July 1 , 2008
It is a great pleasure to accept the position of Director
of the Center for British Studies at UC Berkeley. I want
to offer profound thanks to my predecessor, James Vernon,
whose hard work and entrepreneurial spirit led to the creation
of the Center and its great success over the past five years,
and to Candace Groskreutz, the Assistant Director, whose
work behind the scenes actually makes the Center function.
My first goal as Director is to try not to screw up what
they have created!
My second goal as Director is to try to broaden the scholarly
community of the Center for British Studies. Since its opening
in 2003, the Center has been a magnificent resource for scholars
studying Britain and its empire since the nineteenth century,
but it has played much less of a role for scholars studying
the medieval and early modern eras. There is a large group
of scholars here at Berkeley who study Britain and Ireland
from late antiquity to the eighteenth century, with institutional
bases in the departments of History, Art History, English
Literature, Celtic Languages, and many others. Bringing these
scholars into a common conversation, both with one another
and with scholars of British modernity, can help to enrich
all of our intellectual lives and to make Berkeley truly
a center for British Studies.
To that end, I will be planning a series of events that
will try to integrate pre-modern, early modern, and modern
British studies into a larger and more cohesive community.
But I would also welcome advice and suggestions from any
member of the Berkeley community about how to enrich British
Studies on our campus. We have resources, we have talent,
we have energy; now we need to come up with exciting new
ways to use them!
Ethan Shagan
shagan [@] berkeley.edu
Director
