Join us for “Teaching with Archives” with Donna Troka on Monday, Feb. 9th from 4-5:30pm in the Jones Room. Refreshments will be served.
The “Understanding Archives” Speaker Series is sponsored by the Archives Research Program and is intended to touch on various topics related to working in archives and special collections libraries.
The theme of the inaugural “Understanding Archives” lecture is “Teaching with Archives” and will feature Dr. Donna Troka of the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. Dr. Troka will describe her experience of taking a class from concept to reality by leveraging library resources and planning and designing a syllabus with scaffold assignments using archival material. She will also discuss her experiences working with undergraduate students to present the findings of the class and eventually curate the “Let’s Talk About Sex” exhibition. During this interactive workshop, participants will receive information about resources within the Woodruff Library that supports graduate student teaching, discover models for effective syllabus and assignment design and collect ideas for undergraduate student projects that move beyond the traditional research paper.
Donna Troka (07PhD) is the Associate Director of the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence and an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts. Dr. Troka’s teaching focuses broadly on the interaction between identity and power. In Fall 2012, she taught a class entitled “From Archives to iPads: Investigating the Discourse of Sexuality at Emory” which charged students to find evidence of sexuality using Emory University yearbooks and other publications such as the Emory Wheel and Emory Report which form part of the Emory University Archives housed in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). In Fall 2014, she taught another popular course “The Dividing Lines: Pitbulls, Identity, and Community” which challenged perceptions of pitbulls in American culture. A theme in Dr. Troka’s courses and teaching is that students are encouraged and expected to create dialogue that extends their scholarship beyond the classroom and in to the community.
Donna Troka received her B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a M.A. in Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University and a PhD in American Studies from Emory University.