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 4th National Endowment for the Humanities Grant of $280,000 for 2012-2014 to expand its online archive with the addition of the early broadside ballads at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, including its more than 1,466 Crawford ballads. The NLS ballads will be added to EBBA's archive of the Pepys ballads held by Magdalene College, Cambridge and the Roxburghe ballads held by the British Library, London as well as its near-completed archiving of the Euing ballads at the University of Glasgow Library and the many early printed ballads at the Huntington Library. 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.
Please join us for the following upcoming
EMC co-sponsored events:
John D. Lyons
University of Virginia
"Randomness, Fortune, and Faith"
May 8, 2013
Girvetz 1004 / 9:30 - 10:45 AM
UCSB Medieval Studies Conference
May 17 - 18, 2013
"Says Who? Contested Spaces, Voices, and Texts"
Day 1
May 17, 2013
HSSB 4080 / 12:30 - 5:00 PM
"Medieval Farces": A Theatrical Performance
By The Rude Mechanicals
May 17, 2013
Theater & Dance West 1701 / 5:00 - 7:30 PM
"Says Who? Contested Spaces, Voices, and Texts"
Day 2
May 18, 2013
HSSB 6040 / 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Current Projects at the Early Modern Center
The Early Modern British Theater Archive (EMBTA)
EMBTA will assemble and digitize multimedia resources relating to the history of British theater and dramatic literature during the period 1500-1800. EMBTA is directed by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, with support from UCSB's Office of Instructional Development.
The Re:Enlightenment Project
The Re: Enlightenment Project joins institutions and individuals who share a common purpose: improving the ways in which knowledge works in the world. It identifies, generates, and shares new knowledge and new practices through interactive exchanges, collaborative research and publicatio, and experiments in dissemination. The Project is "Re:"--"about"--Enlightenment in that it frames those iniatives within a history of Enlightenment's purchase on the present, offering not just a recounting but a re-assessment. The third international gathering of the project will be December 7-9th, 2012 at UCSB. Local Organizer and Steering Committee Member: William Warner. Director: Clifford Siskin. New York University Homepage for The Re:Enlightenment Project: http://www.reenlightenment.org/.
w/Shakespeare
This group of Shakespeare scholars, characterized by the interdisciplinary nature of their scholarship and their commitment to public programming, will convene for a series of conversations and events that dramatize the conjunctive and transmedial character of the Shakespearean corpus. “w/Shakespeare” means: Shakespeare in relation to other discourses and media, but also Shakespeare as a commons shared and sustained by traffic among scholars, students, theater-makers, teachers, and public audiences. UCSB will be hosting the first official gathering on the topic of "Shakespeare and Risk" on February 8, 2013. Co-coveners: James Kearney and Julia Lupton (UCI).
UCI w/Shakespeare homepage: http://sites.uci.edu/wshakespeare/.
New EBBA Research Tool
In 2012 the NEH also awarded EBBA a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to develop a Ballad Illustration Archive (BIA) that will integrate computer vision software and human cataloguing in order to make the illustrations in broadside ballads more searchable and accessible for researchers and the general public alike. Co-directors: Carl Stahmer and Megan Palmer Browne.
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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| Richard II. Beauneveu, Andre, c. 1390s. Egg tempera on wood panelWestminster Abbey |