1.

)Welcome to the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center

Situated in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara, the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center builds upon the considerable strengths in American Studies at UCSB by offering aninterdisciplinary setting for new research and teaching initiatives. Equipped with a small library of key resources in the field and computing equipment to support web-based research, this Center provides a unique site for collaborations among faculty and students.
Jasper Johns, Map (1963). Museum of Modern Art, New York

American Studies in Context

American Studies is thriving; membership in the American Studies Association has gone up remarkably over the last 15 years; participation in American Studies conferences and events is higher than ever. A fascinating variety of new American Studies programs are emerging across the country, and internationally as well. Students, in dramatically increasing numbers, are drawn to these programs for the integrated ways of looking at the world that such interdisciplinary venues provide. Among the many intellectual currents that have been animating the field, three have been particularly strong in terms of their influence over the last decade: race/ethnic studies, cultural studies, and transnational/global studies. The field's flagship journals and institutional bodies have fostered an explicitly inclusive ethic that has allowed American Studies to become a remarkable site of diversity. In the UC system, signs of the vitality of American Studies are readily apparent. At UC Davis, the American Studies program has recently gone through a significant revitalization with exciting new hires. At UC Berkeley, the Department of American Studies has been joined recently by an American Cultures Program that supports Berkeley's GE requirement in the field. Finally, UC Santa Cruz is home to one of the most prestigious American Studies programs in the country; this undergraduate major boasts one of the largest enrollments in the U.S.

American Studies at UC Santa Barbara

With fifteen faculty working in the field, and additional Americanist hires planned for the near future, the UCSB English Department is well positioned to help facilitate the exciting innovations in American Studies being undertaken by faculty campus-wide. Among the campus's faculty, there exists significant interest in cultural studies and interdisciplinary exchanges. The Center supports this breadth of interests by encouraging diversity both in terms of methods and "objects" of study. A fundamental part of the Center's mission includes fostering interdepartmental collaborations.

The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center

The Center includes a seminar room (South Hall 2714) and a research conference room (South Hall 2710) with a reference library and access to on-line databases. These spaces provide a setting in which faculty and students can engage in activities devoted to promoting both research and curricular development. The Center's programming facilitates the construction of new kinds of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The Center also disseminates research by converting the results of major conferences hosted by the unit into collected volumes and web-based publications. The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center supports a range of activities including: individual and collaborative research lectures, workshops, and seminars major conferences innovative curricular development the production of collected volumes/working papers the production of web-based resources

2) The Early Modern Center Department of English, UCSB

EMC Home Ballad Project Themes Events Faculty Grads Undergrads Courses Login Gallery Slideshows Bookshelf EEBO ECCO Links Hours Room Schedule About Us English Department

Welcome to the EMC Homepage

Girl Aged 4 Oliver, Isaac

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.

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. CALL FOR PAPERS: The Future of Literary Studies, 1500-1800 The Early Modern Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for our tenth annual conference, "The Future of Literary Studies, 1500-1800." The conference will take place on March 11-12, 2011 at UCSB and features a constellation of keynote speakers including Helen Deutsch (UCLA), Jean Howard (Columbia), Heather James (USC), Leah Marcus (Vanderbilt), Stephen Orgel (Stanford), Clifford Siskin (NYU), and Bill Warner (UCSB).

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 ones 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 highquality sizes. A random image from the Gallery is sampled below.

Hatfield, Old Palace Interior. , . Color photographHatfield House, Hertfordshire