About the CMTC

The mission of the Centre is to promote the study of pre-modern manuscript and epigraphic traditions in a broad comparative perspective, relying on the strong multi-disciplinary community in Oxford while openly engaging with scholars in other institutions worldwide.

ACTIVITIES

The activities of the Centre are at once specialised and interdisciplinary, united by the common goal of enabling long-term research on how knowledge and meaning are shaped and sustained by material conditions, past and present. As a platform for international researchers to engage in close dialogue across their areas of expertise and inform each other about approaches and theories developed in their various subject areas, our goal is to generate discussions that cross subject boundaries and contribute to the theoretical understanding of material text cultures and their impact on knowledge production in global literate societies. With our multidisciplinary approach, crossing traditional academic divisions, we hope to cast light on the deep structures of human behaviours in material knowledge production, past and present.

HISTORY

The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures was established as a research concentration at The Queen’s College, Oxford in 2018. CMTC began in 2012 as an initiative of a group of Fellows at Queen’s, led by Dirk Meyer, with common interests in manuscript and text cultures in literate societies. Since then it has drawn in academics and postdoctoral researchers from other colleges. It provides the nucleus of a research cluster for the humanities with a focus on knowledge production and text circulation which we hope will attract future graduate students.

The Centre holds a dedicated postdoctoral position in Manuscript and Text Cultures. The first postdoctoral fellow of the Centre was Dr Selena Wisnom, now Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East, University of Leicester. Our first doctoral student, the Jennifer and John Clay Scholar of Sanskrit, was Tara Hathaway. We are currently fundraising for an endowed doctoral studentship and other activities of the Centre.