Dr Emily Rowe has been awarded a two-month 2022/3 fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, to begin research for her project Little cities—an interdisciplinary study of early modern military camps. Little cities combines literary analysis and historical research to uncover the social and emotional experience of camp life.

This project is an intervention into military history that will investigate how social belonging and difference, trauma, and wellbeing were experienced in the camp, with a literary interest in how these spaces were imagined as microcosms of urban life at home. By understanding the camp as a mobile, urban microcosm and shifting our focus onto common soldiers and other civilian members of the camp, including medics, women, and sutlers, this project will provide a new perspective on the everyday experience of military life and space and how it was represented in literary texts and historical documents.

During her fellowship, Emily will conduct initial research using military manuals, correspondence, journals, and visual depictions of camps held in the Huntington’s early modern collections. Congratulations!

Josua de Grave, Peasants in a Landscape with a Military Camp in Grand-Hallet, 1675,  Pen and black ink, brush and gray wash, 15.1 x 18.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum New York, 2012.369.

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