University Work: Re-Forming Manuscripts in Elizabeth Jesser Reid’s Correspondence Networks

Abstract

Abstract This essay discusses the process of re-forming the handwritten manuscripts held in Royal Holloway’s Papers of Elizabeth Jesser Reid into a digital archive, Elizabeth Jesser Reid’s Correspondence Networks. The letters and the digital archive map complex networks of reform in which Reid was a lynchpin, and show how the work of founding and running Bedford College, a pioneering women’s education institution, was enmeshed in a wider culture of reform. I employ Sara Ahmed’s idea of ‘queer use’ to examine connections between this nineteenth-century reform work, the digitization process, and forms of labour (administration, housekeeping, community building, and others) that are devalued in the twenty-first-century university, even as they are essential to knowledge production. I argue that digitization as a ‘queer use’ of manuscripts can illuminate the university politics of use, then and now, through analysing a letter in which Bedford’s education mission conflicted with Reid’s antislavery activism.