Centre for Intellectual History

Welcome to SCIH

The University of Sussex has long been an important national and international centre for research in intellectual history. At its foundation, intellectual history at Sussex brought together faculty from disparate areas in the arts and social sciences (Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Classics, Sociology, Politics, and Theology). Intellectual history has thrived at Sussex because of the University’s traditional focus upon interdisciplinarity, and the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History's task is to maintain this tradition. The Centre continues the tradition of investigation into political, economic, and social thought and its connections with literature from early modern to modern times in Britain and in Europe. While maintaining a focus on the national and international history of social, political and economic thought, the Centre has sought to broaden the agenda to include the history of philosophy and science and their connections with religious thought. We maintain a broad European perspective in these areas through recent and current work on Dutch, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, Scottish, and Swiss topics. The transfer of ideas internationally and across continents is also a central concern of the centre.

The Centre promotes intellectual history by being a hub for scholars to pursue research and develop their teaching and by maintaining links to other groups in the UK, across Europe and in North America, Australasia, the Middle East and Far East.

Within Sussex we collaborate with the Department of Philosophy, the Centre for Early Modern Studies, and the Centre for German-Jewish Studies. We have a lively graduate programme with MA, MPhil and DPhil students participating in joint seminars. We host extensive online text resources and are developing discussion fora, both for the academic and the wider community.

The Centre is home to the Newton Project, the most technically advanced AHRC humanities project and one of the most ambitious manuscript text-encoding projects in the world - and it is open access.

Together with The Centre for Dissenting Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, SCIH runs a major project on The Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, that is funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

With the London Library we have launched a major text database of James Mill's writings.

As part of the British Academy funded project ‘Calvinism and Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Studies of Scotland and Geneva’ we have begun the transcription of Étienne Dumont's manuscripts and others pertaining to eighteenth-century Geneva.

We have recently digitised the 15,000 page archive of the late Mrs. Patricia James, containing valuable research conducted on Thomas Robert Malthus and his family.

To add to our 'Papers of Intellectual Historians' series we are digitizing the Sussex intellectual historian Helmut Pappe's unpublished work on the Genevan political economist and historian Sismonde de Sismondi.

We are also launching the Thomas Paine Project, a major initiative to establish a permanent visitor centre devoted to Paine, to encourage the study of Paine in schools, and to put online manuscript and published material concerning Paine and his times.

With the University of Lausanne we are launching the Swiss section of a database dedicated to texts and manuscripts on Enlightenment Intellectual History. This will includes texts and manuscripts of major and minor figures in the European enlightenment and will be launched in the Summer of 2012.

We welcome students who want to study intellectual history. We have a ‘Certificate in Intellectual History’ for visiting undergradutes, an MA programme, MPhil programme, and DPhil programme.

Several major research projects are housed at the Centre. The international journal History of European Ideas is edited here.