Participating Faculty

Carla Freccero
Literature and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, freccero@ucsc.edu

Patricia Fumerton
English, UC Santa Barbara, pfumer@english.ucsb.edu

Randolph Head
History, UC Riverside, randolph.head@ucr.edu

Carla Hesse
History, UC Berkeley, chesse@berkeley.edu

Alan Liu
English, UC Santa Barbara, ayliu.ucsb@gmail.com

Felicity Nussbaum
English, UC Los Angeles, nussbaum@humnet.ucla.edu

Patricia Seed
History, UC Irvine, seed5@uci.edu

Randolph Starn
History, UC Berkeley, rstarn@berkeley.edu

Mary Terrall
History, UC Los Angeles, terrall@history.ucla.edu

Participating Faculty Biographies

David Bates

David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell UP, 2002) and numerous essays in modern European intellectual history, history of political and legal thought, history of cognition, and philosophy of history. His new book States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia UP, 2012), uses close readings of Natural Law theory and Enlightenment political theory and contextual analysis of war and violence in Europe to argue for the invention of a new “concept of the political” in the Enlightenment. This autonomous idea of the political offers a new way of thinking about the perennial conflict between “constitutional” states and sovereign authority in crises. A new project, entitled “Human Insight from Descartes to Artificial Intelligence,” is a study of the history of epistemology within the rationalist tradition, investigating theories of novelty and discovery in the context of material (and machinic) conceptions of mind and body. It ranges from early modern theories of mind, to nineteenth-century machines, psychology, early computers, cybernetics, and modern Artificial Intelligence theories.

Ann Bermingham

Ann Bermingham is a professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the UC Santa Barbara, where she directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. A specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and French art, she has published widely on landscape painting, portraiture, women amateurs, theory and aesthetics. Her books include Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1760-1860; Learning to Draw: Studies in the History of a Polite and Useful Art; Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door; and co-edited with John Brewer, The Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, Text.

Mario Biagioli (Steering Group)

Mario Biagioli is Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Director of the new Center for Science and Innovation Studies at UC Davis. Prior to joining UCD, he was Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, specializing in intellectual property in science. He has also taught at UCLA, Stanford, the Ecole des Hautes études in Science Sociales (Paris), and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). For more than a decade, Professor Biagioli has been studying problems of authorship and priority attribution in contemporary “Big Science,” editing (with Peter Galison), Scientific Authorship (Routledge, 2003). He has subsequently published on the history of patenting in the sciences, the development of specifications requirements, the peer review of patent applications. With Pater Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee, he has edited Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property (Chicago, 2011) and is working on The Author as Vegetable, a book on the role of environmental concepts in contemporary discussions of the knowledge commons. Other current research interests include definitions of patentable subject matter and the role of secrecy in science. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is a founding member of the International Society for the Theory and History of Intellectual Property (ISTHIP). After studying computer science at the University of Pisa (Italy) and receiving an MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop and the Rochester Institute of Technology, he was awarded a PhD in history of science from UC Berkeley in 1989. He is also the author of Galileo Courtier (Chicago, 1993 – translated in German, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese), Galileo’s Instruments of Credit (Chicago, 2006)), and the editor of The Science Studies Reader (Routledge, 1998).

Heidi Brayman Hackel

Heidi Brayman Hackel is Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (2005) and co-editor of Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2008). Her current book project is titled “Dumb Eloquence: Deafness, Muteness, and Gesture in Early Modern England.” She has been awarded a Huntington Library Long-Term Fellowship for 2011-12 in order to complete it. She has served since 2008 as Associate Editor of the Huntington Library Quarterly, which was awarded the 2009 Modern Language Association’s CELJ (Conference of Editors and Learned Journals) Voyager Award for Best Journal of Early Modern Studies. Since 2008, she has also co-chaired the Renaissance Literature Seminar at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, a long-standing research group that meets 6 times each year, bringing in distinguished speakers from the US and UK and sponsoring panels and informal lunches for its graduate student members.

