Several types of interdisciplinary academic programs offered each year are designed to explore the latest research in the early modern period or in some of the special areas represented in the Clark's collections.

Center/Clark Professorship
One or more distinguished scholars are appointed each year to the Center/Clark Professorship; tenure ranges from one quarter to an academic year, depending on the number of appointments. The Center/Clark Professor, in collaboration with the Director, organizes academic programs consisting of public lectures, seminars, and workshops, and develops publications from them. If not already affiliated with UCLA, the Center/Clark Professor holds a visiting appointment in one of the departments and participates in its instructional activities.

Core Programs
The heart of the Center/Clark's academic activity is its core programs—series of interdisciplinary events developed around a common theme. This organizing principle allows for great flexibility in format and scope: core programs may range from three or four consecutive workshops to a series spanning a year or more, with a full complement of symposia, workshops, graduate seminars, and public lectures, held at the Clark or at UCLA. Core programs are organized each year by the current Center/Clark Professor or Professors, who are encouraged to design programs that will lead to publication in the Center/Clark series. The Center's Ahmanson-Getty theme-based fellowships are linked to the core programs as well.

Our current core program for 2011–2012 is:

Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Early Modern Mediterranean
directed by 2011–12 Clark Professor Barbara Fuchs (UCLA)

The program, which is based at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, invites applications from humanities scholars whose research interests relate to the representation of empire and imperial rivalry in the early modern Mediterranean. The field of Mediterranean studies has grown tremendously in recent years, with rich investigations both within the national disciplines and in a comparative framework, placing empires side by side. This series will focus on the imbrication and entanglement of the various actors in the early modern Mediterranean (the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, Portugal, Morocco, France, England, Venice, and so forth). How is imperial competition managed in different genres? How do literary and cultural productions render the alterity and the attraction of the cultures encountered? Rivalry and Rhetoric will feature three symposia that take us from the broadest problems of representation to a case study—early modern England—for which the "Mediterranean turn" has radically changed the field.

October 28th
“Envisioning Empire in the Old World,”
the first and broadest meeting, will consider problems of visual, material, and textual representation of contact zones and encounters among the Mediterranean empires. Topics include: Spain in Italy, Spain on the Ottomans, versions of Lepanto, North African Borderlands, travel writing, captive’s tales, merchants and ambassadors, citational and textual traditions, lingua franca and the problems of communication, and contested spaces on the page and the stage.

February 10th & 11th
“Black Legends and Domestic Dissent”
explores the intersections between the discourses that discredit Spain or the Ottomans as imperial actors and the contestation of orthodoxy in the domestic sphere. How is anti-Spanish sentiment used across Europe, and how does it enable local or national forms of resistance? How do conceptions of the Ottomans intersect with or influence conceptions of Spain? What is the role of race in the black legends? Conference sessions will focus on different iterations of black legends across Europe and the Americas, as well as on their interpenetration.

May 4th & 5th
“Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England”
explores how England engages the Mediterranean as conceptual space, and how this engagement intersects with those of other European nations. What role does the representation of Mediterranean empire serve in thinking through England's own expansion? How is the threat of the Mediterranean negotiated in various genres? How has the canon of early modern English writing changed in response to the Mediterranean turn of recent years? Topics include: the geography of revenge tragedy, Iberian tragedies, Shakespeare's Mediterranean, Machiavellianism on stage, Spanish plots and plotting Spaniards, translation and appropriation.

Our forthcoming core program for 2012–2013 is:

Moralism, Fundamentalism, and the Rhetoric of Decline in Eurasia, 1600–1900
directed by Andrea S. Goldman (UCLA) and Gabriel Piterberg (UCLA)

Conferences and Workshops
The Center and the Clark organize and sponsor interdisciplinary conferences and workshops, usually at the Clark, which bring scholars from throughout the world to UCLA to explore specific issues and to develop innovative interpretative approaches. On occasion these symposia are arranged in association with other campus departments or with other institutions. Some of the proceedings are published, either in the Center/Clark series or in journals.

All programs for the current year can be viewed on our calendar.