Jordanna Bailkin’s talk traced the fate of archives during the end of empire. Scholars of colonialism have charted the taxonomies generated by the sources of colonial archives, but very few studies have focused on their postcolonial counterparts. Professor Bailkin examined the industry of attentiveness to colonial archives, asking why the sources pertaining to decolonization have drawn so little attention. She considered the distinctive dynamics of secrecy and transparency in 1950s and 1960s Britain (as well as the complex and uneven history of declassification) in order to understand which stories about the end of empire have been possible to tell