Welcome to Short Takes, where we take a couple of minutes to show you something interesting we found in the stacks! In this episode, we will show you some books with a hidden feature: painted fore-edges. Script & narration by Ikumi Crocoll. Video by David Eng. Books featured in this video: Letters on the Improvement…

After many months of work behind the scenes from faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and staff, on November 4th and 5th the first conference of the three-part series that constitutes the 2022–2023 Center for 17th– & 18th-Century Studies core program was held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Mildred. E. Mathias Botanical…

At the end of October, the Center & Clark were thrilled to host award-winning theater company Box Tale Soup for a week-long residency. The quirky name comes from their signature style, packing whole handmade worlds into a vintage trunk with a delicious mix of puppetry, movement, theater, and music. Antonia Christophers, Noel Byrne, and Adam Boyle delighted…

Box Tale Soup’s theatrical performance at the Clark Library of its original adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels included a week of workshops at the library to share their creative process with visiting classes. As part of these workshops, Erin Severson, Ikumi Crocoll, and Anna Chen collaborated with Box Tale Soup and with instructors Helen Deutsch, and Leigh-Michil…

In the annexes of the Clark Library, UCLA, safely catalogued and shelved, sits the one of the most important books in history of medicine, Orang-outang sive Homo Sylvestris: or the Anatomy of a Pygmie.  It tells the story of a young doctor and his foray into what we now refer to as comparative anatomy. This…

The Henry J. Bruman Summer Chamber Music Festival is dedicated to introducing chamber music to new audiences by offering performances free of charge. Powell Library’s magnificent rotunda offers live and warm acoustics that inspire performers, and provides an intimate connection between the public and the musicians. This unique stage-less setting is reminiscent of chamber music’s…

Throughout my Karmiole Fellowship at the Clark Library, my project looked at recent scholarship’s great strides in fusing theoretical and historical works in the realm of disability from an early modern archival point of view. Such work focuses on the various systematic implications of authors, characters, dialogic, devices, illustrations, concerning diminishment, the or loss of…

At the recent conference “Archive and Theory: The Future of Anglo-American Early Modern Disability Studies,” Dr. Megan Peiser and Emily D. Spunaugle (Oakland Univesity, Rochester, MI) presented their collaborative research on the Marguerite Hicks Collection, which consists of books and pamphlets by and about British women writers from the 17–19th centuries. Their presentation, “The Marguerite Hicks Collection:…

The Center and Clark thank the following for their generous support during 2022–2023: Major Supporters Dr. Paul Chrzanowski Colburn Foundation Dr. Patricia Bates Simun and Mr. Richard V. Simun Memorial Fund Professor Emeritus Nathaniel Grossman J. Paul Getty Trust Penny and Ed Kanner* Stephen A. Kanter, M.D.* Kenneth Karmiole Virginia F. and Dr. Lawrence Kruger…

The Center offers a broad range of graduate and post-doctoral fellowships to support research within the Clark Library’s collections and beyond. Applications for research fellowships during the 2023–24 academic year are now open and submissions will be accepted until this year’s deadline of February 1, 2023. Fellowships offered this year include our annual Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral…

Little is known about the Virgen de los Ángeles sculptural group other than its early manufacture decades before the other sculptures and the altarpiece of which they are a part. A polychromed wood sculpture group—the Virgen de los Ángeles—fills the bottom left niche of the retablo mayor (main altarpiece) in the church at the Convento…

Flowers are a common feature of nineteenth-century caricatures of Oscar Wilde and his circle.  As part of her postdoctoral fellowship with the Clark’s core program “Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at its fin,” Dr. Lindsay Wells examines the floral imagery of the British aesthetic movement from a horticultural perspective. At first glance, the sheet music cover…

The popularity of Iberian romances allowed them to cross political, religious, and linguistic borders. Early modern English translations employ paratextual strategies to cloak, adapt, or elevate these controversial foreign texts. “Away with your Amadis of Gaule, your Palmerins, your Mirrour of Knighthood, […] all of them such trash as is scarce worth the inke of…

In 2018–19 I had the pleasure of working at the Clark Library as an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow for the Core Program “Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization,” organized by Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson. I moved from the University of Venice–Ca’ Foscari, where I completed my PhD, to UCLA to explore the integration…

The Center and Clark thank the following for their generous support during 2021–2022: Major Supporters Dr. Paul Chrzanowski Colburn Foundation Dr. Patricia Bates Simun and Mr. Richard V. Simun Memorial Fund Professor Emeritus Nathaniel Grossman J. Paul Getty Trust Penny and Ed Kanner* Stephen A. Kanter, M.D.* Kenneth Karmiole Virginia F. and Dr. Lawrence Kruger…

Margaret MacDonald | June 27, 2022 A new donation of 40 historical texts from Paul Chrzanowski further bolsters an already remarkable collection of early English texts at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The newly added items—including a 17th-century parchment with the seal of Queen Elizabeth I and a handwritten manuscript describing precious metals and gems—have…

This annual festival was founded in 1988 by Professor Henry J. Bruman (1913–2005), who sought to introduce new audiences to chamber music at informal concerts on the UCLA campus. This summer we present 5 free lunchtime concerts featuring acclaimed local musicians in the elegant Powell Library Rotunda. The festival is directed by UCLA graduate, violinist …