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The Ajam Digital Archive was established in 2015 to serve as a unique crowd-sourced archive of modern social life in the broadly Persianate world
Abstract
The Ajam Digital Archive was established in 2015 to serve as a unique crowd-sourced archive of modern social life in the broadly Persianate world. Focusing on 20th century family collections, this digital archive provides a space for sharing scarce documents and audiovisual artifacts usually overlooked by state archives. This talk will focus on introducing the archive and our collections, as well as our future curatorial plans. Currently, the Ajam Archive is a digital home to over 500 items, ranging from visual, textual, and material artifacts, that shed light on history from below. With collections including personal family papers from an Armenian immigrant family to the US at the end of the 19th century, to Theresa Howard Carter’s personal papers from her trips to Iran in the mid 20thcentury, and audio recordings of Muharram gatherings in the 1970s, the archive has a wide variety of items that challenge popular historical narratives and provide researchers with otherwise scarce sources for research. The Archive is currently working towards reconfiguring its website to provide viewers with the best resources and will be announcing plans for digital exhibits to further make these materials more widely accessible for research.
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