Hello everyone! This is the first in a series of blog posts detailing my wonderful summer experience working with the Unstable Archives project.

The portion of the project housed at UPenn is headed by Professor Megan Robb, and focuses on displaying and providing context to a collection of archival materials surrounding Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa. Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa (1758-1822) was a native woman (the project's preferred terminology- in modern terms, Bengali) who cohabitated with and eventually  married Gerard Gustavus Ducarel, an Englishman. She eventually moved to England with him, assimilating herself and her biracial children into English culture. While interracial relationships between Englishmen and native women were by no means uncommon during the early days of British involvement in South Asia, Ducarel and Sharaf un-Nisa stand apart due to the formal recognition of their marriage by  English law.  Sharaf un-Nisa's assimilation into English culture is also highly unusual, as most native women in interracial relationships with Englishmen would remain in South Asia. 

The majority of my work was conducting research to flesh out portions of the Unstable Archives website. The website primarily houses articles providing context for the aforementioned archival collection, providing information on Sharaf un-Nisa's life and the lives of her family members as well as providing important contextual information on the time period in which she lived. It acts as a repository for scholars interested in Sharaf un-Nisa, or more broadly interracial relationships between native women and Englishmen. Over the course of 6 weeks, I worked on tracking down works holding information about native wives, compiling as many secondary and primary works as possible to form a base for future scholars to work from.  This eventually turned into the Reading Resources bibliography and the Teaching Resources for Scholars annotated bibliography. Once I had completed this work, I moved on to writing the Law and Interracial Marriage article, an in depth look at the complex nature of interracial relationships within the British legal framework, and an article on Popular Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage (which is currently being edited). 
Over the next couple of posts, I'll dive deeper into the work that I did over the summer, talking through the fascinating questions brought up by my research, and the tremendous amount I learned from the experience. In doing so, I hope to show all of you the importance of the work the Unstable Archives is doing, and its ramifications for future scholars.