The Enlightenment has been increasingly approached as a global phenomenon in recent years, yet most studies still concentrate on particular centres, often in relation to peripheries. Can Enlightenment be reconstructed beyond national and linguistic boundaries – either as a city- or region-focused set of ideas and practices or as a continent- or world-wide network? This question stands at the centre of Enlightenment Decentred, which aims to transcend debates over the national manifestations of Enlightenment. Following the appearance of Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s The Enlightenment in National Context (1981), research tended to break down the Enlightenment into various manifestations along geographical lines. The term became so fragmented that the 2000s witnessed clarion calls for the reconstruction of a common core, an Enlightenment above its local and theoretical strands (for example, Jonathan Israel’s tetralogy on Radical Enlightenment (2001-2019) and John Robertson’s The Case for the Enlightenment (2005)). 

Enlightenment Decentred moves beyond the tendency of both ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ to employ national parameters by focusing on connections and links between groups, institutions or individual agents. The aim is to upscale Enlightenment by extending it to regions, continents or global trends – while at the same time downscaling it by locating Enlightenment in spaces smaller than the modern nation-state, in a period when even the most centralised polities were far from unified or uniform in the modern sense. Each component of the project will examine reciprocal connections between two-three locations regardless of national boundaries (e.g. Kolkata-Bristol-Boston, Berlin-Riga-Königsberg, Uppsala-Göttingen-St Petersburg). The effect is a decentring of Enlightenment and its re-assemblage as a network of mutual exchanges of ideas, practices and media. Particular attention will be dedicated to different media and genres of intellectual dissemination: can Enlightenment be decentred also in relation to the means by which it was propagated?  

A major methodological tenet of Enlightenment Decentred is its rejection of the tendency to conceptualise Enlightenment in terms of centre and peripheries. By highlighting the links between individuals, institutions, and hubs of knowledge production across borders or within a single country, the project recasts Enlightenment as a thick web of exchanges focused on intellectual content and its medial transfer.

An international conference, generously supported by the OUP John Fell Fund and Freie Universität's Division of International Affairs, was held in Oxford in October 2026.

Programme

WEDNESDAY, 30 September

9.00 Welcome & Introduction
Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) & Avi Lifschitz (Oxford)

9.15 Session 1

Paris – Potsdam – Lausanne: the incomplete rehabilitation of Emperor Julian
Avi Lifschitz (Oxford)

Caracas – London – Istanbul: cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the life and readings of an
Enlightened, revolutionary criollo
Mónica Bolufer Peruga (European University Institute, Florence)

11.15 Session 2
Rome – Beijing – Seoul: a knowledge network and its media, 1644–1783
Eun-Jeung Lee (Freie Universität Berlin)

A methodology for intellectual independence: Enlightened strategies for modern knowledge in
Guatemala, 1790s–1820s
Nicola Miller (University College London)

13.30 Session 3
Europe – the Sinosphere: the Eurasian Enlightenment in two keys
Chenxi Tang (University of California, Berkeley)

An English Enlightenment from Lausanne and Göttingen to St Petersburg and Pennsylvania:
Gibbon and Bentham in Venturi’s shadow
Brian Young (Oxford)

THURSDAY, 1 October

9.15 Session 4
Oviedo – Polling – Parnassus: alternative routes to an Enlightened ars critica
Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin)

Eger – Vienna – Rome: Catholicism and improvement across borders in the Enlightenment
(1750s–90s)
László Kontler (Central European University)

11.15 Session 5
Berlin – Venice – Madrid – Lisbon – Recife: making the Portuguese Jewish Enlightenment in the
eighteenth-century Dutch Republic
Alicia Montoya (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)

Pierre Bayle: global history as Christian apologetics. Rotterdam – St. Andrews – Paris – Göttingen
– Calcutta
Dmitri Levitin (Oxford)

14.15 Session 6
When the nomads met the naturalists: knowing and narrativizing the steppe from the Volga to the
Amur
Shiru Lim (Leiden)

Florence – Châlons – Basel: Enlightenment projects of poor relief
Damiano Bardelli (Oxford)

16.15 The Voltaire Foundation: an introduction
Tom Wynn (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford)

FRIDAY, 2 October

9.15 Session 7
Berlin, Copenhagen and beyond: educational reform, public Enlightenment, and authority
Jonas Thorup Thomsen (Oxford) & Olivier Higgins (Oxford)

Enlightenment by comparison: Scotland and Naples revisited and continued
John Robertson (Cambridge)

John Pocock’s decentred Enlightenments
Richard Whatmore (St. Andrews)

12.00 Concluding discussion