Brendan Kane

Humanities Institute/Folger Library “Transcribathon”, September 14th, 10 am – 4 pm

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We invite you to take part in the Humanities Institute-Folger Library “Transcribathon,” to be held

Wednesday,  September 14th, 10 am – 4 pm in the Great Hall of the Alumni Center.

You’ve seen the First Folio, now try and read handwriting from Shakespeare’s time!

The Transcribathon is an event connected with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Early Modern Manuscripts Online project, which is an effort to transcribe and digitize hand written documents from the Age of Shakespeare. [http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Early_Modern_Manuscripts_Online_(EMMO)] Staff from the Folger will be on site to lead the event. Participants will transcribe and encode manuscripts, individually or in small groups. There will be food (lunch and pizza at the end of the day), fun, entertaining manuscripts, transcription sprints, prizes, and an easy-to-use online transcription platform called Dromio. UConn will be working on the seventeenth-century diary of the fascinating Rev. John Ward, who in addition to his church duties was a learned humanist and active in medical and scientific circles. Learn to read the original documents of the English Renaissance, and be a part of history by getting your name on the completed edition. Please join us, and encourage your students (classes welcome) and colleagues. The more the merrier!

For more information, contact: Brendan Kane at brendan.kane@uconn.edu.

A book by Brendan Kane, Associate Director of the Humanities Institute and Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, was included by Choice in its list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015.

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Every year in the January issue, in print and online, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

“Elizabeth I and Ireland” edited by Brendan Kane, University of Connecticut and Valerie McGowan-Doyle, Kent State University, Ohio. Cambridge University Press 2014.

The last generation has seen a veritable revolution in scholarly work on Elizabeth I, on Ireland, and on the colonial aspects of the literary productions that typically served to link the two. It is now commonly accepted that Elizabeth was a much more active and activist figure than an older scholarship allowed. Gaelic elites are acknowledged to have had close interactions with the crown and continental powers; Ireland itself has been shown to have occupied a greater place in Tudor political calculations than previously thought. Literary masterpieces of the age are recognised for their imperial and colonial entanglements. Elizabeth I and Ireland is the first collection fully to connect these recent scholarly advances. Bringing together Irish and English historians, and literary scholars of both vernacular languages, this is the first sustained consideration of the roles played by Elizabeth and by the Irish in shaping relations between the realms.

‘The first sustained study of both Elizabeth I’s relationship to the conquest of Ireland and Irish views of Elizabeth I’.

‘Coordinates the study of early modern Irish- and English-language sources around a common theme for the first time’.

‘The multidisciplinary approach allows readers to experience some of the intellectual, social and linguistic richness of the period’.