The Centre

The first eighteenth-century studies centre in southern England, Kent’s Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century was established in 2007. We investigate such questions as, what exactly was the empire that produced ‘postcolonial’ resistance? How might one approach the colonial archive? What logic shapes the literary and artistic culture of the ‘long’ mercantilist moment between 1650 and 1830 in Britain and outside it, and how might this period account for the ‘long revolution’ that Raymond Williams described? The Centre sponsors research and invites postgraduate applications in such areas of enquiry as visual and material culture; book history, manuscript and print culture; women’s writing; the global ambitions of Britain as an empire, especially with regard to France and the Ottoman Empire; gender and sexuality; intellectual history; labouring-class writing; empire, slavery, and the Black Atlantic; landscape studies; animal studies.

The Centre has links with Chawton House, Godmersham Park and Heritage Centre (two important sites for Jane Austen studies), the National Maritime Museum, and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. It hosts the Evliya Ҫelebi Way project, in search of Ottoman worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown.

It also offers an interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies.