Brown University’s Digital Publications Initiative, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarly monographs conceived by Brown faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences and intended to be published by a university press. A collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, the Digital Publications Initiative extends the University’s mission of supporting and promoting innovative faculty scholarship, while also helping to catalyze both the practice and recognition of digital scholarship in the humanities. Brown currently has five long-form, interactive, media-rich publication projects – in the fields of History, Italian Studies, History of Art and Architecture, and Middle East Studies – nearing completion or under development. This lecture will focus on Brown’s two pilot projects, Furnace and Fugue, which revolves around a seventeenth-century German alchemical emblem book; and Italian Shadows, which takes as its focus the genealogy of virtual reality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italy. These digital publication projects demonstrate a range of ways in which the digital environment is necessary for articulating and advancing scholarly argument beyond the capabilities of print. These projects also show off a variety of tools and platforms conducive to the successful presentation and publication of interactive, media-rich monographic works, including a static page generator created at Brown and Scalar.

Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor and Visiting Scholar in Italian Studies at Brown University. Allison earned her Ph.D. in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and has held academic appointments at University College London, Wheaton College, and Tulane University. She has published widely on the visual and material culture of early modern Italy, and serves as General Editor of the book series Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700, published by Amsterdam University Press.