Cosponsored Event, Lectures, Special Event

Work-in-Progress Sessions: Summer Mentorship Research Projects

Date/Time
Friday, November 20, 2020
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

–presented by Laura Hutchingame (UCLA) and Leah Marangos (UCLA)

Online event via Zoom
Hosted by the Early Modern Research Group

For registration details, please email the Center at c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu

The Graduate Certificate in Early Modern Studies, administered by the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, offers UCLA graduate students an avenue to explore the increasingly transnational and interdisciplinary nature of early modern studies through specially designated comparative courses and unique fellowship and mentoring opportunities.

Students in the certificate program are eligible to apply for competitive Summer Mentorships, which provide financial support to complete one of the certificate requirements: a 25-page paper on an early modern studies topic of interdisciplinary breadth. The Summer Mentorship affords the opportunity for students to work closely with a Center/Clark Core Faculty member to develop their paper for presentation at an academic conference or for potential publication.

The Early Modern Research Group, which meets under the auspices of the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, invites you to attend this work-in-progress session featuring presentations by two Summer Mentorship awardees, both of whom are graduate students in the UCLA Art History Department and mentored by Bronwen Wilson, Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art. Following each presentation, the speakers welcome feedback from attendees during a collaborative discussion.

Laura Hutchingame will present “Virgen de los Ángeles: A Temporal Stratigraphy.” This Summer Mentorship research project considers several questions about the Virgen de los Ángeles, the only sixteenth-century figural sculpture in the retablo at the Convento de Santa Clara in Villafrechós, Spain. Why was this sixteenth-century sculpture preserved, updated, and incorporated into an eighteenth-century decorative program? Is there particular significance to this Marian sculpture, in relation to Sts. Clare and Teresa in the retablo, at a convent with a history of female patronage? How might the layers of wood, plaster, and paint participate in the sculpture’s accretion of meaning over two centuries? The author’s hypothesis is that an investigation into these questions will show that the Virgen de los Ángeles can be most comprehensively understood when it is considered in relation to problems of art historical chronologies.

Leah Marangos will present “From Istanbul to Bologna: Mapping Armenia in the Tabula Chorographica Armenica (1691).” In 1691, the Bolognese count, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, commissioned the so-called Tabula Chorographica Armenica from the Armenian historian and one-time printmaker, Yeremia Chelebi K’eomiurjian. Oriented vertically and measuring approximately four-feet wide and twelve-feet long, the monumental map represents lands once inhabited by Armenians from the Caspian to the Mediterranean Seas. Although the map encompasses lands controlled by the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Persians in the late seventeenth century, it only presents sites associated with Armenians and thus presents a fantastical world inhabited solely by them. In comparison to other early modern maps, this one is unique because of its content, the materials used to make it, and its vertical orientation. It is also the second oldest known map written in Armenian. The author proposes to consider this map in the context of early modern collecting and map making. Moving beyond the biography of the artist and the commissioner, the paper will question how cultural contact and movement in the early modern period could produce such an object.