Q&A with Katie Beene

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

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

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

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

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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