88 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Telephone: 848-932-7750; Fax: 732-445-4219
http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu
Seth Koven and Carla Yanni, Codirectors
The Rutgers British Studies Center (RBSC) supports a rich
variety of programming--lectures, conferences, seminars, workshops, and
roundtable--dedicated to the interdisciplinary analysis of British history and
culture. The center's work is broad in chronological scope and geographical
sweep, ranging from the Early Middle Ages to the present and from the local to
the global. Chronologically, we aim to investigate conventional boundaries
between tradition and modernity, feudalism and capitalism, the imperial and the
post-imperial, the neoclassical and the post-romantic, and the modern and the
postmodern. Geographically, we inquire into relations between regions and
nations within the British Isles and within the British Empire, between Britain
and Europe, and between imperial and post-imperial Britain and the rest of the
world. Methodologically, the center seeks to understand what sort of knowledge
the traditional divisions between academic disciplines promote and what sort
they preclude so that our interdisciplinary projects in scholarship and
teaching may be guided by an informed sense of purpose. Our aim is to encourage
not a quest for a dubious unity of method but a series of intellectual
encounters and engagements, producing friction as much as consensus and
stimulating both productive disagreements and transformative collaborations.
