(deadline 18 March 2013)

PhD Studentship, University of York (3 years, from September 2013; AHRC-funded) (ref: PhD1)

The student will be based at the University of York in the Department of English and Related Literature, under the supervision of Dr Kevin Killeen (co-editor of Pseudodoxia within the Browne edition). As part of the AHRC-funded edition of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols, OUP 2015-2019; general editor, Prof Claire Preston), the student will interact extensively with the eleven editors, two post-doctoral researchers, and a second doctoral student in contributing to its intellectual, analytical, and textual framework. The student may be expected to contribute, as directed, to background research on the edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Enquiries are welcome. Please contact either Dr Kevin Killeen ( kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk) or Prof Claire Preston (c.e.preston@bham.ac.uk), specifying ‘PhD1’.

PhD studentship, University of Birmingham (3 years, from September 2013; AHRC-funded) (ref: PhD2) Co-supervised by Prof Claire Preston (Birmingham), the general editor of the AHRC-funded Browne edition, and Dr Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge), co-editor of Browne’s correspondence, the student will be formally attached to the Birmingham Department of English and additionally supported by the Centre for Reformation and Early-Modern Studies, and by Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts. As part of the AHRC-funded edition of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols, OUP 2015-2019), the student will interact extensively with the eleven editors, two post-doctoral researchers, and a second doctoral student in contributing to its intellectual, analytical, and textual framework. The student may be expected to contribute, as directed, to background research on the volume of Browne’s letters that forms part of the edition. Enquiries are welcome. Please contact either Prof Claire Preston (c.e.preston@bham.ac.uk) or Dr Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk), specifying ‘PhD2’.

Click here for further particulars and application procedures for PhD1 and for PhD2.

Colloquia at CRASSH, University of Cambridge: 24-25 May 2013 and

The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 27-28 September 2013

Call for graduate / early career participants

 Studies in the visual and material culture of the early modern world have recently focused on the concrete materiality or ‘thingness’ of things.  But why is it that certain early modern things endured while others did not?  Was it because of the intrinsic properties of their materials or other reasons: use and abuse, cultural or religious value, chance or neglect?  How should we study those artefacts that have not survived, or which have endured in an imperfect state: the broken, incomplete, cast off and lost things of the early modern world?

This pair of colloquia will examine the fragility and robustness of early modern objects, exploring not only the matter of their material, but also the transitory or forgotten ways in which they were experienced and used.  Reflecting on the sensory and temporal dimensions of artefacts, we will consider the effects upon them of memory, habit, and custom, exploring themes such as impermanence, decay, repair, and recycling.  While seeking to recapture the early modern contexts that determined ephemerality and durability, we will ponder also the unspoken gaps in museums, libraries and archives, and how these themes shape current scholarship.

The colloquia will be an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to present work-in-progress and to discuss their research with established local and international scholars.  Confirmed participants in the Cambridge colloquium include Prof. Peter Stallybrass (UPenn), Prof. Christine Göttler (Bern), Dr Niall Atkinson (Chicago), Dr Marta Ajmar (V&A), Prof. Jacob Soll (USC), Dr Jessica Keating (USC).  Funding for travel and accommodation is available to enable participants to attend the California meeting.

Those interested in participating in either colloquium should submit by Monday 25 March a 500-word abstract of their proposed topic, a CV, and a letter of support from their supervisor (if a graduate student) or an academic reference (if an early career researcher).  Applications will be reviewed by the colloquia organisers and the successful applicants notified by mid-April.  Preference may be given to those applicants willing and able to participate in both colloquia.

Applications should be in Word or PDF format and should be sent via email to Francé Davies: France.Davies@aha.cam.ac.uk.  Informal enquiries may be addressed to the programme Director, Dr Alexander Marr: ajm300@cam.ac.uk.

The colloquia have been organised under the aegis of the CRASSH-EMSI collaborative programme Seeing Things: Early Modern Visual and Material Culture, http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1159/seeing-things.htm.  Seeing Things is generously supported by CRASSH, EMSI, the Dean Joan Schaeffer Fund of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the Huntington Library, and a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant.