Adriana Craciun

Adriana Craciun is Professor of English, UC Riverside, where she directs the new interdisciplinary Ph.D. Designated Emphasis program in Book, Archive, and Manuscript Studies. Before Joining Riverside in 2008, she was Reader in Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London and former Director of their MA in Cultural and Critical Studies program. She is the co-organizer of the international research network The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge, 1600-1850, which included events at the British Museum, University of London, Victoria & Albert Museum, and two UCHRI-funded international conferences at UC Riverside, “The Oceanic Turn in the Long Eighteenth Century” (2009) and “Inscriptions: The Material Contours of Knowledge” (2011). Her current interdisciplinary project will provide a major reassessment of how changing print, manuscript, collecting and authorship practices, across modern disciplinary lines, have helped shape three centuries of Arctic exploration, titled “Northwest Passages: Authorship, Exploration, Disaster.” One recent essay from this project, “The Frozen Ocean,” published in PMLA, won the Best Article Prize for 2010 from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Craciun’s previous books include Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2003), British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Palgrave, 2005), and numerous scholarly editions and collections. She has co-edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies devoted to “The Disorder of Things” series (October 2011). A past recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the AHRC, the Institute of Advanced Studies (London), and the University of Limerick, for 2010-11 Craciun received a University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellowship to work on “Northwest Passages,” and more recently a Canadian Studies Faculty Research Grant from the government of Canada.

Ian Duncan

Ian Duncan studied at King’s College, Cambridge and Yale University, and taught in the Yale English Department for several years before being appointed Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1995. Since 2001 he has been a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he now holds the Florence Bixby Endowed Chair in English. Duncan is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992) and Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007), which won the Saltire Society / National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year award in 2008. Other books include two co-edited collections of essays, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2004) and Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels (New York, 2009), editions of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (Oxford, 1996) and Rob Roy (Oxford, 1998), James Hogg’s Winter Evening Tales (Edinburgh, 2002) and Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford, 2010), and a co-edited anthology, Travel Writing 1700-1830 (Oxford, 2005). He is currently a Co-Chair of the editorial board of Representations, a General Editor of the International Journal of Scottish Literature and of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Edinburgh, British Columbia, and Konstanz. He is currently working on a new project on the novel and human nature in the age of the science of man — from Hume to Darwin, Fielding to Eliot — with the provisional title “The Great Book of Nature.”

Carla Freccero

Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. She also directs the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Queer/Early/Modern (Duke 2006).

Patricia Fumerton

Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and Director of UCSB’s online English Broadside Ballad Archive, or EBBA <http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu>, which has to-date won three large NEH Collections and Resources grants as well as the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies’ first annual BSECS Digital Eighteenth Century Prize (2009). Fumerton is also author of the print monographs Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991) as well as co-editor of Broadsides and Ballads in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate 2010) and Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Pennsylvania, 1999). In addition, she is bringing out a print companion to EBBA, Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (forthcoming MERTS), which includes two CDS of song recordings. She continues to expand EBBA while also working on a monograph that investigates the formal, social, and geographical mobility—over 200 hundred years—of one particularly popular, if also gruesome, broadside ballad, “The Lady and the Blackamoor.”

Randolph Head
Randolph C. Head is Chair and Professor of History at UC Riverside, and holds degrees from Harvard University (AB in Anthropology) and the University of Virginia (MA and PhD in European History). He has published extensively on the history of Switzerland and on religious and institutional cultures in early modern Europe. He is currently working on a comparative study of archival organization that includes cases from Iberia, the German lands, and the Netherlands between 1400 and 1750. Publications from this project include articles in the Journal of Modern History (2003), Archival Science (2008) and several essay collections. Most recently, Professor Head edited a special issue of Archival Science (2010) on “Archival Knowledge Cultures in Europe, 1400-1900.” Prof. Head spoke at the UCHRI-sponsored conference, “Inscriptions: The Material Contours of Knowledge,” organized by Adriana Craciun and is a founding member of the Mellon-funded UC Riverside Early Modern Studies group (along with Brayman Hackel and Craciun) on “Form, Knowledge, Expression” (2009-11).

