This sort of striking moment recurred when I was teaching in partnership with UCL Special Collections. When we introduced students to the collection of Francis Galton, the Victorian pol- ymath and prominent eugenicist, we were struck by their wonder and disgust which arose when contextualising and analysing the material before them. In particular, a copy of his eugenicist novel Kantsaywhere fascinated students, telling a story about his problematic con- fl ation of science and politics, but also a material story of editing by his daughter, who had physically cut whole sections from the book.
These moments suggested the potential for something beyond a material book history, and perhaps more like a social history of ideas, inspired by work such as Antoinette Burton’s discussions of Archive Stories (Duke University Press, 2005), Arlette Farge’s refl ection on the Allure of the Archives (Yale University
Press, 2013), Lisa Jardine’s discussion of Temptation in the Archives (UCL Press, 2015), and Ann Laura Stoler’s call to read Along the Archival Grain (Princeton University Press, 2009). Such stories about our research material evolve signifi cantly over their life cycles, as Arjun Appadurai outlined in The Social Life of Things (Cam- bridge University Press, 1986).
Understanding relationships From here, we organised a conference at UCL Special Collections and Archives which sought to enable collaboration between unlikely partners to help break down barriers that currently exist in academia and to open up the world of his- torical research. Two academic historians worked alongside librarians and archivists to draw up plans for an event that would reveal how our work and methodologies inter-relate, providing opportunities for collaborations beyond the usual parameters our fi elds present. Researchers, academics,
education practitioners and students came together in 2017 for a conference and school workshops based at UCL which turned the focus onto our aff ective relationship with archives and collec- tions, and put research stories to the fore. Amidst a wonderful variety of papers, we travelled from 3,000 BC to the present day, and from Egypt to Iraq, via Paris, Los Angeles, and Bloomsbury itself. At the heart of this vast array of papers, however, was the sense that our encounters with our research material deserved a little more attention.
Afterwards, we had two full days of school workshops scheduled with students from Newham Collegiate Sixth Form School. During the workshops we had three sets of documents, which the students worked through in groups of fi ve along with a professional researcher. The original documents were on hand to view, with digitised facsimiles on the tables for rough working and discussion. With each
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