threats to democratic processes.

 This takes us to a third point that unexpectedly came to define our editing experience. People harbor extreme feelings towards archives: they tremendously enjoy their aesthetic value; they weep—and are sometimes traumatized—by their holdings, and also by the stories they either tell or silence; they experience them as part of the process through which they craft their own identities; in general, they load archives with different, often higher meanings. That is why they get excited or upset.

Also, connecting archives with emotions is often linked with debating over their objectivity (or inevitable lack thereof). Archives are not a neutral place. Indeed, they serve as preferred loci for people and movements to express past and present feelings and for articulating future aspirations. If, for a long time, many considered archives as emotionless, purely administrative bodies—the “grey” product of legal procedures—it is clear that this view tells only part of their history. In turn, if in recent decades historians have emphasized the cultural factors that imbue any structure, the fact remains that some archives maintain a legal function that defines them in ways that cannot be easily dismissed.

Finally, there are important regional and cultural differences to take into account, both from a historical and archival perspective. Both of us started this journey informed by our own training and experiences. Undertaking this endeavour across multiple boundaries has forced us both to reframe our own understanding of our work, role, and convictions. If this dialogue revealed many commonalities, it has also made clear the imperative of understanding and respecting varying contexts in ways that we and others had not anticipated.

How do you hope readers use the book? Are there actions you hope readers take?

We both believe that teaching and training are especially influential in shaping what professions and professionals are and do. We do hope that this volume will serve as a tool to broaden perspectives, develop critical skills across all sorts of boundaries, and stimulate collaborations across all kinds of borders.

From an academic and intellectual standpoint, while editing each piece, we took the time to talk to individual contributors. We continuously conversed with them in order to help them draw out their understanding of the function emotions performed in their piece. To this end, we compiled and circulated bibliographies of existing theoretical and methodological instruments in the fields of history of emotions and critical archival studies, while always welcoming the inclusion of new perspectives. We shared early drafts of our own interpretation of what the volume was doing as whole, maintained an active dialogue throughout to refine our own point of view, and crafted an index that would allow readers to easily identify red-threads across the volume.

Readers might use this book differently depending on their individual interests, needs, and questions. Some might be drawn to individual essays based on the types of archives and emotions they examine. Others—or the same readers at different stages in their thinking—might find it useful to read across essays instead, looking for how concepts such as “personal archives” or “emotional practices” might appear in various studies. We hope that all will find useful the synthesis of existing work and our original interpretation of the dialogue this volume put in motion in our introduction. We especially kept in mind people who are new to either—or both—archives and emotions. We made it a point to explain key terms and to employ the clearest possible vocabulary in order to open and demystify fields and discussions that have often been perceived as closed, or effectively made as such.

Our greatest wish is that members of the public will become increasingly engaged in this conversation. Archives and emotions have implications for all; there are civic and ethical dimensions in both their past and present; and, especially in a quickly developing digital, VR, and AI environment, key issues are at stake for all in future.

The description of the book mentions it “establishes a solid base for future scholarship.” What future work would you like to see?

One in which emotions are acknowledged and not repressed. One in which conversations are inclusive, respectful, and frank. One in which all dare to think about the implications of what we do (or do not do) when we collectively think and act to preserve our past and to tell our histories.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

This has been a true and genuine work of collaboration. We literally zoomed our way through each step, discussing (at times quite vigorously!) each aspect, and ultimately co-writing each line just as we are doing now for this interview. This process of dialogue, not always easy and not always fast (though, often quite efficient in ways that we had not anticipated!), has proven to be a great pleasure. Though there is an argument to make about keeping a healthy separation between the personal and the professional, there is also value in recognizing that our professional life is not detached from who we are and what we feel. We strongly recommend to others to merge collaborations and friendship!