Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS), Royal Holloway

Description

The Department of English is home to the College's longstanding Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS), one of the leading national and international Centres for Victorian Studies.

In 2009, Royal Holloway’s Centre for Victorian Studies was the venue for the first summit meeting bringing together all staff belonging to Victorian Studies Centres in the UK. This well-established Centre at Royal Holloway hosts dynamic lectures from UK and international scholars, and its symposia range from topics such as ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Britain’ (2019) to ‘The Frozen Deep: Voices from the C19th Arctic’ (2020). The annual residential London Nineteenth-Century Postgraduate Conference is a popular, lively occasion for the meeting and exchange of ideas with postgraduate students and staff from the UK and abroad.

Events take place in one of the most flamboyant and beautiful buildings of Victorian Britain, the Founder’s Building, which in turn houses one of the finest private collections of Victorian art. The Centre is a unique place for the meeting of academic scholars, artists, writers, students and the public, where members can enjoy a true immersion in a vibrant nineteenth century atmosphere. While the CVS works to celebrate the rich Victorian art and architecture of Royal Holloway, it is not simply a dramatic 19th century backdrop to members' activities: from 2019, members have collaborated richly on symposia and on jointly hosting speakers with the curators of Art Collections. Historically the CVS has a strong scholarly base in 19th century literature and art, but it has celebrated the transition into the Humanities school in 2019 by continuing and extending to wider disciplinary engagement and collaboration with colleagues in History, Drama, Geography and the sciences.