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.
Johannes Trithemius. Translated by Gabriel de Collange.
Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1561
Polygraphie et universelle écriture cabalistique is a foundational work in the history of cryptography. Published in Paris in 1561, this is the first French edition of the German Benedictine abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius’s Polygraphiae Libri (1518). Gabriel de Collange, a mathematician and valet de chambre to King Charles IX, translated and expanded the text; his additions include “Tables et figures planispheres” with 13 volvelles—paper constructions with rotating parts—for encryption and decipherment. Polygraphie introduced systematic and mathematical approaches for encoding messages that set a foundation for future developments in cryptography.
For more information, contact Derek Christian Quezada Meneses, Rare Books Librarian, USC Special Collections.
Recent Events
Upcoming Events
Hannah Murphy, King’s College, London
“Jouez hautbois, résonnez musettes!” A Concert of 17th-Century French Noels
Eric Herschthal, University of Utah
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Land Acknowledgement
The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) exists on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino-Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples who continue to call this region home. EMSI respectfully acknowledges these Indigenous peoples as the traditional caretakers of this landscape, as the direct descendants of the first people. EMSI recognizes their continued presence and is grateful to have the opportunity to work and learn on this land.
Image: Vallard Atlas, detail of chart 3, 1547. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
