— Cooperation with Other Institutions
—
A major goal of the Center/Clark is to
establish an interlocking network of scholars devoted to the study of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In pursuit of this aim, the Center/Clark
has established cooperative agreements with a number of institutions. The
agreements vary, but all stress the aim to foster interdisciplinary and comparative
research and to enable scholars from different areas and countries to share
their findings. Agreements of cooperation have been reached with the Centro
Interdipartimentale di Studi su Descartes e il Seicento in Lecce, Italy; the
Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice; the Max-Planck-Institut
für Geschichte in Göttingen; the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala; the Università di Bologna; the Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV; and the Universität
Zürich. Other cooperative agreements are being explored.
In addition, the Center/Clark works very closely with
both the American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and the International
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS). The Clark Library is the
repository for the ASECS archives. In academic year 2000-2001, the Center/Clark
hosted and helped to organize the ISECS International Seminar on the Eighteenth
Century. This seminar, formerly known as the East/West Seminar, annually
brings together outstanding junior scholars from across the world to participate
in an intensive weeklong discussion of a specific eighteenth-century theme.
It is expected that the Center/Clark will remain one of the permanent American
sites for this seminar.
The Quadrennial
Congress of ISECS, held at UCLA in the first week of August 2003, was
hosted by the Center and the Clark together with ASECS, whose annual meeting
was combined with the ISECS Congress. The event was organized and coordinated
by Peter Reill, Center/Clark Director, and by John Sandbrook, Assistant Provost
of UCLA's College of Letters and Science. A select committee of scholars from
the region and the nation, representing all the major disciplines concerned
with the era, assisted in the planning and organizing.
