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A Review of: Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

To look at a piece of historical scholarship is to look at a puzzle that has been slowly and arduously pieced together. While we can trace some of the behindthe-scenes workings through acknowledgments and footnotes, the published work often obscures deeper understanding of how the author got from there (the research idea) to here (the finished product). Archival research has been lauded for complicating and extending rhetorical scholarship, and yet few scholars have written about the actual experience of being in the archives: what brings us there, what we must negotiate when we get there, and what keeps us going back there. In other words, we know about the product of doing rhetorical history, but what about the process? Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan’s edited volume fills this gap, offering illuminating ruminations on the twists and turns of the research process and suggesting the resources that lie beyond the archives. In Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, Kirsch and Rohan expertly bring together the experiences of eighteen scholars. The short contributions are designed to provide a concise snapshot rather than a full account of each author’s endeavor. The book is divided into four sections, each organized around a distinct conjunction of circumstances: when serendipity, creativity and place come into play; when personal experience, family history, and research subjects intersect; when personal, cultural, and historical memory shape the politics of the archives; and when the lives of our research subjects parallel our own. Although they span a wide and diverse range of research topics, Kirsch and Rohan make a persuasive case that the contributions to the volume combine to ‘‘promote themes of serendipity, chance discoveries, and personal connections as key ingredients for sustained research when working with archival documents’’ (8). Selections in Part One emphasize the importance of place and location in doing historical work. David Gold, Gesa E. Kirsch, Christine Mason Sutherland, and Alicia Nitecki each look back on the archival reading adventures that have allowed them to produce career-defining scholarship in their respective research areas. It is in this section of the book that the reader gains a sense of how archival research in rhetoric can be analogous to an ‘‘August mushroom hunt’’ (Connors qtd. in Kirsch 21). The authors tell complementary tales of the value of being on-location. For instance, Kirsch’s research on Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter was jumpstarted when she arrived at her Berkeley hotel and noticed a picture of Ritter in the hotel’s Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 4, October 2009, pp. 393–404