Hidden Literacies is an archive of a sort that most people—even many students and teachers of American literature—have not seen. It includes texts created by people who weren’t formally educated or whose ways of reading and writing were not mainstream in their own time; texts that have been rarely or unevenly preserved, that are hard for non-specialists to make sense of. By making these kinds of texts newly accessible, Hidden Literacies makes the human lives and experiences behind them newly visible.
On this introductory episode of Hidden Literacies, the podcast, we’ll hear from the project founders, Hilary Wyss and Christopher Hager, both of Trinity College. Chris Hager is a professor of English and Hilary Wyss is the Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith, professor of English. Chris and Hilary describe their own encounters with hidden literacies as researchers and scholars and explore what it means for texts to be “hidden.”
Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XVShtHGrK1v5MgS-_gHMQBhqBohKT20v/view?usp=sharing
Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org
Hidden Literacies brings together leading scholars of historical literacy to investigate the surprising, often neglected roles reading and writing have played in the lives of marginalized Americans—from indigenous and enslaved people to prisoners and young children. By presenting high-resolution images of archival texts and pairing them with expert commentary, Hidden Literacies aims to make these writers and texts—which too often lie below the radar of American literature curricula—more available and accessible to teachers and researchers.
Hidden Literacies is edited by Christopher Hager and Hilary Wyss.
Christopher Hager is Professor of English at Trinity College, where he teaches courses in American literature and American Studies.
Hilary E. Wyss is the Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she teaches courses in early American literature, American studies, and Native American studies.
Hidden Literacies was produced with the support of the following staff members of Trinity College Information Technology & Library Services:
Cait Kennedy, Research, Outreach, and Technology Librarian
Mary Mahoney, Digital Scholarship Coordinator
Joelle Thomas, Digital Learning & Discovery Librarian
Hidden Literacies: the Podcast was recorded, edited, and produced by Mary Mahoney.
Sound Credits:
“Crescents” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
