On February 3–4, 2023, 13 scholars of music, literature and history convened at the Clark Library to discuss the sounds of the early Atlantic world in broad disciplinary and geographic contexts. Presentations spanned several regions, including Haiti, Mexico (or New Spain), Jamaica, Brazil, Spain, Pennsylvania, Algiers and more. While some presentations directly addressed musical exchange…

Held on February 10-11, 2023, this event was the second of a three-part conference series that comprises the 2022-23 Center & Clark Core Program. The theme of this second installation was “Ephemeral Architecture,” and speakers examined the creation, roles, and histories of impermanent structures in diverse contexts across the Americas. With sessions in the William…

In 1931, wood engraver Paul Landacre published his first major work, California Hills. A transplanted Midwesterner, Landacre had encountered various of the sites depicted—Monterey, Big Sur, Coachella Valley—on a road trip with friends (Landacre did not own an automobile). They followed touring itineraries suggested by the popular Sunset Magazine, a publication sponsored by the Southern…

The Western Ottomanists’ Workshop (WOW) 2022 took place on November 18–19, 2022, with assistance from The Center and Clark Library. This happened to coincide with the sudden graduate student strike, requiring us to make some dramatic last-minute changes to our program and venues. On Day 1 we moved outside Bunche to an outdoor location (outside YRL)….

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…