Many of the social, cultural, and political issues we face today can be traced back to the age of discovery: processes of exploitation and genocide; environmental disregard and degradation; capitalistic greed and imperialist ambitions. These too, along with Leonardo's glorious discoveries, are legacies from the Renaissance Era, legacies still very much among us. For this session we will engage professors from disparate fields who have considered the vast potentialities discovery holds.
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Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Economics
Peter C. Mancall is the author of seven books including Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018); Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson–A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009); Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (Yale, 2007); Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Cornell, 1995); and, most recently, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019). He is currently writing American Origins, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. He is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Professor Mancall is also the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
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Professor of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media & Games Division, University of Southern California; Electronic Arts Endowed Chair, Interactive Entertainment; Director, USC Game Innovation Lab
Tracy Fullerton is an experimental game designer, professor and chair of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, as well as director of the interdisciplinary USC Games program, a collaboration with the Viterbi School of Engineering. Fullerton also works with the Digital Equity in Education team at the Pullias Center for Higher Education.
Her research center, the Game Innovation Lab, has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, and The Night Journey, with artist Bill Viola. She is currently working on Walden, a simulation of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond supported by multiple grants from the NEA and NEH. Fullerton is the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide, and holder of the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment.
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Associate Professor of Classics
Frederic Clark is a cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in the afterlife of classical antiquity in medieval and early modern Europe. His research examines how the reception of the ancient past has informed—and continues to inform—practices of humanistic scholarship. His first book, The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2020), retraces the afterlife of Dares Phrygius’ spurious history of the Trojan War. In doing so, it examines the importance of a now neglected text to a millennium of debates over the nature of history, fiction, myth, philology, and criticism. His second book, titled Dividing Time: The Invention of Historical Periods in Early Modern Europe (under contract with University of Chicago Press), will survey how early modern scholars constructed the tripartite division of historical time into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity.
