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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