Selected Past Events
2016-2017
Digital Shakespeare and the Problem of Accessibility
February 28, 2017
The event features two scholar-makers whose projects tackle the challenge of making Shakespeare accessible to diverse audiences.
Eric Johnson is the Director of Digital Access at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he heads the Digital Media and Publications division. He manages the Folger’s various digital initiatives, and oversees the journal Shakespeare Quarterly and the Folger Editions series of Shakespeare’s complete works. He is the creator of Open Source Shakespeare, one of the most widely-used sites of its kind. Before arriving at the Folger, he developed successful online initiatives for a wide variety of public- and private-sector organizations.
Peter Novak is a professor and founding member of the Performing Arts and Social Justice program at the University of San Francisco. He completed his doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and is currently the Director of the ASL Shakespeare Project www.aslshakespeare.com that helps bring Shakespeare to deaf and hard of hearing audiences and performers. As the former Vice Provost of Student Life at USF, he developed a national curriculum on substance abuse and sexual assault prevention used in over 700 universities around the country.
This event is sponsored by the Davis Humanities Institute, the Theatre and Dance Department, the English Department, the Performance Studies Graduate Group & the Cultural Studies Graduate Group.
2015-2016
Greek Drama and the Early Modern Stage: Text and Performance from Plutarch’s Lives to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Leah Whittington, Harvard University
January 11, 2016
2014-2015
Cleopatra, Plutarch and Isis: Shakespeare’s Globalization
Susanne Wofford, Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University
April 10th, 2015
Sponsored by the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics, and by the Davis Humanities Institute.
Computation Humanities and the Early Modern Digital Archive
Carl Stahmer, UC Davis Director of Digital Scholarship
January 21, 2015
Carl serves as Associate Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) and the Technical Director of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). It is also an opportunity to welcome Carl to the community of premodern scholars at Davis. Sponsored by the Digital Premodern Cluster and the Department of English.
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2013-2014
Monday, May 5th, 2014
Making the Humanities: The Early Modern in a Digital Age
Katherine Rowe, English Department, Bryn Mawr (now Provost and Dean of Faculty at Smith College)
and
Elliott Visconsi, English Department and Law School, Notre Dame
Tuesday, February 18th, 2014
Professors Rowe and Visconsi are co-founders of Luminary Digital Media, a commercial software company dedicated to transforming Shakespeare’s plays into next-generation mobile reading experiences. The event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Innovation Lab and the Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures.
Research-Oriented Pedagogy: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Bringing Research into the Classroom
Saturday, January 25, 2014
This interdisciplinary symposium examines the intersections between research and teaching. Presentations will discuss course syllabi and assignments that teach undergraduates how to engage in original research using primary and/or secondary materials.
Featured presenters: Gina Bloom (English), Claire Goldstein (French), John Scott (Political Science), John Smolenski (History), and Robin Berhnard of the Nelson Gallery

2012-2013
Strange Evidence in the Seventeenth Century
Fran Dolan, Distinguished Professor of English, UC Davis
and
Daniel Stolzenberg, Associate Professor of History, UC Davis
May 8, 2013
Jeffrey Masten, Professor of English, Northwestern University
Travellers’ Tales / Travelling Tales
“Tamburlaine in Hindustan,” Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English, George Washington University
and
“Lesbians Without Borders,” Madhavi Menon, Professor of English, American University
Feb 7, 2013
- Kristen Aldebol, “Lingering Iconographies: Illuminations Reaching Beyond Periodization
- Megan McMullan, “Rhetorical Illusion and the Jurisdiction of Virtue in the Querelle du Tartuffe”
- Sara Petrosillo, “‘To bear in her womb infinite weight and lightness’: Mediating the Womb Across Medieval and Early Modern Drama”
- Barbara Zimbalist, “Reading the Early Modern Julian of Norwich: Marginalia in the Huntington Library’s 1670 edition of the Revelation of Divine Love”
Representing Rural Society: Labor and the Landscape in an Eighteenth Century Conversation Piece
Stephen Hindle, W.M. Keck Director of Research, Huntington Library, and Former Professor of History, Warwick University
Oct 10, 2012
2011-2012
Mellon Early Modern Research Initiative Inaugural Event
Ari Friedlander, Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor, UC Davis
“Promiscuous Generation: Sex, Beastliness, and Social Status in Early Modern England”
October 3, 2011
Suspicious Illustrations
Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College: “Past and Present in Costume Books: Anachronism, Moralization, and Suspicious Reading”
Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania: “Image Against Word: Why Illustrations Don’t Illustrate”
November 3, 2011
Salem Witchcraft and the Birth of American Supernaturalism
Sarah Rivett, Professor of English, Princeton University
November 17, 2011
Abducting Reputation: Gender and Honor in the Early Modern World
Leslie Peirce, Professor of History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU
“Captive Bodies: Histories of Abduction in the Ottoman World”
Kathryn Schwarz, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
“Eccentric Necrologies: The Curious Pleasures of the Heroic Corpse”
February 23, 2012
Wolf, or homo homini lupus
Carla Freccero, Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
April 10th, 2012