Digital archives have become increasingly important to literary scholarship, shaping how texts are preserved, accessed, studied, and remembered. Yet archives are never neutral. Decisions about what is collected, digitized, categorized, and made visible reflect broader social relations of power and influence the literary histories that future generations inherit.

This seminar explores how feminist approaches can help us critically examine and transform digital literary archives. Drawing on feminist archival studies, comparative literature, intersectionality, postcolonial theory, and critical digital humanities, the seminar will investigate how digital infrastructures can reproduce existing inequalities while also creating opportunities for more inclusive forms of knowledge production.

Participants will consider questions such as: Who is represented in digital literary collections, and who remains absent? How do metadata systems, search technologies, and archival classifications shape literary visibility and scholarly engagement? In what ways do digital archives contribute to the construction of literary canons? How might feminist methodologies challenge dominant archival practices and expand whose stories are preserved and valued? The seminar will also address how affect, embodiment, and situated knowledge can be incorporated into digital archival thinking, challenging the assumption of detached or purely technical objectivity.

Through discussion of selected digital humanities projects, literary archives, and feminist interventions in archival practice, the seminar will examine strategies for creating more equitable and inclusive digital literary environments. Particular attention will be paid to the representation of women, Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, queer authors, and writers from the Global South. We will also reflect on the material conditions of digital preservation, including labor, infrastructure, and the environmental costs of sustaining large-scale archives.

In addition, the seminar will engage with practical and methodological questions: How can scholars intervene in existing archives through feminist tagging, annotation, and counter-archiving practices? What role can collaborative and community-based models of knowledge production play in reshaping digital literary landscapes? And how might teaching and research in comparative literature incorporate critical digital literacy as a core skill?

The seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the relationship between technology, literature, memory, and power. By bringing together perspectives from comparative literature and feminist digital humanities, it seeks to imagine what more feminist digital literary worlds might look like and how scholars can contribute to their creation. Ultimately, it positions digital archives not only as repositories of texts but as active sites of struggle over meaning, visibility, and epistemic justice.