The Centre is home to a lively research culture and organizes a wide range of events right through from international conferences to visiting speaker series, seminars, and reading groups. It frequently hosts the Early Modern Studies in Scotland seminar, and is an Associate Organisation of the Renaissance Society of America, regularly sponsoring panels at the RSA annual conference. The Centre is also one of only three British universities affiliated to the Centre of Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Our postgraduates and staff benefit from participation in conferences, seminars and research projects organised at the Newberry’s Centre for Renaissance Studies. The Centre also has strong links with the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel as well as the Society for Renaissance Studies, with whom it has organised a number of joint events.
The Centre provides a stimulating and supportive environment for students taking postgraduate degrees within the period. The MLitt in Medieval and Early Modern Studies encourages students to familiarise themselves with a variety of multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches. Its core courses help them to explore different perspectives and train their skills in Latin, Palaeography and Archive Studies. A menu of elective courses across schools and departments will offer the chance to study this complex and fascinating period from the later Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Fellowships are available for MLitt students (see our Brochure), and an alumni discount of 20% applied to all students who studied here at undergraduate level. For our international students, we also provide Aberdeen Global Scholarships. We also invite students to apply for the PhD programme via the graduate school, which also offers funding opportunities.
- The Material Text and Manuscript Culture
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With extensive holdings of printed books and manuscripts from the early modern period, housed in a dedicated state-of-the-art conservation and research centre and supported by excellent electronic resources, Aberdeen provides a centre of excellence for study of early modern textual culture across the disciplines. Specialist research focuses on early modern letter-writing and the cultures of correspondence in early modern England, the genres and transmission of early modern legal manuscripts.
Other areas of interest are the production and circulation of music manuscripts in Scotland, England and across Europe, the reception of manuscripts, and the emergence of conceptions of identity and a national tradition within Scottish literary culture through the sixteenth-century.
Contacts: Elizabeth Elliott, Andrew Gordon, Adelyn Wilson,Helen Pierce, Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, and the Manuscript Reading Group (via Andrew Gordon)
- History, Unions and Nation-Building
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Aberdeen offers an exceptional range of expertise on the early stages of British and European colonialism and nation building, Scottish imperialism in the Far East and India, the history of borders and border societies and the literature, history and culture of early modern England and Scotland.
Specialist research areas also include the politics of emerging nationhood in north-eastern Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and issues of union between states, parliaments and dynasties.
For a more West European focus, research is conentrating on the literature, political thought and historiography of seventeenth-century France, as well as the impact of the French Revolution and its ideas of nationhood on the late Scottish Enlightenment.
Staff to contact: Jackson Armstrong, Michael Brown, Karin Friedrich, Robert Frost, Helen Lynch, Helen Pierce, Syrithe Pugh, Tom Rist, Bruno Tribout, Bradford Bow
- Religious Culture and Church History
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The Centre provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the upheavals and reconfigurations of the period before and after the Reformation, from a social, cultural, and artistic as well as a theological perspective.
Staff research interests range from international Calvinism, the beginnings of the English Reformation, the history of spirituality with emphasis on the north-east of Scotland, a literary history of the Reformation in English drama and poetry, the relationship between Irish and Scottish Presbyterians in the Restoration era, the religious tensions in Scotland during the Civil War, to religious networks in central Europe, particularly Germany and Poland-Lithunania.
Contact: Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Karin Friedrich, Andrew Gordon, Sandra Hynes, William Naphy, Helen Pierce, Tom Rist, Joanne Anderson
- Renaissance, Baroque Art & Music
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Aberdeen is home to a small but strong group of researchers in the field of Renaissance and Baroque art and a world-leading school of music.
A special focus is the interaction between the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) and literary forms, visual culture of early modern England, and the popular dissemination of visual imagery within print culture and music manuscripts.
Contact: Frauke Jurgensen, Helen Pierce, Joanne Anderson