Check out the 2024- 2025 EMSI Seminar Series.
View the full EMSI Calendar of events here.
EMSI Awarded Major Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for LA2026
For LA2026, EMSI will coordinate humanities discussions related to the 250th anniversary of 1776 and the West for public audiences.
The discussions will take place at our partnering institutions:
▪ Autry Museum of the American West.
▪ Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
▪ USC Special Collections and USC Fisher Museum of Art.
▪ Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.
▪ The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
▪ El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.
You can find our award listed on the NEH Press Release for grants awarded in August 2024.
EMSI is soliciting applications for graduate and undergraduate student research assistants to support the programming.
Visit the application page here.
We look forward to sharing more when the project begins in January 2025!
Early Modern Book-of-the-Month
This new feature highlights books from USC Libraries Special Collections with an emphasis on new acquisitions.
Venice, c. 1680
USC Special Collections JN5266.A44 1680
La storia delle massime e governo della Repubblica di Venezia, descritto da un segretario di un ambasciatore di Francia a Venezia is a clandestine manuscript translation of Histoire du Gouvernement de Venise (1676). USC’s manuscript copy withholds the name of the text’s author, Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706), who, in addition to being the described secretary of a French ambassador to Venice, was a printer, humanist, and political theorist. The unknown translator of USC’s manuscript notes on the title page that this text was “copiata a caffé” (copied in a café); variations in the text indicate this translation was produced for the Venetian market of forbidden books before the publication of an Italian translation in 1681. USC Libraries Special Collections also holds the 1677 first edition of the Histoire and the 1681 printed edition of La Storia. Scholars interested in the material history of the book may also wish to view this manuscript for its elaborate seventeenth-century lace-case binding.
For more information, contact USC Special Collections.
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Image: Vallard Atlas, detail of chart 3, 1547. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
