The Early Modern Center at UCSB mobilizes the English department's strength in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century studies, which is maintained by nine 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 it has won a 2nd National Endowment for the Humanities Grant of $350,000 for 2008-2010 to expand its online English Broadside Ballads Archive to include the Roxburghe Ballads held by the British Library. EBBA is currently nearing completion of its digitization of the Pepys Ballads held by Magdalene College, Cambridge, which was also funded by an NEH grant (for 2006-2008). Congratulations ballad team! For the award proposals, see NEH1: Reference Materials Grant Proposal and NEH2: Collections and Resources Grant Proposal.
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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| Sir Richard Grenville. Unknown Artist, 1571. oil paintingNational Portrait Gallery, London |