Departmental Research Centres
David Jones Centre
The David Jones Centre was officially launched on Friday 14 September at the DRWM, National Library of Wales. This new Research Centre will support research on the history and impact of Modernism in Wales and, more broadly, on the creative interaction of word and image, the textual and the visual. The Centre plans to host an annual conference and seminar programme, and will seek to promote the exciting possibilities for new research offered by the literary and artistic archives at the National Library of Wales. If you would like more information, please contact Luke Thurston.
Centre for Romantic Studies
Since its founding in 2004, CRS remains the only centre for Romantic Studies in Wales. Through a programme of individual, collaborative and interdisciplinary academic research, and a regular schedule of major international conferences, CRS has developed into a highly respected environment for innovative refigurings of Romantic Studies. From its base in rural mid-Wales, CRS is committed to the ‘deep rooting’ of Romantic culture in precise geographical and imagined locations; in particular human communities, dialogues and networks; in devolved, localist cultural and political identities; and in popular forms of Romanticism that resist hegemonic and orthodox narratives. CRS offers lecture programmes and teaching/research activities, and hosts the ‘Landor Lecture’, delivered in recent years by Professor David Fairer and Professor Kenneth Johnston. For further information contact Damian Walford Davies or Richard Marggraf Turley
Centre for Women's Writing and Literary Culture
The Centre for Women’s Writing and Literary Culture has grown from significant research strengths in the Department, developed over a number of years (see Staff Research Areas). It provides a focus for research into women’s writing of all literary periods in both English studies and creative writing.
The Centre supports individual work in specific fields and but also fosters cross-period and cross-disciplinary (creative/literary) engagement and collaboration and is active in developing larger collaborative network projects both within and beyond the department. The Centre in Aberystwyth is unique in the UK, covering women’s writing over a broad range of literary periods and subjects. It includes creative and critical approaches, together with strong coverage of Welsh writers. For further information go to Centre for Women's Writing and Literary Culture.
Contempo
‘ContemPo’, which was founded in 2006, is the everyday or ‘working’ title of the Centre for Contemporary Poetry, which is a collaborative research centre co-ordinated by the English Departments of the ‘triangular core’ of Aberystwyth University (Co-ordinator, Peter Barry), Northumbria University (Co-ordinator: Ian Davidson), and the University of Brighton (Co-ordinator John Wrighton).
It is a ‘critical/creative’ grouping devoted to the interests of poets who are also academics, academics who are also poets, and those who are ‘merely’ one or the other. Contempo has a special (but not exclusive) interest in investigating experimental and performance poetries and their poetics.
Its core-activity is a programme of video-linked papers, seminars, and performances by academics, postgraduate students, and invitees of the three full-member institutions. ContemPo has a website which is maintained by John Wrighton and includes material from most of the sessions to date. Future plans include the development of an on-line critical-creative journal, the development of applications for external funding for collaborative projects linked to ContemPo, and the further expansion of the network, initially by vodcast (video on demand video-clips), enabling a wider networking of the sessions. A number of the seminars can be viewed as podcasts. For further information go to contempo
IMEMS - Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) is part of the research and enterprise partnership between Aberystwyth and Bangor Universities. It was launched in 2006 and is a collaborative interdisciplinary research institute. The Director is Professor Helen Wilcox (Bangor University) and members from this deparment are: Jayne Archer, Sarah Hutton, Sarah Prescott and Elisabeth Salter. IMEMS brings together researchers and postgraduate students from both Universities working in the fields of history, literature, music, theology and Celtic studies, in the period 500-1800. IMEMS has identified four core research themes on which it currently focuses: Women and the Sacred, Writing Wales, Cultures of the Written Artifact, Cultures of War and Conflict Resolution.
Its core activities include a fortnightly video-link research seminar which is broadcast live across Wales, see programme
IMEMS also organizes programmes of conferences, workshops and colloquia, which are attended by scholars from around the world. IMEMS provides a lively research environment for Postgraduate Students, whether at Masters or PhD level. With the regular programmes of research seminars, student led workshops and postgraduate training sessions, IMEMS offers a supportive and stimulating context for postgraduate work in medieval and early modern studies. For further information go to http://www.imems.ac.uk/