Maurer Receives American Archivists Award
Christopher Maurer (Boston University), Andrew A. Anderson (University of Virginia), and Melissa Dinverno (Indiana University – Bloomington) are the 2025 recipients of the Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) for their work on Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive / Memoria en movimiento: Lorca y el archivo. This award recognizes an individual, institution, or organization that has increased public awareness of a specific body of archival documents.
Memory in Motion / Memoria en movimiento is a cross-continental, cross-collection effort documenting the evolution of the archives belonging to the foundation of renowned Spanish modernist writer Federico García Lorca, tracing it across nearly a century of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss, and perseverance. This archival research project comprises a museum exhibit and a book, both of which are bilingual English/Spanish. The exhibit, under the auspices of the Lorca Foundation and housed at the Federico García Lorca Center in Granada, Spain, featured 461 archival records, 70 percent of which had never before or rarely been seen by the public. Two grants from Indiana University are currently funding a virtual tour of the exhibit. The accompanying book features high-resolution images of 343 records accompanied by narrative text and detailed provenance information. The work also includes 30 essays by international scholars, archivists, translators, editors, journalists, and other renowned contemporary creatives.
While the exhibit was open from December 2024 to May 2025, an expansive and international media campaign brought thousands of visitors to the exhibit, including students, scholars, and government officials. A core component of this publicity was its advocacy for the care and funding of this archives, as well as governmental and public commitments to maintaining, using, and learning from the exhibit’s materials. The project incorporates materials scattered throughout collections on both sides of the Atlantic, thus demonstrating how dynamic the formation of archival collections can be, especially in troubled sociopolitical times. The bilingual presentation of both the book and the exhibit not only exemplifies the dedication that went into Memory in Motion / Memoria en movimiento, but also expands the opportunities the public has to engage with this multifaceted collection. The passion and labor that went into this campaign opened new ways of understanding Lorca’s life and the story of how his archives came to be. Anderson, Dinverno, and Maurer have gone above and beyond in conveying the intellectual merits of this archives.
This project was partially supported by Indiana University’s Presidential Arts and Humanities Program; Grant-in-Aid Program; Office of the Vice Provost for Research; Institute for European Studies, a Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence through the Erasmus +program of the European Union; College Arts & Humanities Institute; and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.