CNCSI is the organic evolution of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies (CNCS), founded at Durham University in 2013 by Prof. Bennett Zon.  CNCS is a thriving research centre, including postgraduates, postdoctoral fellows and academic staff at all career levels.  It represents five universities: Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Teesside and Sunderland, and comprises roughly 200 national and international individuals and institutions.  Since 2015 it has attracted many Northern Bridge PhD students and postdoctoral fellows (Addison Wheeler, British Academy, Fulbright, Leverhulme, Marie Curie, Newton), and has hosted numerous large and small project grants from the AHRC, ESRC and elsewhere. More recently CNCS hosted the £1 million AHRC grant ‘Jewish’ Country Houses: Objects, Networks, People (Tom Stammers, CNCS Associate Director, 2019-23).

CNCSI was born in the image of CNCS, in 2018, at a CNCS meeting of leaders of 35 international research centres, institutes, professional societies, and independent research organisations. 

That meeting proved what many scholars had thought – that despite the existence of many nineteenth-century organisations all over the world, collectively they:

1. tended to work in isolation, seldom collaborating with other national or international organisations
2. their members came mainly from the country where the organisation was founded
3. linguistic barriers obstructed broad international accessibility and dissemination
4. their range of scholarly interests tended, perhaps inevitably, to reflect national boundaries; and
5. despite emphasizing interdisciplinarity in theory, in practice their manifest interests lay principally in history and literature.

Since then, CNCSI has grown exponentially, both in number and type of organisation, and a second revised and expanded MoU is currently being prepared to include

• Universities: Baylor University (USA), Hokkaido University (Japan), McGill University (Canada), Shiv Nadar University (India), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Birmingham (UK), Universidad de los Andes-Bogotá (Colombia), University of Bucharest and the National University of Music Bucharest (Romania), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Houston (USA)
• Museums and Independent Research Organisations: The V&A, The Science Museum Group (UK), The Hirschsprung Collection (Denmark), the Petit Palais, the Musée d’Orsay (France); and
• Professional Societies: INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies; BAVS (British Association of Victorian Studies); and NCSA (Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Administrative Structure

CNCSI is administered by the Director, Associate Directors and an Advisory Board which includes ex officio members.

Details of the current office holders (from 2021) are detailed in the table below:

Our Ex Officio Members are listed below: