Projects

An exhibition, publication, and suite of programming in fall 2023 devoted to the visualization of race in the premodern period. Organized in collaboration with the RaceB4Race™ collaborative (ASU), the project uses manuscripts, printed books, maps, visual art, and objects to provide a historical overview of the medieval and early modern roots of racial thinking.

Planned for release in 2023, this digital resource for research and pedagogy is designed to accompany the Newberry’s more than 38,000 digitized French pamphlets collections from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The digitized pamphlets are currently available on Internet Archive, and the OCR and metadata are open to researchers.

The digital resource will include introductory material for students or beginning researchers, scholarly essays, thematic content, pedagogical material, and English translations of select pamphlets. This project is led by former Center for Renaissance Studies Postdoctoral Fellow Elisa J. Jones of the College of Charleston.

The Emblemata Politica in Context introduces the stimulating world of early modern emblems by telling the story of a unique, seventeenth-century hybrid book in the Newberry collections, which was the subject of an international conference held at the Newberry in November 2018.

Through an innovative digital facsimile of the volume, transcriptions and translations of the texts within it, background essays, and active-learning exercises, the resource encourages users to think emblematically to recreate the richly symbolic experience of a seventeenth-century German city.

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