Lisa Voigt and Stephanie Leitch, Collaborative Cluster Fellows

Mining the JCB’s unparalleled collection of early modern travel reports, Lisa Voigt (Spanish/Portuguese, Ohio State University) and Stephanie Leitch (Art History, Florida State University) completed a two-week Collaborative Cluster Fellowship at the JCB in summer 2017. As part of a book project tentatively entitled The Epistemology of the Copy in Early Modern Travel Narratives, they located recycled illustrations and iconography that they see as a critical part of the early modern printer’s apparatus.

Their project aims to credit the copied print as an important cornerstone of publishing history and the circulation of information about distant places and peoples. Insofar as repetition encouraged and standardized knowledge, the recycled image also contributes to the development of visual literacy. This project builds on an article that Voigt initiated while a long-term fellow at the JCB in 2012, “The Traveling Illustrations of Sixteenth-Century Travel Narratives," which she coauthored with Elio Brancaforte (Tulane University) and published in PMLA in 2014 (129.3). Although Brancaforte could not join them at the JCB, the trio plans to apply for more long-term collaborative fellowships. The Collaborative Cluster Fellowship at the JCB served as the perfect launching pad for their larger collaboration.