Presentation Title

Lili Elbe Digital Archive

Major

Education

Anticipated Graduation Year

2021

Access Type

Restricted Access

Abstract

This presentation will describe our work as Provost Fellows on the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). We began working on this project as students in Dr. Caughie’s engaged learning class in Spring 2019. Our task as fellows was to transcribe, translate, encode in XML markup language, proof, and correct the French version of Lili Elbe’s fictionalized life narrative. This version was published in five issues of Voilà magazine between October 6 and November 3, 1934. Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener in 1882, was a Danish artists and one of the first persons to undergo what was then termed “genital transformation surgery” in Berlin and Dresden in 1930. Her life narrative, initially published in Danish in 1931 and then in German in 1932, was titled in its English translation Man into Woman (1933). The digital archive hosts facsimiles, transcriptions, and translations of all four original publications (Danish, German, British, and American) and the German typescript, as well as contextual materials such as letters by Lili Elbe and the German editor, Ernst Harthern (a.k.a. Niels Hoyer); articles in Danish, German, and French magazines; chapters on Lili from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Le Sexe Inconnu (1935) and Lili’s friend Hélène Allatini’s memoir Mosaiques (1939), among other archival materials and commentary. This website is an important contribution to the history of transgender and to scholarship on modernist literature and culture of the early 20th century.

Faculty Mentors & Instructors

Pamela L. Caughie, Associate Faculty Member, Women's Studies and Gender Studies Program; Emily Datskou, Project Manager for Lili Elbe Digital Archive, Department of English; Rebecca J. Parker, Digital Editor, Digital Humanities

Comments

The link to the digital archive can be found here: http://www.lilielbe.org/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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Lili Elbe Digital Archive

This presentation will describe our work as Provost Fellows on the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). We began working on this project as students in Dr. Caughie’s engaged learning class in Spring 2019. Our task as fellows was to transcribe, translate, encode in XML markup language, proof, and correct the French version of Lili Elbe’s fictionalized life narrative. This version was published in five issues of Voilà magazine between October 6 and November 3, 1934. Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener in 1882, was a Danish artists and one of the first persons to undergo what was then termed “genital transformation surgery” in Berlin and Dresden in 1930. Her life narrative, initially published in Danish in 1931 and then in German in 1932, was titled in its English translation Man into Woman (1933). The digital archive hosts facsimiles, transcriptions, and translations of all four original publications (Danish, German, British, and American) and the German typescript, as well as contextual materials such as letters by Lili Elbe and the German editor, Ernst Harthern (a.k.a. Niels Hoyer); articles in Danish, German, and French magazines; chapters on Lili from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Le Sexe Inconnu (1935) and Lili’s friend Hélène Allatini’s memoir Mosaiques (1939), among other archival materials and commentary. This website is an important contribution to the history of transgender and to scholarship on modernist literature and culture of the early 20th century.