About the Institute

The Institute of Cornish Studies (ICS) emerged in 1970/71 as a research centre jointly funded by Exeter University and Cornwall County Council, with its three core staff then as now being employees of the University of Exeter. This partnership, forged in the days before the word became fashionable, remains at the heart of the Institute’s activities, although the balance of funding has since shifted towards the University. The formation of the ICS was the result of a happy coincidence of factors, not the least of which was the late F.L.Harris’s role as both county councillor, chairing the Council’s Education Committee, and head of the University’s Extra Mural Department in Cornwall. Fred Harris’s lasting achievement was to act as a mediator between the Council and the University, overcoming mutual suspicions and guaranteeing that the ICS was physically located in Cornwall.

The ICS’s first home was, indeed, in the heart of the Central Mining District at Pool, strategically and diplomatically sited halfway between Camborne and Redruth. The Institute was housed first at Trevenson House and later at the Trevithick Building on the Cornwall College campus. Charles Thomas was the first Director and Professor of Cornish Studies and set out an ambitious agenda for the subject in his inaugural lectures. He led a small team of Oliver Padel and Myrna Combellack and their work focused on archaeology, place names and the Cornish medieval dramas. The other main thrust of the Institute’s activity in its first decade was the natural environment as it shared its space with the Cornish Biological Records Unit. Various other short-term research projects were housed by the Institute and in this period the journal Cornish Studies was produced, providing a shop window for Cornish Studies and establishing the parameters of the discipline.

However, at the end of the 1980s those parameters shifted. Professor Thomas retired, his departure following the move of Oliver Padel to Cambridge University. In the early 1990s both Myrna Combellack and the Cornish Biological Records Unit also left the Institute. The ICS gained a new Director from 1991 in Philip Payton. He set out to shift the focus of the ICS’s work away from archaeology, medieval history and the natural environment towards more contemporary issues. This change in direction was perhaps best illustrated by the publication in 1993 of Cornwall Since the War, a collection of essays on modern Cornwall. In the same year Cornish Studies was re-launched as an annual volume edited by the Director.

 This change in scholarly focus was accompanied by both a physical move, as the ICS moved from Pool to join the University’s Department of Lifelong Learning at its base at Hayne Corfe in Truro in 1994, and by new personnel. Paul Thornton and Amy Hale made their own contributions to the work of the Institute in the 1990s in the field of tourism and cultural studies and the ICS was for a time at the forefront of moves towards a contemporary Celtic Studies, resulting in a book on the New Celtic Studies, edited by Amy Hale and Philip Payton.

By 2007 the annual Cornish Studies has reached its fifteenth volume and has included over 160 articles on various aspects of Cornish Studies, written by over 100 separate contributors. Volume 10 marked the tenth anniversary of the publication by providing a critical review of the state of work in the various sub-fields of Cornish Studies over the previous ten years. By this time the discipline was mature enough to be generating its own critical debate about the form and future of the ‘New Cornish Studies’ pioneered by Philip Payton in the 1990s. By the new millennium the current core staff of Garry Tregidga and Bernard Deacon had joined the Institute and were developing new directions in the methodology of Cornish Studies.

In the meantime, in 1999 in collaboration with the Department of Lifelong Learning, the ICS introduced the first taught higher education programme in Cornish Studies, an innovative flexibly delivered part-time Master’s degree in Cornish Studies (using Internet, post, telephone and face-to-face day schools). This supplemented the research degrees that it had begun to support in the 1990s. These teaching developments brought the ICS closer in its activities to the rest of the University and in 2003 the Institute became part of the School of Historical, Sociological and Political Studies (SHiPPS), reflecting the focus of its staff on historical studies and the social sciences. On 1 August 2005 the old School of Historical, Political and Sociological Studies (SHiPSS) merged with the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, and the School of Classics, Ancient History and Theology to form The School of Humanities and Social Sciences - or HuSS for short. This new school has research excellence across the humanities and social sciences (six 5-ranking units in the last RAE exercise).

In October 2004 the ICS moved yet again, this time to join the rest of Exeter University’s Cornish ‘outposts’ and the Falmouth College of Arts on their new Combined Universities of Cornwall Campus at Tremough, just outside Penryn and tantalisingly close to the medieval centre of Cornish literary scholarship at Glasney. At Tremough the ICS is home to two major externally funded research programmes, the Cornwall Audio Visual Archive and the Cornish Communities Programme. It is now an integrral part of the Phase 2 development of the site, which involved an expansion of HuSS staff together with new undergraduate programmes in History, Politics, Cornish Studies and Law from 2007 and an expanded English and Geography provision.

The function and the role of the ICS has changed over the years but its commitment to furthering Cornish scholarship has persisted. However, its potential has always been constrained by its small size. But now the ICS is poised to play an important role in the current phase of the Tremough development. This brings the exciting prospect of a greater ‘critical mass’ of Cornwall-based social sciences and humanities researchers plus the potential for more quality research on Cornwall and its society as well as undergraduate teaching modules in Cornish Studies. We live in exciting times.

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