Research Centres

Chawton House
Chawton House holds a unique collection of books focusing on early English women's writing from 1600 to 1830. This specialist collection, set in the home and working estate of Jane Austen's brother, provides the opportunity to study and savour the texts in their original setting.

Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Queen's University Belfast
An interdisciplinary initiative, established in 2002, drawing together research expertise in the long eighteenth century in the Schools of English, History, Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts, and Music. It holds regular seminars (with a mixture of staff, postgraduate and postdoctoral students and guest speakers) and is actively involved in formulating interdisciplinary activities, workshops and conferences within the Faculty.

Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Southampton
Launched in 2008, SCECS brings together specialists from a broad range of disciplines (English, History, Music, and Philosophy) and draws on a rich research culture at Southampton in eighteenth-century studies. Scholars at Southampton and Chawton have initiated a number of publication projects, among them the Chawton House Library Series, published by Pickering & Chatto. Members of the group have expertise in areas including Jane Austen, gender theory, women’s writing, Gothic literature, eighteenth-century fiction, political economy, eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics, Anglo-French female literary networks, slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world, gardens, landscape and aesthetics, education, crime and criminality, and writing for children.

Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, York University
The Centre was founded in 1996 at the University of York, and is now an internationally renowned centre for the study of the 'long' eighteenth century, 1650-1850. It is based at the historic King's Manor in the middle of the city, and has staff members from the departments of Archaeology, English, History, History of Art and Philosophy. The Centre has a lively research community within which students can individually and collaboratively pursue their interests in the history, culture, politics, literature, art, and society of the period.

Centre for The Novel, University of Aberdeen
Since its inception in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the novel in English has become the dominant literary form in our culture. Critical analysis of the novel lies at the heart of modern literary scholarship and theory. The Centre for The Novel at the University of Aberdeen has been created to promote the study of novels, novelists, and novelistic traditions, and the investigation of narrative theory and practice. Through symposia, conferences, visiting fellowships and postgraduate teaching and research, the Centre explores the regional, national and international significance of the novel as an art form, and address such general topics as subjectivity and identity, medical theory and fiction, aesthetics, print culture, the sociology of reading, mass and elite fiction, and issues of nation, class, race and gender.

Eighteenth-Century Centre, University of Warwick
The Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre is an interdisciplinary research centre based in the Department of History of the University of Warwick. The Centre runs major research projects and provides a forum for academic staff and postgraduate students in the Humanities, including members of the departments of History, English, French and History of Art.

UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Center provides a forum for the discussion of central issues in the field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies. It organizes academic programs, bringing together scholars from the area, the nation, and the world, with the goal of encouraging research in the period from 1600 to 1800. The Center's publications program is dedicated to making the results of its conferences known to the larger scholarly public. It provides resident fellowships and scholarships to support research in early modern studies and other areas central to the Clark's collections. 

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