40th Anniversary Celebration of the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies

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. Founded in 1985, the Center provides a forum for the discussion of central issues in the field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies, and organizes a wide range of academic and cultural programs. Additionally, the Center administers the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, located on a historic property in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, which serves as the research laboratory for a distinguished array of fellows working either in early modern studies or the fin-de-siècle world of Oscar Wilde.

The program features a talk presented by UCLA Professor of English Helen Deutsch, who served as the Center & Clark’s Director for a four year-term from 2017 to 2020. Following the talk, guests are invited to mingle with friends and colleagues in Royce 306, where they can add a message to the 40th anniversary Kudoboard, view a display of Center & Clark ephemera and a slideshow, and enjoy a reception on the terrace.

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. Professor Deutsch’s talk, a review and celebration of the Center and its history, refutes such assumptions. She will argue that the work of the Center and its partner the Clark—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. Critical University Studies scholar Christopher Newfield has recently described universities as “places of unique challenge, novelty, and happiness, of intellectual revolutions and personal transformations.”  The Center is just such a place, and our imaginative and intellectual investments in the past illuminate the ways in which such revolutions are both rooted in history and ongoing collective projects of the utmost relevance.

Professor Deutsch joined UCLA’s English department in 1995 and was first affiliated with the Center & Clark as an Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral fellow in 1992–93. In addition to serving as Director, she has assisted the Center & Clark in many capacities over the years, including as Clark Professor in 2005–06, and as a member and chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee.

Her research is fueled by the love of literature and the love of authors. She practices a unique kind of feminist historical formalism that reads texts in relationship to the embodied lives of the writers who produced them. Her first two books consider the singular bodies of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson in symbiotic relationship to each author’s uniquely imitative literary style and contested critical reception.

Her most recent book, The Last Amateur, goes beyond the single-author framework to consider what it means to learn to love one author through another, and to be transformed in the process. Deutsch scrutinizes Edward Said’s career-long conversation with Jonathan Swift, which began with an unfinished book (a part of which was presented at the Clark), in order to raise questions of her own about the path of literary studies. At a time when many in the field have lost faith in critique, she shows how passion and refusal of professional propriety—the hallmarks of the amateur—can enliven critique again.

In addition to serving as departmental Vice Chair for Graduate Studies, she successfully spearheaded the founding of UCLA’s interdisciplinary Disability Studies Minor, which she chaired from 2006 to 2011. She has been a member at large of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, chair of the Division for Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature of the Modern Language Association, an advisory editor for PMLA, the association’s journal, and a member of its Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession.

This event is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person on the UCLA campus in Royce Hall 314 and 306. Seating is limited; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits. The registration form will post here approximately one month in advance of the program.

Photo credit: Reed Hutchinson