The University of Warwick has been awarded over £250,000 to fund a collaborative programme of research between Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.  

Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, plans are underway for a new cycle of Warwick-Newberry initiatives, which will focus on the ‘Renaissance and Early Modern Communities in a Transatlantic Perspective’.  

The three-year programme will look at the formation and impact of networks and groupings which directed Early Modern life (from c. 1400 to c. 1720) in three different areas of research: Italian art history and its links to Early Modern England; Early Modern English/British and American historiography; and the transmission of texts and ideas in Renaissance Italy and beyond.  

Each year of activities will involve two short workshops and one residential Summer School to be held alternatively at Warwick, at Warwick’s base in Venice, the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava and at the Newberry Library in Chicago and will be followed by two eight-week Visiting Fellowships.  

Dr Ingrid De Smet, Director of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and Co-ordinator of the programme, said:  

“The Renaissance and Early Modern Communities programme is a fantastic opportunity for British and North-American scholars to meet and exchange knowledge and ideas. 

“The programme particularly targets advanced PhD students and recent postdocs – this is the generation of specialists of the future, who, with the increased digitization of Renaissance and Early Modern source materials, are already working in a very different, cosmopolitan research environment.” 

Whilst Dr Carla Zecher, Director of the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Chicago, said:

“One of the many valuable aspects of the collaboration is the way in which it allows us to build an ongoing scholarly exchange between researchers associated with the two centres.   

“Professors and advanced students all attend international conferences, but those are one-time events, and so follow-up conversations are difficult to maintain.  

“The Warwick-Newberry program provides an opportunity to sustain a conversation. Each event/seminar/workshop is a prelude to others, and they take places on both sides of the Atlantic, so everyone has a chance to participate.” 

The first strand of activities, proposed by Dr Louise Bourdua and Dr Victoria Avery of Warwick’s History of Art department and scheduled for the academic year 2009-2010, will focus on ‘Family Values: Locating the Family in the Early Modern Italian Workshop’. Further details will be posted on the website: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/ as the programme organisation takes shape. 

To register your interest in the programme, please contact the Centre Secretary, The Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL or send an email to: renaissance@warwick.ac.uk  

Notes to editors 

For further information please contact: 

Natalie Field, Assistant Press Officer, Communications Office, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL

E-mail: natalie.field@warwick.ac.uk 

Tel: +44 (0)24 7657 5601  Mobile/Cell: +44 (0)7824 541142