Carla Hesse

Carla Hesse is the Peder Sather Professor of History and Dean of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley since 2009. A specialist in modern European history, she is the author and editor of several works, including, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary France (California, 1991) and The Other Enlightenment (Princeton, 2001). Currently, she is completing a book about the Terror in the French Revolution, entitled “Foundational Justice and the Politics of Legitimation in Republican France,” as well as a series of studies of the afterlives of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 2007 she was the recipient of the Aby Warburg Prize for distinguished contributions to the humanities and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Alan Liu

Alan Liu is Chair and Professor in the English Department at the UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program. Previously, he was on the faculty of Yale University’s English Department and British Studies Program. His is the author of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989), The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago, 2004), and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago, 2008), explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. Liu founded the Voice of the Shuttle Humanities Gateway and the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara called “Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information” and his English Dept’s undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. During 2002-2007 he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO’s PAD Initiative (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature). His most recent major digital initiative, which he started in 2005 as a UC multi-campus research group, is “Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading.” Presently, he is concentrating on the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) software project that is the culmination of Transliteracies and a series of philosophical and practical essays on media histories, futures, and their impact on the institutions and practices of the humanities.

Felicity Nussbaum

Felicity Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, has published most recently Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (UPenn, 2010). Among her other books are The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2003), The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (Oxford UP, 2008), co-edited with Saree Makdisi, and the edited volume The Global Eighteenth Century. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she has been granted several awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowships at the Henry E. Huntington Library. Her current projects include a redefinition and reimagining of two different paradigmatic approaches to eighteenth-century literary studies—abolition and slavery, on the one hand, and Britain’s relationship to various Easts or the “Orient,” on the other. She is also writing a series of essays on Hester Thrale Piozzi.

Patricia Seed

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at UC Irvine, currently working on the history of cartography (in part through a UCHRI/NEH/ACLS funded project titled “The Development of Mapping: Portuguese Cartography and Coastal Africa” (www.pmoca.net)). She has just completed the Oxford Map Companion to World History (forthcoming), and is writing a history of geovisualization. As part of this new project she is working on the earliest geographic discoveries of the West African coast and their visualization in new cartographic forms. To understand how these the knowledge and its forms of visualization were created is complicated by the destruction of nearly all the originals by an 8.9 earthquake and tsunami in 1755, leaving behind multiple claimants whose veracity can be neither entirely proven nor disproven. She is the author of numerous previous books including American Pentimento: The Pursuit of Riches and the Invention of “Indians” (2001) (winner of the Prize in Atlantic History) and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (1995). In 2009 Seed was an invited speaker at the UCHRI-funded conference on “The Oceanic Turn in the Long Eighteenth Century” at UC Riverside organized by Adriana Craciun.

Randolph Starn

Randolph Starn is Professor Emeritus of History and Italian Studies and former Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. His interests range from Renaissance Italy to the history of art, theories of history, and forms of conservation and collection. His books include Contrary Commonwealth: the Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Arts of Power: Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (with Loren Partridge), and Varieties of Cultural History. He is currently co-editing an issue of the new journal California Italian Studies on “Italian Futures” and completing a series of studies on institutions of authentication, including archives, museums, and libraries.

Mary Terrall

Mary Terrall is Associate Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author of The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago 2002) and numerous essays on the history of science. Her current work is on techniques, materials and objects of natural history in the eighteenth century. In reconstructing the practices involved in making natural historical knowledge, this project looks at the construction and maintenance of correspondence networks and collections, and the circulation of books, letters, specimens and observations through a loose community of naturalists dispersed around Europe and around the globe. Material objects such as printed books, drawings, letters, specimens, apparatus, laboratories and cabinets are shown to be essential elements in the making of natural knowledge.