Café Lumières Café Lumières Café Lumières

Café Lumières

18th-century research in dialogue

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Welcome to the Café Lumières

About Café Lumières

Co-organised by the IZEA in Halle and the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford, Café Lumières is a digital meeting space to encourage the informal exchange of ideas and to help generate connections between colleagues and their projects. All researchers working on aspects of eighteenth-century culture are welcome to join in the dialogue, in English, French or German as they prefer. They are invited to present their (new) projects or individual facets of them, introduce (re-)sources, from uncovered manuscripts to digital tools, and discuss theory, research methods and approaches as well as scholarly publications.

A research centre of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) is a central institution for Enlightenment research in Germany, dedicated to examining the foundations of modern western societies in the ideas and practices that emerged in the course of the long eighteenth century. In addition to offering research fellowships to international scholars from all humanities disciplines, the IZEA regularly organises workshops and conferences and contributes to interdisciplinary research with the publications in the Centre’s two book series, Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung (De Gruyter) and Kleine Schriften des IZEA (Mitteldeutscher Verlag).

At the heart of an extensive network of collaborators, partners and sponsors, the Voltaire Foundation is a leading organization for international eighteenth-century scholarship. Along with its opportunities programme for students, its blog and the frequent scholarly events, the Foundation’s activities relate to central publishing projects, namely, the authoritative edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres completes de Voltaire), the correspondences of several key French thinkers, among them, Voltaire, Rousseau and Bayle, as well as the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), a major series committed to Enlightenment Studies. The Voltaire Foundation acts as secretariat of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), the largest association of eighteenth-century scholars worldwide.

If you are interested in contributing to the discussion at Café Lumières, please contact our blog editors with your ideas and suggestions:

Birgit Mikus (birgit.mikus(at)voltaire.ox.ac.uk).
Theresa Schön (theresa.schoen(at)izea.uni-halle.de).

Blog entries as well as comments will be previewed prior to being published. We ask all contributors to abide by the rules of (online) conduct and refrain from (deliberately) offensive commentary to make Café Lumières a rewarding experience for everyone.