Projects

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) makes 17th-century broadside ballads accessible as text, art, music, and cultural records. To date the archive includes over 5,000 ballads–more than half of the estimated 10,000 extant 17th-century ballads. EBBA’s holdings are free and open to the public.


The EMC Imprint

The EMC Imprint is an innovative open access venue for scholarly work and communication and a peer-reviewed publishing platform for digital scholarship. We would like to combine four virtues of our print media inheritance:

  1. Patient and rigorous care with writing, anonymous peer-review, editing & publishing
  2. Meet exacting standards of correctness
  3. A publication event of all-at-once presentation to the public
  4. A permanence that equals or approaches that of a printed product

with four virtues of new computable media:

  1. The speed, cheapness, and global reach of Internet publication
  2. By exploiting the plasticity of a computer-enabled interface, we could enjoy the productive integration of traditionally separate functions of writing, editing and design
  3. Incorporation of text,image, sound, video, database, etc. to become multimedia
  4. The final transmission of the publication to reader could benefit from earlier format and design decisions

The Early Modern British Theater: Access (EMBTA)

The Early Modern British Theater: Access assembles and digitizes multimedia resources relating to the history of British theater and dramatic literature during the period 1500-1800, our goal being to help students understand early modern theater as a multisensorial and collaborative art form. EMBTA is unique in that most archives on English drama either begin or end with the mid-17th-century closure of theaters by Puritan officials during England’s Civil Wars, and while post-1660 theater was in many ways radically different from the theater of Shakespeare, this archive aims to make apparent both the continuities and innovations in British theater over these three centuries.


Miscellany: An Early Modern Blog

Publishing responses to talks and events, book reviews, and informal musings on early modern literature, culture, and scholarship written by our EMC faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students.


Shakespeare Conversations

From the Shakespeare Conversations website: “In the spring of 2020 two old friends from graduate school, on opposite sides of the country, began email conversations about Shakespeare. Dustin Griffin, living in Williamstown Massachusetts and Michael O’Connell in Santa Barbara California, both retired professors who had taught Shakespeare until their retirement a decade earlier, decided they would reread Shakespeare and discuss the plays act by act in an immediate and fresh way. Many of the plays were very familiar from their teaching and research, but other plays they had not read for years, in some cases since their own time in undergraduate and graduate school fifty years earlier…

Their method was for one to read an act, send a commentary to the other, who would respond and send a commentary on the next act, ending with general comments on the play or poems. They chose the plays more or less randomly, though they read the history plays in order. In attempting fresh readings, they sometimes found themselves arguing with Shakespeare, asking why something or some character was done the way it had been, presuming to make suggestions to him. And of course they argued with one another.

By the time they had finished they found they had produced almost three hundred pages of text. They propose now to release their discussions on this web page, one at at time, with a space for other readers to respond both to them and to Shakespeare.

Dustin Griffin, “Dusty” in the text, is Professor Emeritus of English at New York University. Michael O’Connell, “Michael” in the text, is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California Santa Barbara.”