Toward an Undisciplined Brit Lit Survey Anthology: Students in the Digital Archives

In response to powerful calls to undiscipline and decolonize the field, Victorian studies is currently undergoing an era of reform worthy of the Victorians themselves. One such methodological reform appears in the recent turn to critical archival studies, as scholars and archivists work to unsettle the white-supremacist methodologies of Eurocentric archival research via democratizing digital spaces that both amplify and expand access to silenced voices. But what about pedagogy? This cowritten article builds on these conversations by extending the implications of this antiracist digital work for the genre of the British literature anthology. The authors spotlight an assignment codesigned for their British lit survey courses that asks students to research and compile a collective digital anthology. The authors encourage their students to identify gaps and erasures in their own syllabi, to research in digital spaces such as One More Voice, to present and publish their contributions, and to thereby recenter voices that have been traditionally erased in university curricula. The authors offer a blueprint for integrating this assignment into a variety of university curricula and classrooms. In doing so, they theorize the implications for Victorian studies of reforming the anthology as an antiracist digital archive in its own right.