About the Centre
Launched in October 2009, the interdisciplinary Centre for Modern Studies (CModS), located in the Humanities Research Centre at York within the Berrick Saul Building, has quickly established itself as a thriving locus for research and pedagogical activity in the Modern period, hosting numerous research events, fostering research bids, and building on existing offerings to develop its own interdisciplinary MA, on Culture and Thought after 1945, which launches in October 2011.
The Centre seeks to promote innovative, significant, world-class research across the fields of literature, film, history, politics, philosophy, sociology, music, media studies, performance studies and the fine and applied arts in the period after 1850, and from a wide variety of theoretical, methodological and historiographical perspectives.
Seeking to foster research on both sides of the presumed Modernist divide around 1910, and to connect Victorianists, Modernists, Post-Modernists, and scholars of the Contemporary, the Centre aims to promote historical and theoretical work within and alongside traditional grand narratives for the period.
The Centre aims to develop and promote its intellectual agendas and initiatives amongst faculty and post-graduate communities within the university's humanities and social science departments, as well as regionally, nationally and internationally, through collaboration with other academic and partner institutions.
The Centre receives particular support from History, English and History of Art, but has a desire to foster collaborations across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, and to problematise the notion of the 'modern' from a number of disciplinary, methodological and historical perspectives.
Each year, the Centre pump-primes a number of 'research strands' directed by staff from participating departments, where there is significant potential for developing interdisciplinary initiatives involving multiple departments and the potential for large-scale external funding bids. The Centre also offers a number of small grants each year to postgraduate students to develop interdisciplinary research connections.
The Director of CModS is Jason Edwards .