A Summary of our project
On Friday 16 and Saturday 17 May, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) will hold its first ever book sale. We’re raising funds to support the innovative and exciting research of our postgraduates through this donation driven sale, so anything you can give to support us would be massively appreciated.
Who are we?
Founded in 1997, CECS is the largest and leading centre for interdisciplinary eighteenth century studies. We have a lot of books and the clear out will be massive. And we have a huge incentive to get organized in preparation for our move to Heslington Hall, to join York’s new hub for the arts and humanities in the most beautiful historic building on our university’s campus. Our sale will include many beloved scholarly books on eighteenth century topics and also loads of contemporary novelists, poets and non-fiction writers. We do read outside of our academic focus, we promise!
Book sale details
So come along to CECS at King’s Manor from 11am to 4pm on the 16th or 17th May to choose some favourite books and discover new ones. Our book sale is donation based, with all proceeds going to our new postgraduate research fund. If you can’t make it in person and still want to support us, you can also donate online.
We have an external donor who has promised to match donations up to £5,000 to the book sale, so the more books we sell, the more postgraduate research we can support!
Where will the money go?
CECS does not currently have a fund to support travel to archives, libraries and conferences for postgraduates, so this funding will have a direct and immediate impact on the cutting-edge research undertaken by our brilliant students.
Our book sale will create a fund, starting in autumn 2025, to which CECS postgraduates can apply to support their essential travel to research sources and conferences. It will be our first fund to do so in our over 25 year history. We are prioritising funding for postgraduates because we strongly believe in their innovative interdisciplinary research.
And if you can’t make the book sale but feel passionately about our work, we would still very much welcome any donation you are able to make to help towards this fund.
How we will use the funds
We hope to build a sustainable fund that will provide essential research support to postgraduates for at least 3 years. Postgraduates will be able to apply for support from £200-500 per year to fund travel to archives and / or conferences.
Find us here
You can find us on Bluesky at @cecs-york.bksy.social to follow our progress!
Help us succeed!
And if you’re not able to give money to help us succeed, please share this project with anyone you think would support us – on Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email, telephone, in a chat over the fence or on your blog.
We’d be thrilled if you could share it with everyone you know as we think it's a great idea, and the more people who know about it, the more likely we are to make this work out for our postgraduates.
And we know we said you don't need to give money to help us, but we'd love it if you did! Please sponsor us and help make this happen.
If you are considering a larger gift and would like to have a conversation first, please get in touch with Sharon Oakley, on sharon.oakley@york.ac.uk.
