The Dickens Project is an international research consortium and community outreach organization based at UCSC and dedicated to creating communities around the study of 19th-century literature. The Project’s mission since its founding in 1981 has always been both academic and public-facing: it seeks not only to produce cutting-edge research about 19th-century literature and culture and to foster graduate student development, but also to engage the community at large in reading 19th-century novels and generating new ways to understand their relevance to our current moment.
Through its coordinated program of conferences, seminars, workshops, secondary school programming, and especially its annual week-long summer institute—the Dickens Universe—the Dickens Project not only helps to shape the direction of 19th-century Anglophone studies nationally and internationally, but also creates opportunities for senior citizens, K-12 teachers, high school students, and book lovers from all walks of life to produce new literary knowledge in and for themselves and their communities.
