[Hum_Calendar_Events] Clark Library Undergraduate Research Scholarships

[CDH Help Desk]

Ahmanson Undergraduate Research Scholarship Program--up to ten $1,000
scholarships will be awarded in spring 2008

 

The Ahmanson Undergraduate Research Scholarships provide an opportunity
for UCLA upper division students to do research at the William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library, an off-campus rare book library located in the
West Adams district of Los Angeles. Each year, several scholarships are
made available to students enrolled in a thematic inter-disciplinary
seminar organized by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Studies. All classes are held at the Clark. Course content varies from
year to year but always includes an assigned research project requiring
the use of Clark materials.

 

This spring's seminar, "Islands of Power", (Comp Lit 191-1), will be
taught by Prof. Kirstie McClure, Departments of Comparative Literature
and Political Science.

 

Seminar content: Since the legendary Atlantis at the beginning of the
Western philosophical tradition, the ISLAND has provided a rhetorical
site or topos for philosophical reflection, political criticism, and
utopian imaginings.  Whether literal or figural, fact or fiction, the
ISLAND's topographically bounded space was easily analogized to the
boundedness of a polity or regime, and thus became a ready resource for
engaging the dilemmas of war and peace, order and disorder, simplicity
and sophistication, openness and insularity - and a host of other
ongoing challenges faced by political communities.  In early modern
Europe, these analogies found new life and new complications, on the one
hand, with the troubled rise of the sovereign state as a political form,
on the other, through tales of distant lands and nearby conflicts.  From
the 16th through the 18th centuries ISLANDS proliferated across all
genres of print culture as vehicles of political critique, objects of
imperial desire, sites of exotic practices, and models of natural
possibilities or cultural variation.  This Ahmanson undergraduate
research seminar will encourage students to explore the Clark Library's
extensive holdings - ranging from More's Utopia to later contributions
to that genre, from travelers narratives to geographies, from novels and
dramatic works to histories and chorographies and beyond - with an eye
to the ways in which writers of the period used the ISLAND topos in the
service of political commentary, critique, and reflection.  Common
readings at the outset will focus on a few well-known ISLANDs - Utopia,
for instance, or Gulliver's or Robinson Crusoe's ISLANDs - but
applicants are encouraged to frame their own research projects on the
real or figural ISLAND of their choice.

 

Course requirements: oral presentations, occasional short reports on
research, and most importantly a final seminar paper which must be based
on original research in the Clark collections.

 

Schedule: The seminar will meet at the Clark Library on Mondays, 12:00
noon - 3:00 p.m., during Spring 2008.

 

Eligibility: This seminar is open to upper division students from any
UCLA department. Those who fulfill satisfactorily all course
requirements will receive a $1,000 scholarship.

 

Enrolling: Enrollment is limited to ten participants.  Professor McClure
will schedule interviews with prospective students during the week of
February 25.  Interested students should contact Professor McClure by
e-mail to schedule an interview.

 

Questions about seminar content

and to schedule an interview:

Kirstie McClure

kmmac at ucla.edu

342 Humanities Building

Office hours: Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. or by appointment via
email 

 

Questions about the program: 

Center for

17th- & 18th-Century Studies

c1718cs at humnet.ucla.edu

310-206-8552

310 Royce Hall, UCLA

 

Questions about the Library:

William Andrews

Clark Memorial Library

clarklib at humnet.ucla.edu

323-731-8529

2520 Cimarron Street, L.A. 90018

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