About the Center

Mission Statement

The Center for British and Irish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder promotes research and teaching in all aspects of British and Irish life, culture, and history. The Center, the only one of its kind in the country, advocates an interdisciplinary approach to British and Irish Studies, joining the humanities and performing arts, the social sciences, and the professional fields. Within the University, the Center provides an intellectual focus for faculty members and students at all levels. It plays a vital role within its geographical region, serving people at colleges and universities throughout the Rocky Mountain/High Plains area. The Center also brings members of the academic world into contact with individuals and organizations in the community who are interested in contemporary or historical Britain and Ireland.

Research

The research activities of the Center are based upon the exceptional collections of British and Irish Studies materials held by the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. In addition to standard primary and secondary works, journals, and British government documents, acquired over the past century, the libraries recently have been purchasing microfilmed/microfiched sets of original manuscripts, early books and newspapers, and personal papers from British archives. Some of these materials are available nowhere else in North America. Our holdings constitute the finest research collection in British and Irish Studies within this region and one of the finest in the country. They are open to use by students and faculty members at the University of Colorado, by visiting academics, and by members of the community. We welcome outside users of the research materials. The British and Irish Studies Room at Norlin Library contains microfilm readers/printers and a computer for use by people working with the collections.

Access the Center for British and Irish Studies collection finding guides.

Education

Within the University, the Center contributes to teaching and research in a variety of ways. We offer an undergraduate Certificate in British and Irish Studies and have developed a set of interdisciplinary seminars for graduate students. We provide travel fellowships for students who need to study or do research in Britain, and we have a fund to support photocopying of archival materials for students. The Dean's Writing Prizes in British and Irish Studies reward outstanding papers by undergraduate and graduate students. The Center hosts a range of lectures, seminars, and performances by distinguished visitors, many of them from Britain and Ireland.

Community

The Center is also involved with the wider community. Working with groups and companies in the state that have British interests, we help to organize such projects as "The United Kingdom in Colorado Week" (June 1990), featuring a variety of cultural, political, and economic events. British art loaned by local collectors is displayed in the British Studies Room and in special exhibits. Members of the community are welcome to become members of the Center and to join us at our lectures and at receptions after special events, performances by British and Irish groups, or art exhibits.

People

	Executive Director Jeremy Smith, Music Jeremy L. Smith, Associate Professor of Musicology, is a specialist on the English Renaissance with a secondary interest in Progressive Rock. He has published articles in Journal of American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Computing in Musicology, Notes, Fontes Artis Musicae, New Dictionary of National Biography, MGG and New Grove. His monograph Thomas East and Music Publishing in Renaissance England was published in 2003 by Oxford University Press and his edition of William Byrd’s “Psalmes, Sonets and Songs,” Vol. 12 of the Byrd Edition, general editor Philip Brett, was published in 2004 by Stainer & Bell. Research for the latter volume was supported in part by a NEH Collaborative Research Grant. In 2001 Smith was awarded the Richard Hill (MLA) prize for his article in Music & Letters. In 2006 he was awarded a Provost’s Award for his article in JAMS. Smith is a founding member of the editorial board of a forthcoming journal Music & Politics, for which he is slated to publish an article in the inaugural edition. He is also currently working on a book project titled Close to the Flame: Music and Politics in Elizabethan England.
	Managing Director Helmut Muller-Sievers, Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) Helmut Muller-Sievers is the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts. His scholarly work is concerned with the intersection of the life sciences, philosophy, and literature at the turn of the 19th century; in recent years he has developed additional interests in the role the knowledge and practice of engineers is playing in the culture of the 19th century. His forthcoming book, The Cylinder, Kinematics of the 19th Century, attempts to relate the practices of transmission design to the development of realist modes of narration. Before coming to CU in 2009, Dr. Muller-Sievers taught for almost 20 years at Northwestern University in the Department of German Literature and Critical Thought. He was also director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies (2003–2006), Lane Professor in the Humanities (1997–1998), and the director of the Kaplan Center for the Humanities (1998–2002).
	CBIS Library Liaison/Coordinator Thea Lindquist Thea Lindquist, the Center's Library Liaison, is an Assistant Professor and the History and Germanic Language & Literature Librarian in the University Libraries. She earned her MA in Library and Information Studies and PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests span from electronic library resources for teaching and research in early modern studies to early modern English religious and diplomatic history.
Executive Board:

	Katherine Eggert, English Associate professor of English, Katherine Eggert specializes in English Renaissance literature, cultural studies, and gender studies. She received her BA from Rice University, and her MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), as well as articles on other Renaissance topics and Shakespeare on film. Currently she is writing a book with the working title of Unnatural Magic: Alchemy and the Illicit Discourses of Renaissance England.
	Oliver Gerland, Theatre
	Paul E. J. Hammer, History
	William Kuskin, English William Kuskin is an associate professor of and chair of the department. He received his BA from Vassar Collage (1987) and his PhD. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison (1998). Dr. Kuskin works on the history of literary books, from medieval manuscripts to twenty-first century comic books. He has completed two books on England's first printer, William Caxton, a monograph, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (Notre Dame Press, 2008), and an edited collection, Caxton's Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (Notre Dame Press, 2006). He has written on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English literature, world literature, online pedagogy, and graphic novels, including guest editing a special issue of ELN, Graphia: Literary Criticism and the Graphic Novel. His current book project, entitled Recursive Origins, is on Shakespeare and the late Middle Ages.
	Catherine Labio, English An Associate Professor of English, Catherine Labio specializes in modern and contemporary intellectual history and in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, particularly literature and economics and literature and the visual arts. She is the author of Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant (Cornell University Press, 2004) and the editor of Belgian Memories (Yale French Studies, 2002). She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and has taught in the English Department of Reed College, the Masters in Intercultural Management (MIME) of the Brussels Business School (ICHEC), and the Departments of Comparative Literature and French at Yale University.
	Laura Ann Winkiel, English
Staff:
	Paula Anderson, Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) Paula Anderson is the Center's Administrative Assistant. She is also the administrative assistant for the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA).
	Gabrielle Dietrich Gabrielle Dietrich is the Center's Graduate Assistant and a doctoral candidate in Choral Conducting and Literature.