Month: September 2020

Upcoming Events: Talk by Professor James Rice, “‘Early Modern’ and ‘Indigenous’ Histories”

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The Early Modern Studies Working Group has a few exciting events in the next few weeks.

On March 7th, we are please to announce that Professor James Rice will be giving a talk titled “‘Early Modern’ and ‘Indigenous’ Histories.” The talk begins at 1pm and will be preceded by a lunch at 12:15. The talk will explore the intertwining questions of periodization, theories of historical causation, and identity. The ways in which scholars have traditionally periodized the ‘Early Modern’ match up with certain important turning points in Native American history, and that’s not a coincidence. Yet any attempt at marking the beginning and end dates of the Early Modern also serves to elide important continuities in Indigenous histories – elisions with significant consequences for the politics of today.

Professor Rice is the chair at the Tufts History Department and the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History. His major publications are Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2012) and Nature and History in Potomac (2009). Currently, the Early Modern Cross Cultural Interactions Reading Group is reading Tales from a Revolution on Tuesday’s between 12-1 in the UCHI conference room. All are welcome to join.

On February 21st we will be holding our first transcribathon meeting in the UCHI conference room at 11am. As always, we will be transcribing John Ward’s diary along with a guest transcription. All are welcome.

Scandal and Murder in the Folger Archives

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This post comes from the Early Modern Studies Working Group’s Co-Coordinator, Melissa Rohrer. Melissa is a PhD Candidate in the English Department.

In October of 2018, I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library with generous funding from the UConn Early Modern Studies Working Group and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. My dissertation investigates how playwrights of the early modern period adapted notorious true events for the stage—events such as true crimes and scandals. I already had access to the plays which adapted these events, so I my trip to the Folger was centered largely on learning more about how these events were understood, circulated, and commented upon, both at the time of their unfolding and in the centuries after they transpired. Continue reading →

Announcing The Early Moderns Works in Progress Writing Group

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The Early Modern Works in Progress Writing Group—part of the UCHI-sponsored Early Modern Working Group and Folger Consortium Committee—brings together faculty members and graduate students with interests in early modern / Renaissance literatures, art, and history.  Our purpose is to support and promote the research of Early Modern Community members by providing them an occasion to present work in progress and receive constructive feedback and criticism on that work.  We also seek to foster an intellectual, interdisciplinary community, particularly in the hopes of bringing together graduate students and faculty members from UConn’s main and satellite campuses.

 

The Group meets once or twice each semester at times announced in September and January respectively.  Presenters are chosen each semester by members of the subcommittee who solicit nominations from the community at large.  Presenters will typically be UConn faculty members and graduate dissertators working on any aspect of early modern / Renaissance cultures.

 

Presenters are expected to send their work in progress (no published or “accepted” essays will be workshopped) to the group committee chair no later than two weeks prior the scheduled event.  The chair will disseminate the essay to all group members, who will read the work in advance of the meeting.  On the day of the 90-minute workshop, community members will gather to discuss the essay in a lively, collegial conversational format—with the primary goal of helping the presenter to refine the essay for eventual publication submission.  Essays should be between 15 and 30 pages of double-spaced prose.

 

We hope to see you at our meetings!

Folger Research Report: “My Experience in the Folger Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas Skills Course, Summer 2019”

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Kristen Vitale is one of the Early Modern Studies Working Group’s New Co-coordinators and received a travel grant last spring to conduct research at the Folger Library This past July I participated in the Folger Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas Skills Course. The Library hosted twenty-six scholars from around the world to develop “a set of research-oriented literacies,” navigate the archive, and enhance our understanding of early modern book history. I left the Folger with thorough knowledge of the promised objectives and so much more. I now have a better grasp on my intended thesis project, refined paleographic proficiency, and a range of research skills that will aid in developing my ever-looming dissertation. I also gained a number of professional and personal relationships which formed with such ease that I, along with many others, viewed our meetings as pure serendipity.

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Q&A with Katie Beene

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Today’s Post is a Q&A with a new member of the EMSWG. Katie is a first year history PhD student who specializes in early modern Irish history.
1. Where are you from originally?
I am originally from a town called Evans, GA, it is just outside of Augusta, GA. For the past seven years I have been living in Villa Rica, GA, just outside of Atlanta, GA.
2. Where else have you gone to school?
I started school at the University of Georgia but switched to Georgia Southern University because it offered a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. I graduate from Georgia Southern in 2011 and worked in the restaurant industry for several years before coming back to school. I then went to Georgia State University for an undergraduate in history and religious studies. After I graduated with my BA in history I continued at Georgia State and earned my MA in Early Modern European History in December of 2018.

