Transforming the Early Modern Archive: the Emmerson Collection at State Library Victoria

Researcher profile

Rosalind Smith is Chair of the Discipline of English and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU and is co-convenor of the Early Modern Women Research Network (EMWRN). Her research focuses on gender, form, politics, and history in early modern women’s writing, with particular interests in the ways in which women’s writing is produced, circulated, and received. View full bio >

Researcher profile

Anna Welch is Senior Librarian, History of the Book & Arts at State Library Victoria. Her first monograph is Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria (Brill, 2015) and she is co-editor of Poverty and Devotion in Mendicant Cultures 1200-1450 with Constant J. Mews (Routledge, 2016).

Researcher profile

Sarah C. E. Ross is Professor of English at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015), co-editor of Editing Early Modern Women with Paul Salzman (2016), Women Poets of the English Civil War with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (2017); Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics with Rosalind Smith (2020), and Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1689 with Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (forthcoming). Her research focuses on early modern women’s writing, in particular poetry, religious and political writing, and manuscript and print culture.

Researcher profile

Paul Salzman is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at La Trobe University, and a Conjoint Professor at The University of Newcastle. He has published widely on early modern women’s writing, literary history, and the theory and practice of editing. His most recent publications have been Editing Early Modern Women co-edited with Sarah C. E. Ross (2016) and Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825-1915 (2018). He has also produced an online resource through La Trobe University titled Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electric Edition. His current project is a book on the relationship between eighteenth and early nineteenth-century editing, facsimiles, and forgeries.

Researcher profile

Trisha Pender is an Associate Professor of English and Writing and Director of the Gender Research Network at the University of Newcastle, and is co-convenor of the Early Modern Women Research Network (EMWRN). She is the author of Early Modern Women and the Rhetoric of Modesty (2012), co-editor of Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing with Rosalind Smith (2014), and editor of Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration (2017). She is also general editor with Rosalind Smith of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (forthcoming). Her current research focuses on Tudor women’s textual production in its early modern and late modern incarnations. She is increasingly interested in translating early modern scholarship to non-academic audiences, a challenge she will pursue in this ARC Linkage Project by exploring avenues for public engagement with the Emmerson Collection.

Researcher profile

Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer, and maker with interests in digital design and culture, data practices, more-than-human worlds, and digital collections. His work has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Senses and Society. He has worked with institutions including the State Library of NSW, the State Library of Queensland, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Australia developing “generous” interfaces to their digital collections. Mitchell is currently a Professor in the School of Art and Design at ANU.

Candidate profile

Julia Rodwell is an HDR student in the School of Art and Design at ANU and Publishing Coordinator at the National Gallery Victoria. Her PhD research sits within the ARC-funded Linkage Project Transforming the Early Modern Archive: the Emmerson Collection at SLV. Her thesis is titled “Digital Design for Cultural Collections: Digital Humanities, Art Curatorship, and Museology in the Emmerson Collection Online Exhibition Project.” She is interested in engaging audiences with art and history through publishing, the display of archival materials, and online exhibitions. View full bio >

Christian Algar is Curator of Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library. Christian’s expertise comes from his access over several years to an unrivalled collection of early modern materials—physical items which many scholars and experts in their fields often have limited exposure to.

Des Cowley is Principal Librarian, History of the Book & Arts, State Library Victoria, and has more than 20 years’ experience working with rare books. Des is co-curator of State Library Victoria’s permanent exhibition “World of the Book” (formerly “Mirror of the World”) and co-author of The World of the Book (Melbourne University Press, 2007).

Professor Anne Dunlop is Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. Anne works on Italian and European art in the later Middle Ages and early modern period, and researches and publishes on links between Italy and Eurasia in the Mongol period. In 2015 she published her fifth book Andrea del Castagno and the Limits of Painting and in 2018 edited the volume Antipodean Early Modern: European Art in Australian Collections, c. 1200-1600 (Amsterdam University Press).

David Emmerson was born in Melbourne and graduated from the University of Melbourne Law School before travelling to the United States to pursue his studies at the University of Michigan. He has had a long career as a corporate lawyer in Melbourne, New York, and London. He is now retired and living in London.

Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research interests are in early Tudor poetry and Renaissance literature, digital humanities, book history, scholarly editing, pedagogy, and scholarly communication. He directs the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Project, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

Wendy Wall is Professor of English at Northwestern University, Avalon Professor of the Humanities, and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. Wendy specializes in early modern gender/sexuality studies, women’s writing, poetry, recipe culture, food studies, theater, and media studies (manuscript and print cultures). She is co-creator with Associate Professor Leah Knight (Brock University) of The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making and is the author of many publications including Recipes for Thought: Knowledge (2015) and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (2016).

Susan Wiseman is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London where she teaches and researches seventeenth-century and Renaissance literature. Her publications include Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (2006), the edited collection Early Modern Women and the Poem (2013), and Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance, 1550-1700 (2014).