Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies

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

Luis de Carvajal el Mozo (the Younger) was a crypto-Jew from Benavente who traveled to New Spain in the late 1500s and was arrested and ultimately killed, alongside his mother and sisters, by the Mexican Inquisition tribunal. During his time in Mexico and in the Inquisition’s prisons, he wrote theological and mystical treatises as well as a memoir. His story has been canonized in Jewish Studies literature and in recent public memory from Mexico to the U.S. borderlands, and the figure of Luis has served as a canonical center—a nostalgic origin point for the history of Jews’ arrival in the Americas. And yet there remains a crucial story clearly visible in Luis’s writings and in the colonial archive but untold by scholars of crypto-Jewish, Jewish, or Latin American history. If reexamined, the canonized story of the Carvajal family reveals histories of mining, gendered and racialized violence, social hierarchy, and environmental change in colonial Mexico. What historical narratives does a rhetoric of nostalgia, purity, and victimhood preclude? Rachel Kaufman reenters Luis de Carvajal’s famous memoir to complicate the story of Jews in the Americas. Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Her work explores diasporic memory, transmission, and violence and argues for the power of poetry as historical method.

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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 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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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.

#Educational #Academic