Programs for Undergraduates

Chicago Memoir: From the Page to the Archive

Instructors: Dr. Kara Johnson, Director of Teacher Programs, Newberry Library, and Lisa Schoblasky, Director of Reader Services, Newberry Library

Literary memoirs are individual stories of personal experience, but they can also be studied as primary sources that reveal larger topics in Chicago history, including social and political movements, segregation and gentrification, and immigration and migration. From the storytelling of Jane Addams’s founding of Hull-House (Twenty Years at Hull-House), to Richard Wright’s accounts of his personal “Great Migration” to Chicago from Alabama (Black Boy), to Sandra Cisneros’s depictions of Chicana coming-of-age in an under-resourced Latinx/e neighborhood (The House on Mango Street), this seminar will introduce important themes and flashpoints of Chicago history.

Alongside our exploration of memoirs, we will immerse ourselves in the Newberry’s archival collections. Combining literary analysis, historical thinking skills, archival research methods, seminar discussion, and individual and collective interaction with the Newberry’s collections, participants will identify topics for their final research projects. Other elements of the final project process will include writing and research consultations with course instructors and other Newberry staff, and peer review and discussion with classmates. As a group, we will ask questions like: What about the Chicago memoir brings history to life in a new or different way? How does an individual narrative experience represent larger historical and cultural moments? If Chicago were a “character” in these narratives, how is it portrayed? Why is Chicago’s characterization in literature important to our understanding of representations of this complex city across time? And, most importantly: How do the Newberry’s archival collections both complicate and enrich our initial impressions and interpretations of these Chicago memoirs?

This course will meet Tuesday/Thursday 2-5pm from January 14 to April 24.

Please reach out to the faculty advisors listed below to apply for the course.

Interested in taking an NLUS course?

If you’re a student at one of the participating institutions and would like to apply for the upcoming NLUS course, contact the advisor at your home campus.

• DePaul University
  Megan Heffernan, Department of English
  Email
• Loyola University Chicago
  Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Department of History
  Email
• Roosevelt University
  Priscilla Archibald, Department of Literature and Languages
  Email
• University of Illinois at Chicago
  Ellen McClure, School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics
  Email

“Taking a course where I was actually taught step by step how to take on a large-scale research project made me more confident to pursue other research opportunities in the future. I’d never had a class that was so supportive and collaborative!”
- Annie Lemieux, '21 NLUS

“This course offers a chance to step outside of the comfort of your home university and enter into a world of scholars you’ve never met. It’s such a unique chance to make friends who are also interested in intensive archival work and love, just as much as you, how your own unique questions take you through an archive.” - Rose Gallo, '21 NLUS

NLUS courses from the recent past include: 

• 2024: "Medicines, Poisons, and Landscapes of Care in the Early Americas," Kat Lecky (Loyola) and Josefrayn Sanchez Perry (Loyola).

• 2023: “Inventing Mexico: Maps, Manuscripts, and Materiality, 1521-1921,” Delia Cosentino (DePaul) and Emmanuel Ortega (UIC).

• 2022: “Writing Migration: Chicago, Haymarket to 1968,” Elliott Gorn (Loyola) and Mary Hale (Newberry Library)
  
  
• 2021: “Chicago: City of Industry, Art, and Labor,” Elizabeth Tandy Shermer and Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola)
  
  
• 2020: “Shakespeare’s Afterlives: Literature, Philosophy, Politics, and the Visual Arts, 1623-2020,” Meghan Heffernan (DePaul University) and James Knapp (Loyola University)
  
  
• 2019: “Modern Literature and Art in Chicago, 1900-1960,” Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola), Mark Pohlad (DePaul)
  
  
• 2018: “Censorship and Freedom of Expression in an Era of Religious Change: Western Europe, 1450-1789,” Valentina Tikoff ( Depaul) and Glen Carman (DePaul)

Interested in teaching an NLUS course?

We welcome proposals for future NLUS courses. Seminars run from January - May at the Newberry Library. Seminars are team-taught by faculty from participating universities. Faculty receive Newberry short-term fellowship awards to prepare their syllabi. 

For more information, please email us.