You are invited to attend the student workshop Methodological Challenges in Reviving Peripheral Voices: Archives, Performances, and Literary History, which will take place on Monday, December 8, 2025, at 9:40 a.m. in Lecture Hall 434.
How does archival research transform when minoritarian communities don’t just share or show you their archives but perform them for you and with you instead? Drawing on research with the Rum community in Turkey and its diasporas in Greece and the USA, this workshop examines how marginalized communities transfer their archives through enactment: reading documents aloud, recreating scenes, and sharing objects through embodied storytelling. For communities whose histories don’t align with national paradigms of memory, performance becomes a way to claim agency over their archives’ afterlives.
The Rum community performs its archives—what we will explore as “archival enactment”—to determine not only what gets preserved but how it circulates, who participates in its transference, and what futures it enacts. Through hands-on exercises, participants will experience how this performative approach to archival preservation works, especially when traditional archives are closed, scattered, or lost.
We’ll grapple with practical questions: How do you ethically participate when a community enacts their archives with you? What knowledge emerges through performance that wouldn’t appear in written documents? How can researchers honor communities’ active role in shaping their archives’ afterlives and the conditions of their own mnemonic preservation? By shifting from asking what the archive is to what the archive does, this workshop will offer tools for developing collaborative archival research practices that center community agency in shaping memory politics and recognize performance as archival method, not just archival content.
About the speaker: Christina is a Matija Murko Fellow in Intellectual History at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics at the University of Milan. Her research examines minoritarian and diasporic theatre histories in the Eastern Mediterranean and its global diasporas. Her work has appeared inPerformance Research, Theatre Research International, Archival Science, Interventions, and Mediterranean Studies, among other international journals. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She co-convenes the SWANA Theatre Working Group at ASTR and serves as Focus Group Representative for Theory and Criticism at ATHE.