Society Members Featured in Conversation
"Toni Morrison in the Archive,
Toni Morrison as Archive"

Toni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as Archive

with Autumn Womack and Dana Williams

Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free

In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107

Please join us the evening of October 20th at 5:30 for a panel with historians Autumn Womack and Dana Williams

This panel considers Toni Morrison both as a subject of the archive and as a figure who reshaped how we understand it. Bringing together work on her papers, her editorial career, and her fiction, the conversation asks what Morrison’s practice reveals about the making—and the limits—of the historical record for Black history. Drawing on recent scholarship on the Toni Morrison Papers, her work as an editor at Random House, and new critical studies of her novels, the panel explores how Morrison used the archive, worked against it, and expanded what counts as historical knowledge. In doing so, it positions Morrison not only within the archive, but as a central figure in the history of Black archival practice.

Autumn Womack
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English, Princeton University. Womack works on African American literary history, visual culture, and archival practice. In 2023, she led the curatorial team for the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which drew on previously unseen materials from the Toni Morrison Papers to illuminate Morrison’s creative process. Her forthcoming book, The Wanderer (Knopf, 2025), examines Morrison’s creative process through her archive, and she is co-editing, with Kinohi Nishikawa, a volume on Toni Morrison and Black archival practice.

Dana A. Williams
Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University. Williams is a leading scholar of African American print culture and publishing history. She is the author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (2025), which examines Morrison’s work at Random House and her role in shaping late twentieth-century Black literary and intellectual life.

Sponsored by the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia