The TORCH Enlightenment Programme co-ordinates research that builds on the University of Oxford’s extraordinarily rich resources for the study of the Enlightenment, in close collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation. Our interdisciplinary events bring together scholars from across the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and beyond. The programme includes publishing ventures such as the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, the correspondence of key figures of the French Enlightenment, and the series Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment. It also has close ties with Digital Humanities projects at Oxford: Electronic Enlightenment, the Voltaire Lab, Early Modern Letters Online, Cultures of Knowledge, and the Newton Project. The Programme fosters collaboration with international centres of research on the Enlightenment such as the IZEA in Halle and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen, among others; we also co-ordinate the newly established Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment Hub, a research group under the aegis of the larger Oxford-Berlin Partnership.
Our activities as a TORCH programme include the annual Besterman Lecture and the George Rousseau Lecture; an annual colloquium; and the Enlightenment Workshop, an interdisciplinary research seminar in the second and third terms.
The French Revolutionary Terror: Proto-Totalitarian or Public Sphere?
Seminar: "The German Enlightenment in Philosophy and Literature. Ideas, Aporias, Legacy"