Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies

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 first conference, "Empires of Thought," looks at imperial ideology, challenging and broadening the default understanding of empire as a large territorial state by focusing on how each empire upheld a normative universe within which particular kinds of political authority and legitimacy were articulated. Organized by Professors Choon Hwee Koh & Meng Zhang (History, UCLA) and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).

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The Escher Quartet performs an all-Bartók program including String Quartets Nos. 1, 3, and 5. Tickets are limited and go on sale at 12 noon on Tuesday, December 9. Please visit the event website for full details.

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What is sky? Both a border for land and sea, and a blank canvas for portents and celestial events, sky reflects fears and hopes for stasis in a changing and unpredictable environment. This conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore early modern concepts of sky from a variety of environmentally consequential perspectives, from the history of science and art, to poetics and literature.

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This talk by Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware) suggests that Oscar Wilde's fairy tales have been just as influential as his work in world of the theatre and his effect on Gothic fiction. This influence was clear almost immediately after the publication of both The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), especially in works by rebellious “New Women” of the 1890s such as “George Egerton” (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Mabel Nembhard, and Ella Erskine.

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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 second conference, "Empires in Practice," looks at Imperial Operations. How did empires work? What did the mundane, everyday operations of imperial rule look like? Early modern empires confronted the same “great enemy” of distance which severely constrained all actions, from government communications to tax collection. The solutions that the Ottomans, Mughals, and the Qing developed to address these common problems shared some essential features despite their local variations. Organized by Professors Choon Hwee Koh & Meng Zhang (History, UCLA) and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).

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Baritone Benjamin Appl is celebrated for a voice that "belongs to the last of the old great masters of song" with "an almost infinite range of colours" (Suddeutsche Zeitung), and for performances "delivered with wit, intelligence and sophistication" (Gramophone). James Baillieu is one of the leading song and chamber music pianists of his generation. They will perform Franz Schubert's Winterreise. Tickets are limited and go on sale at 12 noon on Tuesday, February 17, 2026. Please visit the event website for full details.

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Notos Quartett returns to our Chamber Music at the Clark series with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor, K.478, Sir William Walton's Piano Quartet in D Minor, and Johannes Brahms' Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60. Tickets are limited and go on sale at 12 noon on Tuesday, February 24. Please visit the event website for full details.

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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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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).

#Educational #Academic

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.

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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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