Archive Unboxing
Anne Jenner will lead a day-long, hands-on archiving event in the UW Special Collections on Thursday. Pre-registration is required. Guests must be available to attend all day.

Anne Jenner has overseen the flagship Pacific Northwest Collection at UW Libraries since 2012. She co-created the We Are History Keepers! free community archiving workshops that served the Puget Sound area from 2016 through 2022. She held earlier posts as Director of Archives and Special Collections at North Park University in Chicago, Head of Library and primary cataloger at the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center in Rock Island, Illinois, lecturer of Swedish and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and membership coordinator/docent at the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia. She holds an M.A. in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington and an M.L.I.S from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Karl-Magnus Johansson is a Senior Archivist at the National Archives in Gothenburg and an honorary doctor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg. Through various forms of public engagement—including teaching numerous university courses—he works to expand knowledge and understanding of archives. His research interests span the practical and theoretical dimensions of archives in relation to co-creation, microhistory, artistic practices, and visual media. He has authored several articles on popular history and archival science and edited two international anthologies exploring the intersection of archives and contemporary art: Communication the Archive: Physical Migration (2013) and Inscription (2018), as well as the film studies anthology Filmens Göteborg – spår, erfarenheter och resultat från ett samverkande forskningsprojekt (2021).

LECTURE: Friday, 2:30pm-3:45pm
(in Swedish)

Traces of images in the archives

By leveraging the specific properties of the photographic image—its ability to capture a visual slice of reality using light—photography and film, when viewed as archival media, possess a unique potential to open up pathways to knowledge.

In this lecture, Karl-Magnus Johansson discusses two projects in which images were used to pose questions to the archives. The first project was conducted in collaboration with a group of citizen researchers and 45 design students, taking a short documentary film from 1964 as its starting point. The film focuses on a district in Göteborg that was facing a dramatic transformation at the time. Using selected details from the film as a springboard for further archival inquiry, the project deepened—and also challenged—the film’s narrative while seeking possible counter-narratives.

The second project begins with a small photograph depicting the 23 young women who graduated from the midwifery training institute in Göteborg in June 1865. This photograph serves as the starting point for a micro-historical study of how archival fragments can help us understand individuals who left no letters, diaries, or other personal archives.

Helene Larsson Pousette has worked in the museum field for over 20 years - at the Swedish History Museum and the Swedish National Heritage Board, she co-founded the Stockholm Museum of Women’s History (Kvinnohistoriska) and has sat on a number of international museum organizations. Her focus has been to drive museum development forward and create methods for, and collaboration between, artists and researchers, collections and archives, with a focus on representation. After working at the Swedish Institute and being a cultural counselor in Serbia and recently in the USA, she is again active in Sweden. She is very interested in archives and collections in close relation to the writing of history, the use of history, and especially the artistic interventions of these. She has contributed to international projects such as We Hear You–A Climate Archive‍ and Creative Mentorship Serbia, and, together with Lina Thomsgård, has led the charge of the method and book, Arkivism: En handbok–Hitta, spara och organisera för framtidens historieskrivning (2021).

PLENARY: Thursday, 10:45am-12:00pm
(in Swedish)

Tracking Engagement and Resistance in the Archives

Archival research often resembles detective work, piecing together fragments of evidence to uncover lives, experiences, and unexpected connections. We engage in archival research not merely to gather information, but to reveal stories and recover voices that might otherwise be forgotten. The presentations also explore how these discoveries can be translated into different formats, making research findings accessible and meaningful for the engagement of future generations.

The presentation is based on archival research conducted in the KvinnSam archive at the University of Gothenburg, focusing on women in the early twentieth century who were engaged in the peace movement, women's rights and environmental issues, including Elin Wägner (1882–1949). These archival discoveries will, among other outcomes, be interpreted and brought to life in a new performance that Helene is creating together with her two American colleagues. 

Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard (born 1976 in Germany) holds a master’s degree in Nordic literature and a teaching qualification in Norwegian and German from the universities of Tübingen and Oslo. Since 2009, she has worked as an archivist and researcher at the National Library of Norway in Oslo, focusing on acquiring, managing, and disseminating archives belonging to authors and literary institutions. She is particularly committed to reaching new user groups—such as upper-secondary and university students—through presentations and lectures. She manages the Sigrid Undset archive and edits Undset’s private letters for the NB kilder e-book series; the collection Brev til Nini Roll Anker 1911–1940 (Letters to Nini Roll Anker 1911–1940) was published between 2021 and 2023, partly within the framework of the research project Made Abroad: Producing Norwegian World Literature in a Time of Rupture, 1900–1950. She writes both scholarly and popular-science texts, having contributed to the anthology The Voices of Jon Fosse (2025; her chapter is titled "Sounding German: An Exploration of Linguistic Devices in Trilogien versus Trilogie"). She is a regular contributor to the Norwegian Archivists' Association journal Norsk arkivforum, with articles such as "Sigrid Undset: Et arkiv for vår tid, eller om arbeidet med et forfatterarkiv" (Sigrid Undset: An Archive for Our Time, or On Working with an Author’s Archive, 2021) and "Ebba Haslund og krigen, eller veien til et forfatterskap" (Ebba Haslund and the War, or the Path to an Authorship, 2023). Currently, she is organizing the papers of Kjell Askildsen (1929–2021) and working on the letters from Undset to the author Nils Collett Vogt (1864–1937) as part of the MAP project.

LECTURE: Friday, 1:15pm-2:30pm
(in Norwegian)

Glimpses of Life in Literary Archives: Sigrid Undset and Ebba Haslund, Old Papers in a New Light

Private papers left behind by authors are often interpreted solely as sources for understanding an author's literary works and status. Traditionally, the papers of male authors have dominated archival collections, research, and public dissemination, both in scope and attention. The emphasis has typically been placed on the author's status and position, and less on their “real” life, the life that does not fit neatly into a coherent literary trajectory but unfolds in the private sphere. Over the past twenty years, however, the archives of women writers have received renewed attention. Women are rarely only authors. They are spouses, mothers, and builders of relationships, while traditionally also having to combine their professional work with primary responsibility for the domestic sphere. Their private papers offer many revealing glimpses of these aspects of their lives.

In my work with the archives of the two Norwegian authors Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) and Ebba Haslund (1917-2009), it is the interplay between the personal and the public that fascinates me. What do we find in their papers that we do not expect and that we did not previously know? What can these materials tell us about their own times and about their legacy? I would like to highlight diaries and letters as sources of “real” life, the life that lies beyond the public façade, and explore how the discovery of authors' creative childhoods became the catalyst for an unexpected exhibition success at the National Library of Norway.