University of Oxford, 16-17 September 2013

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, based at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, invites proposals for conference papers. All papers that focus on early modern texts will be considered, but we particularly encourage proposals on digital research and editing methods and methodologies in early modern studies.

See http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/conferences/conference-eebo-tcp-201 3/ for more details.

Department of Manuscripts and University Archives (Special Collections Division)
Grade: 7, Salary Range: £27,854 – £36,298 p.a

This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated and proactive individual to work at the heart of one of the world’s major research libraries with an outstanding collection of western medieval manuscripts.

The successful candidate will lead the development of high quality reader-focussed services to support scholarship on the manuscripts, promoting them to the research community at local, national and international level. He/she with deal with all aspects of the care and administration of medieval manuscripts and will be outward-looking in developing innovative digital services alongside traditional methods to support the University in its teaching, learning and research and to make the medieval manuscripts accessible to the widest possible audience. He/she will have the necessary skills and enthusiasm to exploit the opportunities created by the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk) and to take a leading part in planning and implementing a new online catalogue of medieval manuscripts.

Informal enquiries are welcomed by Dr Patrick Zutshi, Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives (tel: 01223 333149; email: Patrick.Zutshi@lib.cam.ac.uk). Further details can be downloaded from http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Vacancies/medieval_manuscripts.pdf or are available from the Librarian’s Office, Cambridge University Library, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DR, tel: 01223 747413; email: Charlotte.Ross@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Applications, in the form of a completed CHRIS/6 form (http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/forms/chris6/), a covering letter, curriculum vitae and contact details for three professional referees should be sent to the University Librarian either by post to Cambridge University Library, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DR or electronically to Charlotte.Ross@lib.cam.ac.uk (but not both) by 5pm on the closing date, Monday 18 March 2013. Interviews are expected to take place in mid-April.

At a meeting of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network yesterday I was belatedly introduced to dh23things–a site that has been put together to introduce early careers humanities researchers to digital tools that might be useful for their research. It’s full of useful links & enlightening commentary–useful for mid- and late- and falling-off-the-end-of-their-career people too.

Tuesday morning, 8.10 am, Ben’s cello lesson. He’s only eight so he has to have something to get his knees up to the right height. At home, it’s the poor neglected Latin and Italian dictionaries. At the teacher’s house, it’s a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and England’s Thousand Best Houses.

The Sandars Reader for 2013 is Professor Jim Secord who will lecture on ‘Visions of science: books and readers at the dawn of the Victorian age’

Professor Secord is giving the lectures on Monday 25 February, Tuesday 26 February and Wednesday 27 February, at 5.00 pm in the Yusuf Hamied Theatre, Christ’s College.

Monday 25 February: ‘Fantastic voyages: Humphry Davy’s “Consolations in travel”‘

Tuesday 26 February: ‘The conduct of gentlemen: John Herschel’s “Preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy”‘

Wednesday 27 February: ‘Nature for the people: George Combe’s “Constitution of man”‘

The final lecture on Wednesday 27 February will be followed by a reception in the Old Library at Christ’s from 6.00 pm to 7.00 pm. A small selection of books related to the lecture series will also be on display.

Click here for further information

6-7 SEPTEMBER 2013 — THE WREN SUITE, ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, LONDON

Sponsored by the AHRC in its support of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, this is a conference which will reassess the ‘place’ of preaching in Early Modern Europe in all its aspects.

