For Faculty

The Archives & Special Collections Center at Seton Hall University welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with faculty on crafting enriching educational experiences for their students.

Class visits to the archives often spark a sense of awe and curiosity, encouraging students to participate in active learning activities, engage in inspired conversations, and connect the past to the present. Primary sources, which comprise the bulk of our archives, rare books, and gallery collections, are powerful instruction tools. All students benefit from learning how to find, analyze, interrogate, and reference primary sources.

If you’re not sure our collections will have materials related to your subject area, try us! We love finding gems from the collections to support your research and instruction needs.

Our archivists structure our class visits to be hands-on, interactive learning experiences. We work closely with faculty to customize the lesson plan, selected materials, and learning activities. Observing, analyzing, and interrogating primary sources is often the focus of our individual class visits. We can also instruct your students on how to conduct archival and rare books research, using our collections or digital databases. In addition to highlighting materials from our archival and rare books collections, we collaborate with the Walsh Gallery staff to incorporate art and artifacts from their collections.

Our archival collection strengths include:

• Seton Hall University history
• Catholic studies
• New Jersey politics
• New Jersey immigrant culture and history

In addition to our main collecting areas, we have a wide range of materials and are equipped to accommodate virtually any discipline. Some of our recent class visits have focused on:

• Gender and women's studies
• Typography
• Communication research methods
• United States politics
• History (Vikings, food, the 1980s)

If you're interested in a special project or would like your students to conduct their own archival or rare books research, we can work together to craft a plan for the semester that includes instructional sessions and student research support. Our archivists can host sessions in the archives reading room or visit your regular class sessions to provide ongoing instruction and learning activities throughout the semester.