The Institute of English Studies at 25

2024 witnessed the 25th anniversary of the Institute of English Studies.  A few years younger than the School of Advanced Study, which celebrated its 30th year in 2024, and not as old as other Institutes in SAS (the Institute of Classical Studies was founded in 1953, the Institute of Historical Research in 1921 and the Warburg Institute joined the University of London in 1944, for example), but still the IES merited a birthday party – and cake. 

Staff, students, Fellows and friends celebrated the IES at 25 at our annual December party hosted by our close neighbours in Bedford Square, Maggs Bros. Thank you Ed Maggs, Ben Maggs, and Fuchsia Voremberg of Maggs Bros. The honour of cutting the IES Cake of Books – thank you, Ellie Hardy, Institute Manager for that brilliant design – fell to Andrew Nash, now Director of the London Rare Books School (LRBS) and Deputy Director of the Institute, then, in 1999, the Institute’s first postdoctoral Fellow. Some of you have seen these photos before, but I make no apologies for repeating them. The IES ended its 25th year with a lovely party. Thank you all.

As the UK’s only national institute for research promotion, facilitation and advocacy in English Studies, the IES plays an important role in the research landscape of the Arts and Humanities. 2024 was not an easy year for English Studies or the Humanities nationally, however. Funding for research and teaching in the Humanities continued to contract and the impact on English Studies is ongoing. In 2025, encouraged by the support of the IES Advisory Council, the IES will continue to advocate for the public benefits – social, economic, creative and cultural – of English Studies in an increasingly digital and AI world, alongside the English Association and University English, the other two major national organisations for English. We will advance our work with the Bibliographical Society and our colleagues in the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and the rare books trade to explore the past, present and future of books, collections and archives. And we will continue to promote English Studies as a creative, critical, historically informed, future-facing, and technologically aware discipline. There is more to do to show our various publics and audiences how successfully English Studies works across and within the Arts, the Humanities and the Sciences, and how it can encourage ambitious collaborative research now and in the future. 
We will do this work in 2025 and for the future because of the firm foundation laid in the Institute’s first 25 years and its thorough integration into the School of Advanced Study, the UK’s only national centre for Humanities research support, promotion and advocacy. 

Collaboration and co-operative support for the discipline together with creative, critical and cultural innovation are hallmarks of the IES.  In 2025 we will advance and sustain co-created, engaged, practice-informed research and research training with HEI partners, learned societies, the GLAM sector and our colleagues in the School. We will develop further researcher training in book and manuscript studies  through the LRBS, the London International Palaeography School (LIPS), short courses, the MA/MRes in the History of the Book and the PhD programme (with its notable success at attracting collaborative doctoral awards). And, through the IES Fellowship programme, externally-funded postdoctoral fellowships, research seminars, workshops and conferences, we will continue to provide spaces for researchers to do the necessary work of advanced thinking and engaged learning essential to research and to research-led teaching.

Advancing research through shared learning is central to research practice in the Institute as well. Towards the end of 2024 two innovative collaborative research projects neared completion: Laura Cleaver’s ERC-funded project on the trade in medieval manuscripts in the first half of the twentieth century (which also supported 5 postdoctoral Fellows and 3 PhDs); and Andrew Nash’s co-PI in the Leverhulme-funded project on the early history of the Society of Authors 1884-1914 (which also brought a fully-funded PhD to the Institute). Both projects show how the history of information, knowledge production, both cultural and creative, and the trade in books and objects can also help address the increasingly complex circuits of knowledge production now.  Information networks, archives and the social, political and cultural history of print are central as well to forthcoming books by Michael Durrant on early modern England and Pragya Dhital on modern India, while Christopher Ohge’s work continues to break new ground in digital editing, archiving and storytelling. Autumn 2025 will see the re-opening of the Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery and the launch of The Art of the Gothic, curated by Cynthia Johnston. The exhibition is the next phase of Johnston’s long engagement with museums and libraries in the North West of England to unlock their cultural heritage through collections research and arts practices. Her work is a model of what place-based research can achieve.

As these and similar achievements over the last 25 years have demonstrated, the IES is small when judged by the number of its staff, both professional and academic, but bold in its ambitions for English Studies, a discipline which is creative and language-focussed, literary and critical, technological and historical, and alive to the intersections between the cultural and the commercial. Over the holiday period, Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the AHRC, has laid out the case for increased strategic funding for Arts and Humanities research at this time of critical national and global challenges. It is important that English Studies joins the conversation, and I encourage the IES community to read and reflect on Smith’s blogs.¹ The research infrastructure of the Arts and Humanities and the importance of libraries, collections and archives for learning and teaching are under-remarked, Smith notes. In this and other respects, the IES has expertise and case studies to offer.

Predictions are hostages to fortune so this blog written like Smith’s between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new won’t offer any. Warren Chernaik was the first director of the Centre for English Studies, which became in 1999 the Institute of English Studies. Warwick Gould, Sandra Clark, Wim Van Mierlo, Rick Rylance and Andrew Nash have all served as directors or acting directors of the IES. The IES has been fortunate too in our Institute managers and administrators, including Conor Wyer, Jon Millington, Chris Adams, Helen Bhandari and Ellie Hardy. I am confident of the ongoing commitment of the IES to English Studies, the Humanities, and the national research landscape in its widest sense. I am encouraged by Christopher Smith’s bold, ambitious, and clear-sighted articulation of the vital importance of AHRC funding to a responsible, civil, collaborative, innovative and integrated research culture in the UK and internationally. There is no more important a time to attend to the past, present, and future of reading, writing, speaking, making, thinking and learning; these are at the core of all scientific knowledge, after all.

_{1 Christopher Smith, 'The funder among the philologists'; Smith posted 12 provocations posted by 26 December 2024 and 5 January 2025.}