Announcements:
Emblematica Online earns the 2023 Digital Innovation Award from the Renaissance Society of America.
Mara R. Wade is currently a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden, in Spring 2023. She is professor emerita of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the immediate past president of the Renaissance Society of America. Her research focuses on emblems, digital humanities, court studies of Germany and Scandinavia, gender studies, and German literature and the arts in the early modern period. She is an associate editor of Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, having previously served as Editor in Chief, and is the PI for Emblematica Online. She was a Getty Scholar 2018-2019 and a Newberry Library fellow 2016-2017; she holds a senior research prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She was also awarded the prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois.
Emblems in the Free Imperial City of Nürnberg (with Christopher Fletcher and Andrew C. Schwenk) and Collections and Books, Images and Texts: Early Modern German Cultures of the Book are currently at press. Volume 5 of the journal Emblematica appeared under her editorship in 2023. As a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, she expects to complete the monograph A Social History of the Renaissance Emblem.
Mara R. Wade is the Immediate Past President of the Renaissance Society of America, 2022-2024. This will then conclude her tenure in the presidential sequence at the RSA.
You can download her cv and publications here.
Continuing Research
A Social History of the Renaissance Emblem analyzes the emblem’s role in forging social identities among intellectual elites. My research charts a new course in the field by analyzing the emblematic strategies employed as social practices in diverse contexts.
Recent Keynote Lectures
2022 – “Political Emblems and the Common Good,” Society for Emblem Studies, Coimbra, Portugal, 25-27 July.
2022 – “The Agency of the Queen: Queen Sophie (1557-1631) and the Education of the Lutheran Princess,” at Dronningegerninger – og kvindeligt handlerum ved hoffet (Conference celebrating the 50th Jubilee of Queen Margarethe of Denmark, organized by Curia Danica) Amalienborg Castle, Copenhagen, 11-12 October.
Home Department
Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Email: mwade@illinois.edu
Courtesy (Zero-time) Appointments
Comparative and World Literature
Contact Information
Address:
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
2090 Foreign Languages Building
707 S. Mathews Avenue
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois 61801 USA
Phone: (217) 333-8777
Fax: +217 244-2223
Mara R. Wade 