In my Professionalization course two weeks ago, Professor Kiana Murphy stopped by to talk to us about her trajectory in the academy—as a newly minted Assistant Professor in Brown’s Department of American Studies. Professor Murphy was deeply generous with her time, and spent almost an hour talking to us about the things that we were most excited and curious about. For me, that was the archive [insert dramatic hand gestures to indicate the almost woo-like ways that we think about the archive].

People talk a lot about “the archive” in academia—without really ever providing context for what that means. What it looks like. Who all is in there. But the advice that we got was pretty simple: Just go. And see what you see.

So I did just that on Thursday: visiting the archives of Hortense J. Spillers. Which really means that I did some very light research on the front end by visiting the library website. Got a sense of how the boxes were all organized. And then chose one. The finding aid includes titles like Personal and Biographical, Notebooks, Correspondence, Administrative, to name a few. But the one that caught my eye was Teaching. So I chose Box 12, which included descriptions like: Afro-American Literature: syllabi and handwritten lecture notes.

Quick backstory: Last year, when Professor Spillers came to visit Brown for a symposium in her honor (which I wrote about briefly at that time), the burning question that I had was about teaching. I wondered how it was that she channeled her brilliance in ways that could be taught: if she felt skillful at doing this in a classroom. What she learned about herself. About her pedagogy. About the craft of teaching. About the craft of teaching black studies, specifically. I didn’t get to ask her. So I figured this would be an opportunity to find something akin to an answer. I should also say that, a year ago, I had no idea who Hortense J. Spillers was. That my introduction was in a course called Blackness and Being, and that while I have not engaged with a great deal of her work, yet, I am fascinated by the near-mythology that surrounds these black feminist writers of the 80s.

And wow. I understand why people go to archives. I only got through two folders, but I can see how people get addicted to this process. There is such intimacy in those pages—and what was most striking, on this visit, was reading the notes that she gave students to study for their midterms or finals. The voice, the generosity, the rigor, was so deeply reminiscent of my experience in Kevin Quashie’s class last year—wherein he would write to us after class to synthesize or work through musings that we had started in our time together. I’m so interested in this rigor and sense of commitment as integral to the teaching of black studies—that the field emerged because of the living that we were doing apart from the academy, and that the continued study of it [the field] requires a life beyond the classroom, too. It’s a thought I think I’m going to be sitting with for quite some time.