The Centre for Writing, History and Place has recently been approved by the University, and the co-convenors are Simon Barker, John Hughes and Neil Wynn. It was devised to be as broad and inclusive as possible. We hope that it will genuinely accommodate a broad range of existing research interests within the Department of Humanities (and beyond) while maintaining a viable and productive focus on a set of underlying questions (about identity, representation, narrative, place, evidence, and so on) that define our different disciplines, and approaches. Above all, the aim has been to provide a topical structure that people would find enabling without being diffuse, and that will promote further work, not least of an interdisciplinary kind.