Introduction

• Louise Kane

This special issue of the Archiv’s English Studies section, “Archives and the Global Turn,” explores some new and in-development archives based in Europe and the United States. The purpose or goal of this special issue is to show how the profiled archives reflect and contribute to recent scholarly ‘turns’ within the intersecting fields of Archival Studies, Literary Studies (particularly the concept of the ‘global turn’), and the Digital Humanities. The archives described in the five articles also intervene in recent debates about archives in relation to Postcolonial Studies and Periodical Studies. They play a part in the gradual and still-ongoing scholarly shift that has broadened the definition of “English Studies” in increasingly capacious, global contexts. The authors of each article describe very different archives – three are digital, one is a museum exhibition, and one is a physical-cum-digital archive – but all of the archives share a specific commonality: they have been built to focus on the transnational and the global, and to widen the capacious definition of what an archive can, or should, be.