Centre for Regional Literature and Culture
County Map of Nottinghamshire by Richard Blome (d. 1605), Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham.
The Centre for Regional Literature and Culture was launched in 2005 with a conference at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. The Centre has two remits: to co-ordinate the activities of what had previously been two single-discipline centres -- the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre and The Byron Centre for the Study of Literature and Social Change; and to develop new research initiatives that interrogate the concepts of regionality and provincialism and explore the interactions between regional and national identities. The Centre for Regional Literature and Culture welcomes applications from postgraduate students.
The Centre for Regional Literature and Culture has, since its inception, re-focused the priorities of the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre and The Byron Centre for the Study of Literature and Social Change in order better to exploit the identities of Byron and Lawrence as East Midlands authors. In addition, the Centre for Regional Literature and Culture is fostering new research initiatives that cover a wider geographical and chronological range and have an interdisciplinary bias.
Current research projects involving members of the Centre for Regional Literature and Culture include the AHRC-funded ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-67’; and ‘Landscape, Space, Place’, the first stage of which has received funding from the University Research Committee, via the Humanities Research Centre's ‘Interdisciplinary Initiatives in the Humanities’ Scheme. ‘Water, Culture and Society’ is running a series of seminars, lectures and workshops, as well as welcoming a Leverhulme-funded visiting professor, W.J.T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago.
The Centre for Regional Literature and Culture is home to The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, the first-ever edition of the correspondence of the controversial and influential ‘Lake’ poet. Parts 1-4 of this eight-part project are funded by the AHRC. The Collected Letters has also received grants from the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust and North American research libraries.
The Centre for Regional Literature and Culture runs a regular programme of events, including ‘The Eighteenth Century Interdisciplinary Seminar’.
