Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies

This conference will gather a group of leading scholars to see where scholarship about the Revolution is on its 250th anniversary. Through their own research, they’ll address the many and exciting ways we’ve come to rethink this important event, including its broader continental and even global reach, and its racial and ideological underpinnings. Unlike a traditional academic conference, however, these talks will be addressed to a mostly non-academic audience of students and members of the public. In doing so, we hope to show non-scholars new ways historians are currently thinking about the meaning of this seminal event in U.S. and world history.

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Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris and exhausted by scandal and prison life. The details of his life in the limelight are well known; what has regularly been ignored are the reverberations of the scandal for decades after his death: the challenges his descendants faced, the myths and legends, the quarrels between his friends and enemies, and the court cases. During this special event, Wilde’s only grandson, author and editor Merlin Holland, will speak with Rebecca Fenning Marschall, Manuscripts & Archives Librarian, about his new book, "After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal," which details the remarkable posthumous life of one of the most celebrated literary and cultural figures. With pathos, humor, and his grandfather’s signature wit, Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer and thinker, tracing the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde’s posthumous reputation and exposing a century of bigotry and hypocrisy within the cultural establishment.

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This concert featuring Ambroise Aubrun (violin) and Steven Vanhauwaert (piano) pays tribute to the refined tradition of musical salons, tracing their influence from nineteenth-century Vienna to early twentieth-century Los Angeles. At its heart is Guillaume Lekeu’s Violin Sonata, performed in homage to Alfred Megerlin, the Belgian violin virtuoso and concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1920s. Through works by Schubert, Fauré, Debussy and others, the program evokes the elegance, intimacy, and cultural dialogue that defined salon music across generations and continents.

#Arts #Music

What does it mean to feel stony? John Milton’s 1671 verse drama Samson Agonistes retells the last day of the biblical Judge Samson, as he moves from an initial feeling that his disabled body is a “Sepulcher, a moving grave” to his eventual toppling of the Temple of Dagon occasioned by a mysterious set of “rousing motions.” This talk by Shaun Nowicki, Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, examines Milton’s deployment of the lithic as a structuring metaphor for understanding both Samson’s initial abjection and the eventual return of his strength. In doing so, the play both draws on emergent cultural understandings of disability as an abject category of being and offers a refutation of that paradigm by considering the potential vivacity of non-living things and the possibilities inherent in the alliances between the human and nonhuman world.

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The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) made significant strides towards establishing colonial control over the Indonesian islands in the seventeenth century. When the Company founded Batavia in 1619, the city became the administrative hub of an extensive mercantile network and served as its Asian headquarters. In this talk, Emma Gagnon, Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, examines the images of Batavia in Johan Nieuhof’s (1618-1672) illustrated travelogues. Nieuhof spent years in and out of the colonial capital, and his accounts provide some of the earliest images of Batavia. This talk demonstrates how the city’s Dutch identity was defined not only by its built environment but also through the dissemination of these forms in the Dutch Republic’s print culture.

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The German-based ATOS Trio will perform in Los Angeles for the first time at the Clark Library with selections from Joseph Haydn, Gaspar Cassadó, and Franz Schubert. Tickets are limited and go on sale at 12 noon on Tuesday, March24. Please visit the event website for full details.

#Arts #Music

In the 2025-26 Core Program conference, historians of the Ottoman, Qing, and Mughal empires revisit the problem of comparison by considering synchronicities and structural parallels across Asia. The third conference, "Empires of Things," looks at Society, Materiality, and Knowledge. In what new ways did merchants trade, how did artisans and craftsmen organize themselves, how did guilds transform, how did the pious communicate with each other, how did common subjects live, how did spatial imaginaries change? Organized by Professors Choon Hwee Koh & Meng Zhang (History, UCLA) and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).

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Join us in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, the nation’s first research center for early modern studies. At a moment when higher education is under siege, the study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might seem a luxury at best, irrelevant at worst. UCLA Professor of English Helen Deutsch, who served as the Center & Clark’s Director from 2017 to 2020, will present a review and celebration of the Center and its history, which refutes such assumptions. She will argue that the work of the Center and its partner the Clark Library—research, musical and theatrical performance, conferences, collaborations in many forms—is not a retreat to the past but rather an ongoing engagement with our present.

#Educational #Research

A central figure in the literary and cultural spheres of the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was also the originator of Irish modernism. Still, literary scholarship has largely sidelined his powerful influence over this movement. Regarded by his contemporaries as an outstanding artist, critic, and public intellectual until his imprisonment in 1895, current research on Wilde tends to confine his leading presence within the late Victorian aesthetic and decadent movements. By highlighting this overlooked aspect of Wilde’s legacy, “Oscar Wilde’s Modernist Legacies” will raise critical and theoretical awareness of his influence over modernist innovation not only within the field of literary production but also in related artistic areas in Ireland and beyond.

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