Institute of Cornish Studies

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The Institute of Cornish Studies (ICS) started in 1970/71 as a research centre jointly funded by Exeter University and Cornwall County Council, with three core staff being employees of the University of Exeter.

The ICS’s first home was in the heart of the Central Mining District at Pool, halfway between Camborne and Redruth. The Institute was housed 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. He led a small team of Oliver Padel and Myrna Combellack and their work focused on archaeology, place names and the Cornish medieval dramas. At the end of the 1980s 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 who 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 illustrated by the publication in 1993 of Cornwall Since the War, a collection of essays on modern Cornwall.

In 1994 the ICS moved from Pool to join the University’s Department of Lifelong Learning at its base at Hayne Corfe in Truro and 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. 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.

In collaboration with the Department of Lifelong Learning, in 1999, 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). In 2000 Garry Tregidga and Bernard Deacon had joined the Institute and were developing new directions in the methodology of Cornish Studies.

The ICS moved yet again October 2004, 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 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.

By 2006 the annual Cornish Studies had reached its thirteenth volume and had included over 150 articles on various aspects of Cornish Studies, written by over 90 separate contributors.

The function and the role of the ICS has changed over the years but its commitment to furthering Cornish scholarship has persisted. The ICS is poised to play a leading role in the next phase of the Tremough development and 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.