The Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Courtney Rivard and Dr. Shinjini Chattopadhyay have been awarded UNC’s Junior Faculty Development Award, a prestigious grant funded by IBM and R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. The $10,000 award, announced annually in late fall, supports early-career faculty in advancing their research over the course of one calendar year. We are thrilled to dig into how our department’s recipients will use this funding to explore how archives shape cultural memory and how modernist authors engaged with global literature, respectively.
Archiving Disaster: Dr. Courtney Rivard’s Study of Crisis Collecting
Dr. Rivard’s research focuses on what she calls “disaster archiving,” tracing a shift in how historical institutions collect materials in response to crises. While archives have long documented disasters, Rivard argues that after September 11, 2001, new archival practices emerged, including immediate collection efforts, extensive documentation of materials in their original locations, and the use of digital storytelling to gather public narratives. These methods were deployed once again with Hurricane Katrina and subsequent disasters further cemented into crisis collecting strategies—namely, the Covid-19 pandemic, when hundreds of institutions launched rapid collection initiatives.
Her project explores how these evolving archival methods influence historical memory and shape narratives of race, gender, class, and national belonging. “Rather than representing neutral storehouses of materials from the past, archives are now called upon to serve as both memorials that commemorate lives and ways of life that have been lost and catharsis that create a sense of doing, of preservation, in the face of trauma,” Rivard explains. Her research also asks how digital methods—such as computational analysis—can help scholars uncover silences in archival records and reimagine the ways history is recorded and understood.
Modernist Cosmopolitanism: Dr. Shinjini Chattopadhyay’s Archival Research on Woolf and Joyce
Dr. Chattopadhyay’s award will fund a summer archival research trip to the United Kingdom and the New York Public Library, where she will examine historical materials related to modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Her project explores how these authors gathered information about global literature and culture, and how that knowledge shaped their portrayals of cultural alterity in fiction.
“This archival trip will help me continue my explorations in modernist cosmopolitanism for my research and teaching at ECL,” Chattopadhyay says. By investigating the ways modernist writers absorbed and interpreted literary influences beyond Europe, her research contributes to broader conversations about transnationalism and the interconnected nature of literary production.
Advancing Scholarship
Both Rivard’s and Chattopadhyay’s projects promise to offer new insights—whether by rethinking the role of digital archives in documenting crises or by uncovering the global influences that shaped modernist literature. We congratulate them both and looks forward to seeing how their research unfolds in the coming year.
