Friends of the UNCG Libraries

Jenna Townend is pursuing her Ph.D. at Loughborough University and was recently awarded the Special Collections and University Archives’ Research Travel Grant. She visited UNCG's University Libraries earlier in 2017 to study the seventeenth century literary borrowings from George Herbert’s “The Temple” (1633) and to conduct comparative bibliographic research into the watermarks and ornaments of six texts published by Philemon and Robert Stephens. University Libraries offers one research travel grant per year to support the work of a researcher who utilizes the holdings of the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. Collections include rare books, manuscripts, women’s literature, cello music, University archives and Betty Carter Women Veterans Historical Project. The research travel grant is intended to pay for travel and lodging costs associated with a research trip to Greensboro, North Carolina. Graduate students, post-docs, teaching faculty and indepe...

Christopher Hodgkins, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has been awarded a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant. The money will be used to support co-editor Hodgkins and Robert Whalen of Northern Michigan University (NMU), in producing George Herbert: Complete Prose, with Latin and Greek Verse. A once-in-several-generations project, Hodgkins’s and Whalen’s edition will provide a foundational resource for Herbert studies. When completed, it will include digital captures of all known manuscripts and first print editions of Herbert’s works—all of the latter housed in the Special Collections of UNCG’s Walter Clinton Jackson Library. The edition also will present original-spelling transcriptions linked to the high-resolution images of each manuscript or print page; edited texts, partially modernized; translations of the Latin and Greek works; and a scholarly apparatus that includes a full set of textual and critical...

The following post was prepared by Dr. Chris Hodgkins of the English Department: Dr. Robert Whalen When Robert Whalen of Northern Michigan University began to explore how he might apply emerging digital technology to the English poetry of Metaphysical master George Herbert (1593-1633), he thought with youthful optimism that such a project might take, oh, a year or two. After all, the complete printed works of Herbert fit into only one volume. How long could it take to transcribe, encode, and annotate the lyric poems of The Temple (1633)? Thirteen years later, he knows. The Digital Temple , more than a decade in the making, is now available from University of Virginia Press/Rotunda, America’s leading academic digital publisher, where it keeps company with the digital papers of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and is being hailed by advance reviewers as the state of the art in digital editions. http://digitaltemple.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/ Dr. Christopher Hodgkins...

D r. William Finley, Head of the Department, reports: Special Collections & University Archives at UNCG has recently made several significant additions to its large and important research collection on the writings and life of the prominent seventeenth-century English religious poet George Herbert .   The recent acquisitions include copies of the seventh (two printings), eighth, and eleventh editions of Herbert 's well-known collection of religious verse, THE TEMPLE.  These editions give UNCG's collection a complete run of the first fourteen editions of THE TEMPLE, issued between 1633 and 1799.  The George Herbert Collection includes a total of more than seventy printings of THE TEMPLE, along with other important Herbert titles and a large research collection of books and manuscripts, one of the largest concentrations of George Herbert material in the world.