Centre for the History of European Discourses

	Profile

The Centre for History of European Discourses provides an environment dedicated to advanced research in European intellectual and cultural history and traditions.

Rather than focusing on ideas, the Centre is concerned with the discourses in which thought is formulated, the purposes envisaged for such discourses, the networks in which they circulated, and the larger cultural and political contexts in which they functioned. The Centre's historical focus on European discourses reflects the hypothesis that the languages in which current cultural and political issues are framed are centrally derived from discourses fashioned in early modern Europe, even if these have been transmitted to us via continuous contestation rather than as uninterrupted traditions.

Among the first discursive domains to be investigated is the libertine literature of enlightenment France and the desacralising political discourses of early modern Germany. These projects will form the nucleus of an expanding series to be supported by the centre's core activities. In developing its agenda the Centre will constitute a distinctive research milieu through the supervision of postgraduate students, the support of postdoctoral fellows, and the affiliation of research scholars. Central to this agenda is a visitors program, the maintenance of national and international research networks, in-house research seminars, and a program of workshops and conferences.

Through its core staff and affiliated researchers the Centre offers high-level doctoral supervision in the following areas:

• Early modern political thought in Britain, France, and Germany
  
  
• English and French libertine and romance fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially novels written by women
  
  
• Penality and punishment in England and France from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries
  
  
• The history of religious thought in Britain, France, and Germany
  
  
• Witchcraft, demonology and heresy in Britain, France, and Germany
  
  
• Fin-de-siècle literature and the cultural history of sexology and psychiatry
  
  
• Early modern legal thought in Europe, common law and continental traditions
  
  
• Medical pathologies of race and gender
  
  
• European philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century
  
  
• Copyright, authorship, and the history of publishing
  
  
• English literary history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

	Links

	Keywords