Faculty Research Support and Other Funding Sources

• The Ballitore Project
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  • The Ballitore Project is a research project investigating the Ballitore Collection, which is held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. This collaboration between the University of California, Santa Barbara, California State University, Northridge, and Howard University uses archival and computational methods to analyze the collection, while simultaneously introducing students to critical perspectives in the fields of book history, archival studies, and the digital humanities. The Ballitore Collection features more than 2,500 documents related to the Irish Quaker community of Ballitore, Ireland, including letters, journals, notebooks, and dream accounts. Originally assembled by the author Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826), this unique, understudied archive offers important insights into the intersections of gender, race, and religion in this period. The project—with funding from the UC-HBCU Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies—uses computational techniques to expose the collection’s contents and exclusions, highlighting how women and people of color are often marginalized within a community that claims egalitarianism. We are in the process of digitizing the collection for public access.

    Contact: rking@english.ucsb.edu

• Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender
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  • “Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender” is an IHC Research Focus Group bringing together graduate students and faculty from various disciplines to investigate the critical intersections of race and gender in premodern studies. We engage the ‘premodern’ as a way of addressing the resonances of the past in our contemporary moment while complicating the traditional Eurocentric disciplinary boundaries that set the ‘Middle Ages’ and the ‘Renaissance’ apart from the ‘modern’ within the academy. Together we intend to consider what undisciplining and redisciplining could look like within this approach as we work to center marginalized bodies and voices in the process. In the years ahead, “Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender” will offer a forum for scholars to further engage these critical intersections through interdisciplinary discussions devoted to ongoing research, pedagogical practices, and methodological directions within the field of premodern studies more broadly.

     

• Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group
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  • The categories of “slavery” and “freedom” are as complex and elusive as they are central to our understanding of the social, economic, and cultural phenomena with which students of the Humanities are most deeply concerned. Whereas legal frameworks emphasize the slave’s status as property, the concept of “social death” remains highly influential, and yet seems not fully able to encompass advances in the scholarship on smaller-scale forms of human bondage. Some students of slavery prefer to explore the rubric of “captivity,” which places slaves within the broader class of persons who have been relocated against their will into a new social context, from the ancient Mediterranean to the modern carceral state (Brooks 2002; Cameron 2011). Even the distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves” is subject to fierce contention (Cameron and Lenski, forthcoming). This RFG’s initial and perhaps most invigorating debate will address how to delineate our common object of study, a conversation which happens most effectively across disciplinary lines. Even as we grapple with terms like “slave,” “captive,” “free,” and “unfree,” scholars working on these topics share a core set of questions. The enforced exploitation of labor informs economic and technological history. The master-slave relationship, in its seemingly infinite iterations, epitomizes the negotiation of power in situations of extreme imbalance. Representations of slavery in visual art and text illuminate cultural responses to subjugation and violence. And the ways in which enslaved persons survive or escape slavery, form networks, practice religion, bury their dead, and otherwise fashion their lives problematize the politics of groups in captivity (Brown 2009). Studying modes of accommodation and resistance reveals, in turn, the ideological forces that lead us to perceive the experience of slavery as knowable or invisible, tragic or triumphant. After the abolition or decline of massive slave systems such as those found in the Roman empire and the Americas, the legacies of slavery have proven remarkably tenacious, as have forms of captivity and exploitation that closely resemble legal enslavement. New research linking the ancient and modern worlds includes, for example, incisive studies of the reception of classical Greek slavery (duBois 2003) and of African American and Caribbean writers’ engagement with the Classical tradition (Rankine 2006; Greenwood 2010; Tatum and Cook 2010). In recent years, a renewed emphasis on relationships between capitalism and slavery has produced prize-winning works at the regional, national, and global levels of analysis (Johnson, 1999, 2013; Baptist 2014; Beckert 2014). These force us to confront the persistence of slavery in the 21st century, and to wonder if, indeed, it is intrinsic to human affairs (Bales 1999; Bales and Soodalter 2009).

