Eighteenth Century and Romantics Research School

Portrait at Fairfax House, York

The Eighteenth Century and Romantics Research School provides a research context for scholars in the department whose interests include the eighteenth century and Romantic periods.

Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies

Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies

The Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) 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.

All members of the school are members also of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS), an interdisciplinary centre which brings together, at King's Manor in the centre of York, members of the departments of Archaeology, English, History and History of Art.

In association with the school, CECS runs two or three day conferences a year and a well-attended research seminar which meets five or six times a term and is largely addressed by speakers from outside (often outside the UK); recent events have included 'Tourism in Yorkshire in the Eighteenth Century', and 'Medical Matters: the cultural politics of the body in the eighteenth century'.

In connection with CECS, the school also sponsors the annual Copley lecture, in commemoration of Stephen Copley, one of the Centre's founding members. Recent speakers have included Nigel Leask (Glasgow), Brean Hammond (Nottingham), and Peter De Bolla (Cambridge).

Currently the school has over 20 research students. It runs the MA programme, Romantic and Sentimental Literature, 1770-1830 and contributes to the Centre's interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth Century Studies.

Staff

Staff

Staff

Interdisciplinary approach

The school has a strongly but not exclusively interdisciplinary character.

Harriet Guest has recently completed a monograph on women and the language of feeling from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen, titled Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution, which will be published by Oxford in 2013. She is now researching British seaside resorts before the railways; Stephen Minta is working on a political biography of Lord Byron; James Watt works on orientalism, empire, and race and is currently working on a study of British Orientalist fiction in the period. Mary Fairclough is now researching the literal and figurative uses of  electricity; Alison O'Byrne is completing a monograoh on the art of walking in London. Ziad Elmarsafy has research interests in the literature and culture of Enlightenment France, as well as in early Orientalisms and the relationship between literature, philosophy and religion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Books recently published by members of the school include:

  • Harriet Guest's Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge 2007)
  • James Watt's Contesting the Gothic (Cambridge University Press)
  • Mary Fairclough's The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge, 2013)
  • Emma Major's monograph, Madam Britannia: Women, church and nation in literary culture 1750-1800 (Oxford, 2012)
  • Ziad Elmarsafy's The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, which was awarded the 2010 British-Kuwait Friendship Society / British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) Prize for the best book in Middle Eastern Studies