This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

This essay considers the dispersed Samaritan manuscripts as a challenge for digital and rhetorical scholars. Although the entire Samaritan population of 760 lives in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, most of their manuscripts are housed in libraries, collections, and museums across the world. Drawing on interviews and archival research, I introduce the term textual diaspora to describe how some Samaritan Elders are strategically thinking about the future digital delivery of manuscripts in diaspora, and I suggest the importance of engaging with stakeholders when building digital repositories in the humanities.

The authors discuss courses in which they examined with students female rhetors’ historical presence in the public imagination, investigating how rhetorical work has inscribed these women into public memory and erased them from it.

In reporting their research, historians of rhetoric and composition should be more explicit and specific about their investigative methods.

Contemporary Chicano codex rhetorics subversively question the alleged superiority of Western writing traditions, while reminding us that Mesoamerican pictographs have been an important—although repressed—part of rhetorical history.

Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.

In three voices - one as a scholar, one as a writer, and one as an alcoholic - Hindman considers the question: in what ways can our own personal writing illuminate the theory and practice of teaching composition? Demonstrating the process of composing the self within the professional, she responds both passionately and personally to literary criticisms about recovery discourse. Her purpose is to “make writing matter” and, in doing so, to attempt to dispel the tension between competing versions of how the self is constructed. She also considers how, in and for recovery, she learned to write, and how it has affected her professional writing. This type of writing, which she has called “embodied rhetoric,” offers lessons for composing a better life.

Discusses the topic of reading typographical errors as an example of archival work. Suggests that reading typos is a practice within textual scholarship which is a rather venerable if now somewhat overshadowed tradition of humanistic research and pedagogy. Begins with two examples of typo reading and then presents some general claims about editing as a paradigm for critical interpretation.