The start of many good things to come
It is remarkable how much a minivan full of dedicated, professional postgraduate researchers can resemble the atmosphere of a primary school field trip – the excitement, the camaraderie! The occasion was not dissimilar, in fact: a month into my PhD in English Literature, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) organised a field trip for its postgraduate students to Harewood House, a stately and porticoed Georgian manor overlooking the green and patchworked landscape that separates Harrogate from Leeds, to visit a landmark exhibition of works and artefacts from two of the great chroniclers of the Regency country house, J.M.W. Turner and Jane Austen, in an environment which would have been familiar to both.
The exhibition is particulary interesting to us, as it was put together by a team of CECS academics and postgraduate students. Experts on eighteenth-century women’s writing, for instance, and on Regency art history came together with Harewood House’s curators to assemble a magnificent interdisciplinary display intended to shake off our preconceptions of Austen as ensconced in a stately salon world of tea in fine-China, and of Turner as an isolated figure on a hillside, divorced from Regency society as a whole.
Interdisciplinary expertise
As I moved through the exhibition with my colleagues, the distance between these two icons of the Regency era began to break down, as their works – delicate pencil sketches by Turner; Austen’s manuscript for Sanditon (1817) – took root in a shared social world of marbled paper notebooks, of delicate Claude-glasses, and of relationships and conversations brought to life by the CECS team’s panels.
But it was not only the exhibition that brought Austen and Turner to life that day: before a cabinet of magnifying and distorting lenses used by regency landscape artists, a colleague I had never met before began to talk about magnification in the eighteenth century, the subject of her history PhD; a little further on, a Turner sketch on the wall was placed in the broader context of a recent exhibition of his sketches in London, an exhibition I had not seen – but which had informed a chapter on Turner by another colleague, working across English and art history. The Sanditon manuscript began to speak of credit and trade, and of slavery and empire, not in its own voice but in that of an Austen scholar who has since successfully defended her remarkable dissertation on Austen’s gossip and economics.
Learning through community
This trip, one of the first CECS events I was able to attend after joining the Centre, taught me two things about my new institutional home. The first was that nobody in the Centre was a stranger: even if we hadn’t yet been introduced, we knew we spoke the same language, shared a passion for the world of the eighteenth century. And the second was that our department is a broad church, a home for completely different disciplines, approaches, and foci – and that by breaking down the disciplinary boundaries you might find elsewhere, students in CECS could gain an immersion in the culture and history of the eighteenth century richer and deeper than anywhere else. In CECS, we learn through community.
This has been my experience of the department since the very beginning, and it has continued throughout the productive, exhausting, and thrilling first year of my PhD. This is not only a matter of atmosphere or proximity: the department has worked tirelessly to make itself a connected and engaged place to do research. Access to shared CECS workspaces and regular research events ensure that not only do students across CECS remain in close contact, but that we remain in touch with the cutting edge of eighteenth-century scholarship across the world, with the foremost scholars from Britain, the US, and the Continent offering seminars and training sessions every semester.
CECS in the wider world
The CECS culture of community, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity has produced many incredible projects, and not only those led by staff. Through my first year, I have had the opportunity to develop, in partnership with my colleague Kate Nankervis, the Eighteenth-Century Ecologies Network, a group aimed at fostering collaboration and community amongst ecocritical scholars of our period. Together we have organised several guest seminars by important figures in our field, held in the CECS spaces in Heslington Hall and broadcast across the world via Zoom, placing CECS at the centre not only of York’s scholarly community, but of a community stretching from nearby Durham and Manchester to universities in New Zealand and Japan.
This project would not have been possible without the culture of community and collaboration fostered here at the CECS. Despite the dominant image of the Romantic alone atop a lonely mountain – whether that be Wordsworth or Turner – the long eighteenth century was a time of sociability and collaboration, of ever more intricate networks stretching across the world. There is no better way – nor a more personally enriching one – to study this world than through the interdisciplinarity and connection that defines research in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.
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