About the Centre
A research community
We warmly encourage our students to organise activities for the CECS community. CECS MA and PhD students have run highly successful conferences, sent panels to international conferences, and have established a very popular Postgraduate Forum which provides them with valuable peer support for their research.
In the almost 30 years since its foundation the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies has come to be recognised as a leading centre in the English-speaking world for interdisciplinary research in the eighteenth century.
The Centre was founded in 1997. It has over 20 permanent members of staff and some 30-40 affiliated PhD students, and runs a flourishing MA programme with a wide range of optional courses.
Its research seminars, held four or five times a semester, attract visiting speakers from Europe and North America as well as from UK, as do its frequent international conferences and one-day symposia.
Eighteenth-Century Resources
At the University of York
Almost all the major online databases for research into the 18th and early 19th centuries - including ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), the British Periodicals Collection, the 19th-century British Library Newspaper Collection and the 17th- 18th-centuries Burney Newspaper Collection - are available at all workstations in the University. All students have access to the extensive resources of libraries on the Heslington Campus, including special collections of rare books, the comprehensive collection of more than 12,000 reels of microfilmed 18th-century books and ephemera, and the unique and extensive archival resources of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research.
Outside the University
Within easy reach of the campus are the York City Art Gallery, York City Archives, and the major 18th-century collections at York Minster Library. York's excellent resources are backed up by the presence, only a dozen miles away, of the British Library at Boston Spa, easily accessible using the University's free minibus service.
The City of York
York 800 Video of History of York
The city of York is a stimulating environment for the study of the eighteenth century; it contains a wealth of Georgian architecture, including buildings by Carr and Burlington. The York Assembly Rooms, designed and erected by Lord Burlington, 1730-1735, are open to the public, as well as a flourishing Georgian Society which runs a large programme of events, and a Georgian museum at Fairfax House which stages frequent exhibitions of everyday life in eighteenth-century England. From York, there is easy access to the great eighteenth-century houses and landscape gardens of Yorkshire, including Castle Howard, Harewood House, and Burton Constable.
