Combining Archival Research and Creative Practice at Knox College

The Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book is pleased to present Combining Archival Research and Creative Practice at Knox College with Casey Foubert.

As both a creative practitioner with a 25 year career in the music industry, and an archivist and librarian in training, Casey has been preoccupied with questions about the durability and utility of cultural artifacts: What does it mean to write, record, and release music into the digital void? How do we decide what is worthy of preservation and what can be discarded or lost through neglect? Whose voices are missing from our collective cultural memories, and are these voices available for rediscovery?

In this Student Research Spotlight, Casey will present about his research project, All Is Moved by Love: Finding Creative Inspiration and Confronting Archival Silences in the Knox College Archives and Library. He will share insights, inspirations, mysteries, and erasure he encountered during the course of this year long, interdisciplinary research project he carried out at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois that combined archival research with creative practice. Casey selected ten student poems from the Knox College Archive, covering major historical periods from 1855 to the present, researched the historical and thematic context of each poem—confining his research to mostly what was physically available at the college library—and composed and recorded a song-cycle in response to the poems and research. The song cycle explores family history, migration, indigenous removal, and archival silence and was pressed to a limited number of 100 copies of vinyl with no digital release. Casey performed the song cycle as a kind of live-concert-meets-research-presentation in the Knox College library and is currently in the process of producing artwork for the album: hand silk-screened covers with lyric booklets set on a Ludlow Typograph.

This event is open to all with registration and will be held in The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.

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Host or Publisher Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book