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Report from the Folger: Enslaved and Freedwomen; Creators of the Atlantic Economy

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Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey is an Assistant Professor at the Stamford Campus of UCONN. He visited the Folger with funding from the Early Modern Studies Group.

Since the Renaissance of the 12th century (the real one), one of the exhilarating drivers of human innovation has been the collective learning enabled by conferences/universities/libraries, where scholars gather to discuss and sharpen their ideas. However, as a nontraditional, single parent, early career academic at a regional campus, the requirements to find, apply, and attend such academic gatherings can be a bit daunting. When my eagle-eyed mentor Mark Healey pointed out that Jennifer L. Morgan, one of my academic heroes, would be directing a yearlong colloquium on Finance, Race, and Gender in the Early Modern Atlantic World at the Folger Institute, I really wanted to participate. However, with time running out to finish my application I got stuck. In what would become a theme, the UCONN liaison Brendan Kane and others kindly reached out and helped me to understand what/how I could contribute and shepherded me through the process. Continue reading →

Q&A with Dr. Kathryn Moore

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Today’s Post is a Q&A with a new member of the EMSWG. Dr. Kathryn Moore is an Assistant Professor of Art History.

  1. Can you tell us a bit about your background (academic and otherwise)? Where are you from? Where else have you taught, researched, etc?

I am from Virginia and did an interdisciplinary BA as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia.  I studied Latin and Italian languages and literature, as well as the history of art and architecture. I then completed an MA and PhD in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where I did coursework in Italian architectural history with Marvin Trachtenberg and Islamic art and architecture with Priscilla Soucek.  While a graduate student, I studied Turkish at the University of Chicago. My studies at New York University were supported by a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship. In my last two years of graduate school, I was a Kress pre-doctoral Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.  After finishing my PhD, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.  With support from the ACLS fellowship, I completed the summer intensive program in Modern Standard Arabic at the Qalam wa Lawh school in Rabat, Morocco. I then taught as an assistant professor at both the University of Hong Kong and Texas State University.  In my various positions, I have taught courses across medieval and Renaissance European art history and Islamic art history, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean research.  My research has also spanned the medieval and Renaissance periods and has taken me to Turkey, Israel, North Africa, and much of Europe.  Last year, I was a fellow at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s center for Renaissance studies in Florence, Italy. Continue reading →

Folger Research Report: Dr. Ken Gouwens

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Today’s blog post describes Dr. Ken Gouwens’ research trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library

Thanks to the generous support of our Folger Committee, I was able to return to the library for a whirlwind trip just a few weeks before it closed for renovation. While a short-term fellow there years ago, I’d discovered its wealth of emblem books, a genre that now occupies a central chapter of my book manuscript on simian-human comparisons. I’d accumulated hundreds of photographs of emblems and transcribed quite a lot of the material, not knowing, of course, what would end up being useful. Now that the chapter’s taking shape, it was absolutely essential to get back to the Folger to be sure of my documentation and to choose the most useful images from multiple editions. Continue reading →

Folger Research Report: Dr. Debapriya Sarkar

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Today’s blog post describes Dr. Debapriya Sarkar’s research trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library

 

Thanks to the support of the Early Modern Studies Working Group, I was able to return to the Folger for a short trip in Fall 2019 before the library closed for renovation. I am in the early stages of research on a new project on terraqueous spaces—islands, shores, riverbanks—in early modern romance, and I wanted to consult some maps at the Folger that would enable me to think further about how these spaces functioned across different representational media. The project asks how the liminal spaces that demarcate the boundaries between land and water not only provide physical relief from the maritime dangers, but also serve as symbolic escapes from nature’s unpredictable forces. Before going to the Folger, I had been tracking how the instabilities of the romance form provided writers with an ideal literary mode within which to use these thresholds—between inland and ocean, between calm and chaos, and even between life and death—to inquire about the struggles of humans to understand, control, and manipulate their natural surroundings. While I had consulted images available on LUNA, I hoped to study a few of the atlases in greater detail at the library. At the Folger, I decided to begin by looking at the physical copies of some of the same texts I had studied online, since I hope—as the project develops—to think more about how the maps were compiled and ordered, and if such organization follows other logics of collection and compilation prevalent in the period. During my visit, I focused on English translations and abridgments, but I plan to expand my archive in future archival trips.

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