    A focus group with the mission to explore these questions fits well with current trends in the interdisciplinary study of slavery. Building on landmark contributions by Patterson (1982) and Davis (1966, 1975, 1984), scholars working in this field have profitably employed comparative methodologies with varying degrees of rigor and specificity (see Dal Lago and Katsari 2008, 5-12). Some of these studies refine our knowledge of slavery as an institution, while others use comparative techniques to spark questions or to apply new models. While remaining sensitive to the particularities of any given historical setting, we stand to benefit immensely from this type of dialogue, both in terms of understanding the natures of slavery and captivity and in the interest of opening new lines of inquiry.

     

• Legal Humanities Research Focus Group
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  • Legal humanities views law and culture as mutually constitutive domains. Law, after all, is the site where theory meets practice, where ideals wrestle with norms, and morality and ethics confront politics and regulation. Legal humanities seeks to understand how law makes meaning and produces effects within and across cultures – which, in turn, constantly make and remake law. Legal humanities is thus particularly concerned with how justice, power, representation, and participation are inflected by indigeneity, “race,” gender, class, sexuality, age, national origin, and cognitive or physical ability.

    Crucially, legal humanities offers much more than a culturalist critique of law. Scholars in the field are deeply committed to demonstrating how marginalized, dispossessed, and disenfranchised individuals and communities have wielded – and, in the process, transformed – law to promote equity and justice. Legal humanities explores how we all engage law to transform culture (or create culture to transform law), whether as legal professionals, scholars, teachers, social service providers, community organizers, political activists, or simply as residents or citizens of the U.S. Focusing on the epistemology, transmission, and transformation of law in and through culture (and vice versa), legal humanities encompasses legal history, classics, legal anthropology, political theory, legal philosophy/jurisprudence, law and literature, critical race theory, and queer and feminist legal studies, among other approaches.

     

• Caribbean Studies Research Focus Group
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  • The Caribbean is the vortex of early capitalism, social identity, and cultural anxiety. It is the site of first colonial contact, conquests, institutions, and taxonomies. Therefore, we gather under the urgency of unpacking the spacetime ripple effects of this global capitalist accumulation, what it has meant, and how it has become deeply entwined with the development of nations and identities within and outside the Caribbean basin. Thus, we think through and beyond the thoroughly exploitative and marginalized conditions of the region. As a historic crossroads, the Caribbean is also a population crossroads that gives us an opportunity to engage the intimacies of continents and bodies (including but not limited to Africans, Indians, Chinese, Europeans, Portuguese, Syrian, and Indigenous groups).

    The co-conveners of the Caribbean Studies RFG formed the group to pursue the following goals: 1) Enhance dialogue on existing research; 2) Increase strategic communication across departments and campuses for the purposes of publication and grant writing; and 3) Advance a diverse program of research designed to address gaps in Caribbean studies on campus. Our aims are to create space where academics, policy makers, artists, and practitioners can discuss their work in the areas of cultural, political, economic, social, and sexual formations of the Caribbean regions and its diaspora. It will also include more generalized interests such as: migration, Caribbean queer diaspora, social justice, philosophy, literature and writing, music, Carnival and festivals, Caribbean archives and development, pedagogy and practice, and the region’s digital life and futures.

     

• American Indian and Indigenous Collective
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  • The American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group has been created by graduate students, faculty members, and community members who want to build research relationships between different disciplines and research projects interested in issues within indigenous communities nationally and internationally. The purpose of this group is to foster the development of interdisciplinary research agendas that focus on an Indigenous research paradigm that would require new visions of ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology in our respective fields.

     

• English Broadside Ballad Archive
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  • The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a groundbreaking digital humanities initiative associated with the EMC. EBBA digitizes, transcribes, and catalogues the images from extant early modern ballad collections in order to improve scholarly and public access. To date, EBBA has received four National Endowment for the Humanities grants and has transcribed more than seventy-five percent of surviving seventeenth-century ballads.

     

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