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An artist’s view of India from ‘Itinarario,’ 1596
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Scholars’ Paradise
Huntington archives enhance USC's early modern program
By Karen Newell Young
It’s a sunny weekday morning at the Huntington Library in San Marino. In a wood-paneled reading room, professors pore over antique texts, 200-year-old newspapers and illuminated manuscripts from medieval times. At 11:45 sharp, the texts are returned to their shelves to protect them from sloppy lunches, and the scholars wander the gardens and chat about their research.
The Huntington’s archives and gardens serve as a powerful magnet for researchers, and represent the kind of symbiotic relationship that results when museums, nonprofit organizations and libraries join forces with scholars from research institutions. The Huntington gains exposure and prestige when professors are plentiful; researchers are rewarded with access to some of the best archives in the world.
These relationships are not new at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The library and USC have been research partners for years—the Huntington’s vast resources have drawn university faculty, who have in turn participated in its many seminars and conferences.
Now a new collaboration, the USC-Huntington Institute for Early Modern Studies, will formalize this exchange. It will bring together researchers to share discoveries and scholarship on human societies between 1492 and 1800, a period richly captured by the Huntington’s huge collection of rare books, manuscripts and newspapers.
“This interdisciplinary collaboration will wed our early modern program to a world-class archive,” says College Dean Joseph Aoun. “It will give the College prominence as an organizer of seminars and make us a focal point of a huge interdisciplinary group of scholars.”
The library already serves as a nurturing ground for intellectual activity, according to its research director, Robert C. Ritchie. USC’s involvement will attract even more scholarship. “We always like having exciting scholars here who are on the cutting edge of their fields,” says Ritchie.
Huntington President Steven Koblik agrees. “This is obviously a significant development for both institutions, given the commonality of our missions in the areas of research and education,” he says. “We are extremely pleased.”
As for USC, the creation of a joint program with the library will provide a focus for College faculty specializing in the early modern period, and will help attract prominent faculty and talented graduate students to USC.
Peter Mancall, professor of history and acting director of the institute, says the Huntington’s collections are among the best in the world. “They draw great scholars from all over the globe, and exposing our students to them is important. And it’s a beautiful place to study. In such a sublime environment, people really do open up and forge intellectual ties.”
Although Southern California has several top research universities, collaborating with USC is particularly attractive to the Huntington because its scholarship runs along similar lines. Ritchie, Mancall and USC History Department Chair Carole Shammas have been studying the early modern period from a perspective different from their traditionalist counterparts. They look at how specific groups have been impacted by the European expansion, rather than focusing on discovery, colonization and empire building by the British.
“We are breaking out of established paradigms in that the old history was centered on imperial aspects,” says Ritchie. “The new perspective looks at the periphery groups—people outside of the expansionists—and how colonized people have dealt with the facts of colonization. This is one of the exciting aspects of the collaboration,” he adds. “USC is one of the few institutions looking at this part of history from this point of view.”
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Illustrations of ‘new world’ inhabitants from the book ‘Trachtenbuch’ published in 1577
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Although the partnership will begin with faculty from the history and English departments, the goal is to interest faculty from other departments as well. The program, which will deal with the formation of the Atlantic community, the rise of the mestizo societies and colonial uprisings—among other topics—should be of interest to those in art history, Spanish and anthropology, says Mancall.
The collaboration will feature several aspects, including the joint appointments of visiting professors and postdoctoral researchers who would teach a course at USC but primarily work on research in early modern studies; the offering of graduate courses at the library to expose students to the Huntington holdings; and the sponsorship of lectures and conferences.
Among the ideas being explored as themes for conferences or seminars are the coordination of a computer project on the population registers of the California Indians based on records from the missions, and a visual culture event on 18th-century metropolitan and colonial landscapes.
Mancall says that visual resources are becoming more and more important to graduate students, and providing the Huntington’s resources will benefit students’ publishing and job-seeking efforts.
“The Huntington has phenomenal resources that are so appealing to scholars,” he adds. “It’s like having a vast museum at your fingertips.” |
