…’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever did you spy …”

Welcome to the University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies. Based within the College of Humanities, the Centre for Victorian Studies promotes interdisciplinary research and teaching in all aspects of nineteenth-century literature, culture and media. It comprehends the Victorian period in geographically and historically extensive terms; its researchers move beyond an island’s literature and culture to its global interdependencies and beyond Victoria’s reign to its antecedents and legacies. The CVS has an international reputation for its innovative, interdisciplinary and transnational research and teaching in wide-ranging aspects of nineteenth-century literature, media and culture, as well as its strong archival holdings, thriving postgraduate community and internationally recognised academic events.

Research fostered by the Centre has a wide historical and conceptual scope. Current projects include Women and Craft, Hardy and Science, Victorian Globalization, Optical Entertainments, nineteenth-century gothic in the South West, sexology and sexual knowledge, a joint biography of Benjamin and Mary Disraeli, Robert Louis Stevenson, decadent poetics, poetics and Historical Prosody, and early film. We are comprised of a diverse range of scholars, and we respect diversity of opinion and recognise the 2010 UK Equality Act.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”

_{Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre}

_{* The header is excerpted from the opening lines of “The Spider and the Fly” (1829) by Mary Howitt.}