“The Conde de Montemar Letters: Opening the Vault to Andean History”
Antonio Sotomayor, Assistant Professor, Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Silvia Escanilla Huerta, PhD Candidate in History
The University Library at the University of Illinois owns a unique collection of eighteenth-century letters from the family of the Count of Montemar, Diego José Carrillo de Albornoz y Bravo de Lagunas between 1761 and 1799. This project will digitize part of the collection, presenting diplomatic transcriptions, historical essays, and an annotated bibliography. The goal of the project is to provide open access to this set of unique letters and foster the research and instruction of Andean Studies in an interdisciplinary fashion. Presenters will discuss the origins of the project and contextualize it in Latin American digital humanities. We will also discuss some of the main challenges as well as its potentials.
“Toward a Digital Edition of Proust’s Correspondence”
François Proulx, Assistant Professor of French and Italian
Caroline Szylowicz, Kolb-Proust Librarian, Associate Professor of Library Administration
We are an international team of scholars creating a fully digital, open-access edition of the letters of Marcel Proust. This collaboration brings together the University of Illinois, whose collection of nearly 1,200 Proust letters is the largest in the world; the Université Grenoble Alpes, home to faculty experts on Proust’s correspondence and in digital humanities; and the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, where a long tradition of scholarly research on Proust’s manuscripts is now taking a digital turn. We do not propose an online version of the existing paper edition of Proust’s letters (21 volumes, 1970-1993), which is highly valuable but outdated. Instead our long-term goal is to produce an updated and augmented digital edition, observing rigorous scholarly protocols, of this evolving corpus – nearly 5,900 letters known to date, up from 5,356 in the paper edition.
Please take a moment to browse the existing Kolb-Proust Archive database.