Plenary Lecture: Brian Cummings (York)

Confirmed Speakers: Hugh Adlington (Birmingham); David Colclough (Queen Mary); Joshua Eckhardt (Virginia Commonwealth); Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge); Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont); Kenneth Fincham (Kent); Erica Longfellow (Oxford); Mary Ann Lund (Leicester); Peter McCullough (Oxford); Charlotte Methuen (Glasgow); Mary Morrissey (Reading); Jean-Louis Quantin (Sorbonne); Emma Rhatigan (Sheffield); Andrew Spicer (Oxford Brookes); Sebastiaan Verweij (Oxford); Philip West (Oxford)

All further conference details – including graduate bursaries to attend the conference – and information on booking will be posted on this site later: http://www.cems-oxford.org/donne

Call for Papers
The organisers welcome proposals (250-500 word abstracts) for further papers on any of the following aspects of sermon culture in Early Modern Europe: Roman Catholic preaching; architectural settings and auditories of preaching; sermons in manuscript and print; performance and delivery; sermon hearing, note taking, and commonplacing; production and reception of patristic and other theological works; rhetoric; and more.

Please send your proposals to Professor Peter McCullough and Dr Sebastiaan Verweij: peter.mccullough@lincoln.ox.ac.uk / sebastiaan.verweij@ell.ox.ac.uk

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 1 MAY 2013

In odd moments over the last few days I’ve been absorbed in reading a pile of letters that my father-in-law sent home during World War II. He was stationed in North Africa, Italy and Austria, and the letters mostly confirm the received story: that dear old Peter never saw any of the fighting and spent most of the war sitting in an olive grove reading a book. Well, perhaps that’s not quite fair. There are plenty of letters that dwell on the discomforts–mud, snow, leaking tents, rabid dogs, bugs, scorpions, and above all the sheer tedium of life in khaki, the sense of your youth being sucked away by events that are beyond your control or comprehension. But there are also lyrical descriptions of the landscape, reports back on the latest concerts and operas, endless requests for more cigarettes, and numerous references to books, which were evidently one of the best antidotes to the boredom and to the impersonality of army life.

And what a lot of books were travelling out to that olive grove. Vera Brittain, Rosamond Lehmann, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden… he reads them all and sends back detailed comments to his (possibly perplexed) dear mother and father. The wish-list you see here gives some idea of the canon as it appeared in June 1944: from Wyndham Lewis to E. M. Forster via Plomer, Green, Joyce, Upward, Freud, any Elizabethan dramatist and a host of poets. The letters bring home the cultural significance of Penguin, as Peter asks for a subscription to Penguin New Writing, delights in the world opened up by Penguin Modern Painters, and asks for any Penguin guides to European countries. You also feel the strength of his desire to pick up the local languages, as he begs for grammars and dictionaries to reinforce the effects of halting conversations with the locals and (in Italy) with Giacomino, the boy who became for a time his main language tutor. He was a producer as well as a consumer, co-editing a magazine called ‘Swill’ that ran for at least two issues, and putting on a one-act miracle play by Alex Comfort (a writer whose extensive oeuvre would later be eclipsed by just one of his works, The Joy of Sex).

The material stuff of the letters has its own fascination. Most of them are written on single sheets of air-mail paper, with signed declarations on the outside to the effect that the contents don’t stray beyond personal or family matters. One refers explicitly to the ‘censor’s scissors’ which would make ‘a mere frond’ of a letter if it continued on a particular topic. The letters are covered, as you might expect, with multiple stamps and declarations marking the activities of the censor; one of them also has a doodle of ‘Auntie Olive’, presumably executed at a later stage. And then there’s a particularly strange kind of letter which appears to have undergone a shrinking process, such that poor old mum and dad would need to find a magnifying glass to be able to read it. Can anyone explain what’s going on here?

Reading the correspondence is something of a guilty pleasure. Peter was acutely embarrassed by his memory of what his 21-year-old self had written home, and wanted it all destroyed; so the letters were hidden from him during his lifetime, only to be dug out after his death in 2004. You can’t help but sense his mortification as you read. But after the war, he became a historian, and perhaps (just perhaps) the historian in him would have forgiven me for my interest in this cache of ancient manuscripts.

Networking Australasia, Researching Novel-Worlds in the Cyberage

Thursday, 14 February 2013
16:00 – 18:00
Location: S3

Please note that this event has been postponed.