The Dickens Project

Arguably the first modern novelist, Dickens's concern with social and environmental issues, urban crime, child abuse, poverty, and exploitation, makes him very much a writer for our own time, partly because he is so much a writer of his own time. The Victorian Period faced, and in some cases created, the same problems that concern us today. Through the study of Dickens and some of his contemporaries, we engage in an ongoing social commentary that is still relevant. As a writer, Dickens is modern in his self-consciousness about the act of writing fiction. His novels explore aspects of the writer's dilemma in ways that invite new critical methods.

Concerned with these simultaneously historic and modern issues, The Dickens Project consists of faculty and graduate students from the eight general campuses of the University of California as well as from other major American and international universities. Founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, the consortium includes the following universities among its institutional members:

• Birkbeck, University of London
• City University of New York
• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Indiana University
• Louisiana State University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• New York University
• Penn State University
• Princeton University
• Rice University
• Royal Holloway, University of London
• Rutgers University
• Stanford University
• University at Buffalo
• University of Exeter
• University of Iowa
• University of Melbourne
• University of New England (Armidale, New South Wales)
• University of Puget Sound
• University of South Carolina
• University of Southern California
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• University of Texas at Austin
• Vanderbilt University
• Yale University

In addition, faculty regularly attend from Georgetown University, University of York, University of Southern Mississippi, and University of Vermont.

The Project creates opportunities for collaborative research on Dickens and the Victorian age, and disseminates research findings through annual conferences, institutes, and publications. It supports the professional development of graduate students and produces curricular material for teaching Victorian literature at both secondary and post-secondary levels.

The Dickens Project is a Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) of the University of California. Its research activities have been supported by extra-mural grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Council for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, the Exxon Education Foundation, dues from member schools, and private gifts. Activities for the general public are supported in part by contributions to a private, non-profit organization, The Friends of the Dickens Project.