UCLA Litbrarian

Because UCLA subscribes to American Literary History, we already have online access to all its articles, but it’s worth knowing that a handful have been made freely available in honor of the journal’s 20th anniversary.

*Celebrating the 20th anniversary of American Literary History*
To mark 20 years of American Literary History, we have made a
selection of articles from the current anniversary volume available
FREE online. To access the articles, simply click on the links below:

*FREE ARTICLES from the 20th anniversary volume*
What Good Can Literary History Do?
Jonathan Arac
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/1

National Treasure, Global Value, and American Literary Studies
Eric Lott
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/2

Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism
José E. Limón
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/3

“Are We There Yet?”: Archives, History, and Specificity in
African-American Literary Studies
Xiomara Santamarina
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/4

Re-thinking “American Studies after US Exceptionalism”
Donald Pease
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/5

Hemispheric Islam: Continents and Centuries for American Literature
Wai Chee Dimock
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/6

Scholarship and the State: Robert Greenhow and Transnational American
Studies 1848/2008
Anna Brickhouse
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/7

*Table of contents*
To browse the tables of contents and other articles from the
anniversary volume, visit http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/3329/8

*About American Literary History*
Covering the study of US literature from its origins through the
present, American Literary History provides a much-needed forum for
the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.

 This announcement may be of interest to literature faculty:

John N. King and James K. Bracken of The Ohio State University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on continuity and change in the production, dissemination, and reading of Western European books during the 200 years following the advent of printing with movable type. In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the Protestant Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which adherents of different religious faiths shared common ground in exploiting elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries) in order to inspire reading, but also to restrict interpretation. Employing key methods of the History of the Book, our investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in  the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and/or Reformation, the History of the Book, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including would-be rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 22 June until 24 July 2009. During the first week of this program, we shall visit 1) Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the world’s only surviving early modern printing and publishing house) and 2) London, England, in order to attend a rare-book workshop and consider treasures at the British Library. During four weeks at Oxford, where we shall reside at St. Edmund Hall, we plan to draw on the rare book and manuscript holdings of the Bodleian Library and other institutions.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2009 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,800.

Full details and application information are available at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/king2/Reformationofthebook/. For further information, please contact  rankinmc@jmu.edu. The application deadline is March 1, 2009.

Research has never been a straightforward, easy endeavor and it has only become more complicated with the advent of online indexes and databases.  With resources changing on a frequent basis, it is tough for even the most advanced scholar to figure out how to find relevant sources in her area of research. 

UCLA Librarians are now trying out LibGuides, a dynamic software program that enables us to present online research guides that are easy to update and user-friendly.  A list of available guides can be found at http://guides.library.ucla.edu.

I don’t yet have a guide for Literature, but I have already created a guide for History and literature scholars will find a great deal of relevant information in the History guide.  I plan to release the Literature guide at the beginning of Winter Quarter, so keep an eye out for it!

Did you?