Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

FAIN: HND-284998-22

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14850-2820)
Tao Leigh Goffe (Project Director: July 2021 to present)

Participating institutions:
Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) - Applicant/Recipient
University of London (London, United Kingdom) - Participating Institution

The creation of an interactive website that brings together collections in the United States and United Kingdom to facilitate scholarship on colonialism and indentureship. The lead UK partner, Birkbeck College, is requesting £58,709 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and Cornell University library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, and oral histories.