The Early Modern Center at UCSB mobilizes the English department's strength in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century studies, which is maintained by ten faculty in the field. The Center provides a specially-constructed space (consisting of a seminar area, resource library, and networked computers) that promotes collaborative research and teaching. State-of-the-art computing equipment is supported by the latest databases in the field, including the Early English Books Online (EEBO), consisting of all extant books published in England from 1475-1700, and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), 1701-1800. The Center creates courses around innovative annual themes; supervises the department's undergraduate specialization in Early Modern Studies; organizes colloquia and conferences; produces an online gallery of images and an archive of internet resources; maintains a bookshelf of rare books in its library and critical reviews on its website; and offers a graduate student assistantship each year.
The EMC is proud to announce that the English Broadside Ballad Archive has won a 3rd National Endowment for the Humanities Grant of $325,000 for 2010-2012 to expand its online archive to include the Euing ballads at the University of Glasgow Library and the many early printed ballads at the Huntington Library. EBBA is currently nearing completion of its digitization of the Roxburghe ballads held by the British Library, London, and has already fully archived the Pepys ballads held by Magdalene College, Cambridge . These earlier phases of EBBA were also generously funded by NEH grants as well as by UCSB. To date EBBA has garnered more than $1,500,000 in support of its project. Congratulations ballad team! For award proposals, see Funding.
2011-2012 Annual Theme: Early Modern Social Networks, 1500-1800
The word “network” is more likely to call to mind computer connection than the “glittering net-work” of a spider-web (E. Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 1781) or a “Mantle of blacke silke” (Book of Robes, 1600). What is the link between such “curious Piece[s] of network” (Addison, Spectator 275, 1712) and contemporary social networking? These older uses of network illuminate the development of early modern techniques of loose connection. By contrast with a chain-of-being model, networks are versatile, allowing for manifold modes of association. We will explore early modern networks of both human and nonhuman actors in areas such as knowledge production, religious practice, international trade, infrastructure development and others. We speculate that social networking, in the broad sense that we are using it, lies behind many of the transformations of the three centuries after 1500.
Spring events
Thurs., April 12 Neil Saccamano: "Reading Books on a Battlefield: Cosmopolitics and the Trouble with Humanity in Rousseau", 3:30-5pm 2635 SH (sponsored by the EMC and the Comp Lit. Department)
Tues., April 24: Andrew Griffin, "Collaboration Without Interdisciplinarity: On a Digital Performance Edition of King Leir" 3:30-5pm 2635 SH
Fri., May 4th, 1-5pm IHC Symposium: Renaissance Publics, Renaissance Goods
This symposium will contribute to the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center theme for 2011-2012 – "Public Goods" – by discussing the contribution of furniture, clothes, writing desks, books, ballads, and woodcuts to the creation of publics and public goods in the Renaissance. The event will include talks by Patricia Fumerton (UC Santa Barbara), Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College), Julia Reinhard Lupton (UC Irvine) and Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania).
Wed., May 16 David Marshall, "Turning Points: Dickens, Defoe, and the Conversion of Autobiography", 2635 SH at 3:30PM; reception to follow at 5PM in Research Commons (with the 19th Century Reading Group)
Fri., May 25 Patricia Fumerton, "Digitizing Ephemera and its Discontents: EBBA's Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad" 3:30-5pm 2635 SH
Coming Soon! Early Modern British Theater Archive (EMBTA)
The Early Modern British Theater Archive will assemble and digitize multimedia resources relating to the history of British theater and dramatic literature during the period 1500-1800. So that students can encounter drama as the multisensorial and collaborative artform that it has always been, EMBTA will organize images, sound files, links, and archival material from specialist sources so as to make it easily accessible for instructors and students. In the last decades, new academic research -- on such expansively multimedia topics as the rise of the celebrity actress, the ballad-opera (an early form of musical theater), popular entertainments such as puppet-shows and farces, the development of stage technologies and illusions, and the wild popularity of visiting superstar Italian castrati on the English operatic stage -- has emphasized the importance of spectacle in early modern theater. EMBTA will help us re-experience early modern theater in the 21st c. university classroom.
A distinctive feature of this project, exploiting the existing historical range of the EMC, is that the site will highlight seldom studied continuities across the period 1500-1800, obscured in conventional studies of English drama because of the mid-17th-century closure of theatres by Puritan officials during the Commonwealth, which has been taken as establishing a radical break with the theater of Shakespeare. Almost no resources, print- or web-based, study the period across its historical sweep.
EMBTA is directed by Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, with support from UCSB's Office of Instructional Development.
EMC Gallery
The Early Modern Center Gallery is a featured resource of the center, containing reproductions of many important period images in thumbnail, browser, and large high-quality sizes. A random image from the Gallery is sampled below.
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| Shark (Shovel-nose) , from Journal. Barlow, Edward, 1659-1703. pen and ink and watercolor manuscripthalf-folio sheets (unbound)rectangularNational Maritime Museum, Greenwich |