Enlightenment

Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment

The TORCH Enlightenment Programme/Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment aims to co-ordinate and foster research that builds on the University of Oxford’s extraordinarily rich resources for the study of the Enlightenment.  Our interdisciplinary events bring together scholars from across the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and beyond. Our research programme has close ties to the Voltaire Foundation, which publishes, alongside the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire and the correspondence of key figures of the French Enlightenment, the newly-renamed Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment (formerly Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century - SVEC).  Under its new title, the series aims to further expand its interdisciplinary and international reach in publishing innovative studies on the Enlightenment from the widest possible range of perspectives.  The Programme also has close ties with Electronic Enlightenment, a key resource for eighteenth-century scholars providing access to an ever-increasing corpus of Enlightenment letters.  At present, our principal activities as a Programme comprise an annual Besterman Lecture by an invited scholar; an annual conference; and the Enlightenment Workshop, a series of eight seminars held in Hilary Term each year.

People

Enlightenment Programme Steering Group:

Nicholas Cronk (Modern Languages)

Ritchie Robertson (Modern Languages)

Laurence Brockliss (History)

Michael Burden (Music)

Andrew Kahn (Modern Languages)

Fiona Macintosh (Classics)

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (Modern Languages)

Kate Tunstall (Modern Languages)

Carly Watson (English)

Related Networks

Enlightenment Correspondences (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/enlightenmentcorr)

Celebrity Research (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/celebrity)

Talking about Voltaire and the Enlightenment Blog (voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/)

Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/recso)