Courses & Learning
About Woodbrooke
H.G. Wood, Director of Studies at Woodbrooke in the 1920s, was the first Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham. This revival of the old partnership between the University and Woodbrooke gives students the benefits of the academic and cutting-edge thinking of both institutions, as well as having two excellent libraries to draw from, and the option of living and learning in community at Woodbrooke.
Since 1995, Woodbrooke has been involved in postgraduate research degrees in Quaker Studies with the Universities of Birmingham and Sunderland, and with Birmingham alone since 2003. There are currently 35 students enrolled in CPQS programmes. Additionally, the Quaker Studies Research Association (QSRA, www.qsra.org) is based at Woodbrooke, as is the Series Editorship of the Series in Quaker Studies of the Edwin Mellen Press. The refereed journal, Quaker Studies, is co-sponsored by QSRA and CPQS. Woodbrooke is also the venue for the QSRA Annual Conference and hosts the prestigious annual George Richardson Lecture in Quaker Studies. With QSRA, Woodbrooke offers new postgraduates in Quaker Studies from any University the chance to apply for the annual David Adshead Award which gives five days resident study time in the library. Every two years, there is a ten-day Quaker Studies Research Summer School. These activities have been brought together under the umbrella of the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies. An Advisory Panel drawn from the top Quaker Studies thinkers and scholars in Britain meets annually to review the work of the Centre.
Woodbrooke, based in the heart of Quaker Birmingham in the beautiful Victorian home of George Cadbury, has an international reputation as a Quaker study centre. The Woodbrooke library is the main Quaker collection in Europe outside of Friends House. It carries many first edition seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books and tracts, includes the unique Bevan-Naish Collection, and has unrivalled 24 hour access for those resident in the college.
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