About the Centre
Mission statement
The Centre for Romantic Studies (CRS) forms part of the Department of English, founded on the international reputation of its scholars and critics of Romanticism. It is, however, not simply a literary enterprise. We aim to broaden fundamentally the scope of Romantic Studies so that it includes all aspects of history, culture, and society c. 1700-1850.
That period was home to greater collaboration between the worlds of art and science, a collaborative impulse symbolised in the close working relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Humphry Davy, who together forged a lasting myth of British ‘Romantic Science’. The CRS aims to resurrect those interdisciplinary associations by pioneering collaborative projects between academic disciplines and institutions, and by reaching outside of academia into the public domain.
Romantic Bristol
Bristol is the foremost city of the English Romantic movement. The University's 1998 conference, Bristol: Romantic City, comprehensively demonstrated the significance of Bristol cultural life to Romantic culture, broadly conceived as running from 1750-1850. As Thomas Chatterton's city, and as the place where William Wordsworth first met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bristol has a unique claim to the genesis of Romantic poetry. Alongside literature and radical politics, Bristol was also the intellectual crucible for figures such as Thomas Beddoes, Edward Jenner, and Humphry Davy: scientists who worked alongside poets. This collective arts and science collaboration was set against the local background of debate over the slave trade. The Centre for Romantic Studies has built on the Romantic City conference in order to extend the definition of 'Romanticism' into areas as diverse as medicine, science, human rights, and folklore.
The wider aims of the CRS were focused in the 2007 BARS/NASSR Conference, hosted by the CRS and other departments at the University, a prestigious international event that brought the world’s most eminent scholars in Romantic Studies to Bristol. The 2007 Conference was an example of the CRS’s scale of ambition to reach across the University, the region and the world in order to provide a centre for interdisciplinary collaboration in Romantic studies, and to ensure that the research undertaken by the Centre remains innovative, challenging and accessible beyond the University.