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.
CALL FOR PAPERS: Early Modern Social Networks, 1500-1800
The Early Modern Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for our eleventh annual conference, “Early Modern Social Networks, 1500-1800.” The conference will take place on March 16-17, 2012 at UCSB and will feature keynote speakers Ann Blair (Harvard University), Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London), and James Raven (University of Essex).
2010-2011 Annual Theme: The Future of Literary Studies, 1500-1800
In recent decades, scholars working in the early modern period have been at the vanguard
of literary studies. To cite just one example, some of the earliest practitioners of New
Historicism, such as Stephen Greenblatt and the late Richard Helgerson, worked in the
early modern period. The question we are contemplating this year is simple: where is
early modern studies headed? What's next? Does the future lie in advancing or revisiting
existing approaches, such as still newer historicism, or something different altogether?
In addition to exploring this question theoretically, we are also interested in new
pedagogical and critical practices.
2009-2010 Annual Theme:Limits of the Human
Cloning, organ farms, the completion of the Human Genome Project, recombinant DNA, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and other manufactured life forms, all suggest that, depending on one’s point of view, the twenty-first century opens onto a horizon of radical possibilities for the future or cataclysmic demise of the human. The 2009-2010 EMC Theme, “The Limits of the Human,” turns back to the early modern period to ask: before we were posthuman, how did we become human? How do early modern representations of monsters, anomalies, race, gender, automata define what is human and separate out what is not? What innovations in technology, botany, labor equipment, law, and mathematical notation helped to calcify the boundaries of the human? How did Cartesian, Newtonian and Leibnizian systems of the world shape the conditions that Michel Foucault argues, “made it possible for the figure of man to appear?” In what ways were the “limits” always permeable and did they invite transgression and mutation? The EMC theme provides a forum to explore these and many other questions at a crucial moment in the formation of the “human.”
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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| Ann Bonny and Mary Read convicted of piracy November 28th 1720 at a court of Vice Admiralty held at St. Jago de la Vega in ye Island of Jamaica. B. Cole, 1724. McMaster University |