Watkinson Library Institute: Teaching with Special Collections
Are you interested in incorporating special collections and archival materials into your courses but unsure how to do that? Or are you already doing this but want to enrich and deepen the experience for you and your students?
Consider applying to the Watkinson Library Institute.
In this two-and-a-half-day teaching workshop, we will focus on pedagogical best-practices that undergird successful student learning engagements with special collections and archival materials.
The goals of the Institute are as follows:
(1) To provide faculty with greater familiarity with current pedagogical approaches to teaching with special collections and archives
(2) To build knowledge of print and nonprint resources related to pedagogy, as well as organizational supports for course and assignment design
(3) To build greater awareness of some of the common challenges that instructors and students face when working with special collections and archives
(4) To enhance awareness of the importance of consultation, collaboration, and partnership with archivists and librarians at any and/or all points (from planning to delivery to assessment)
(5) To develop practical experience in designing a lesson plan/worksheet/assignment that incorporates the pedagogical principles introduced in the workshop
The Watkinson Library Institute Workshop in Teaching with Special Collections and Archives is supported through the generous funding of the following partners:
Faculty at Watkinson Library Institute (for 2024)
Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, PhD (English, Boston University, 2012), Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian, Watkinson Library, Trinity College Library (Hartford, CT)
Eric Johnson-DeBaufre joined the Watkinson Library staff in 2019 after working as the librarian for the Robbins Library of Philosophy at Harvard University for six years. Prior to his career as a librarian, he taught English literature, specializing in 16th and 17th century British literature, at several small liberal arts colleges. Eric has a background in early modern manuscript and print culture. Eric has received a Mellon Fellowship for the study of English Paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and has taken several courses at Rare Book School, including Descriptive Bibliography with David Whitesell. Most recently, he attended the Rare Books Workshop at Texas A&M where he practiced paper making, casting and setting type, and printing on a reproduction 18th century press. As the Rare Books and Special Collections librarian for Watkinson, his work engages four overlapping interests: making Watkinson’s rare and unique materials publicly accessible, supporting their educational use, promoting broader engagement with them, and preserving them for future generations.
Eric Stoykovich, PhD (History, University of Virginia, 2009), Manuscript Librarian and College Archivist, Watkinson Library, Trinity College Library (Hartford, CT).
Eric Stoykovich joined the Watkinson Library staff in 2019 after working for the University of Maryland’s Special Collections for three years. Prior to coming to Trinity College, he digitized multi-format cultural resources at the Library of Congress and military records housed at the U.S. National Archives for Fold3/Ancestry. His dissertation in American history from the University of Virginia focused on the intellectual history of agricultural improvers and cattle breeders in the early American republic, looking at how their arguments, mainly in print and in agricultural periodicals, were created and adapted for political purposes. Stoykovich earned a B.A. in history from Brown University and an M.L.S. from the University of Maryland. While earning a Lang Fellowship from the Rare Book School in 2022-2024, he has taken two Rare Books School courses in 2022: The American Book in the Industrial Era, 1820–1940, and Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching. In 2023, he took the Rare Book School course The Bible and Histories of Reading.
