The Quill Project

This collection traces 250 years of American history through a series of landmark constitutional texts. Our federal portfolio includes ground-breaking digital editions of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, as well as the later Bill of Rights and Civil Rights Amendments. Well-known federal landmarks tell only a small part of the story of US constitutional development, and in partnership with U.S. universities, we have also set ourselves the ambitious target of presenting the records of many of the 235 de novo state constitutions created since 1776.

The Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) project is making a ground-breaking contribution to the study of successful post-colonial constitution-making, shedding light on the negotiations of the Indian Constituent Assembly that took place against the backdrop of Partition, communal violence, and the largest mass migration in history. Our team has just completed two years of archival research, bringing to light thousands of amendments tabled to the Constitution which have never previously been published.

In addition to its core research areas, Quill has carried out a number of exploratory projects, including work on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the European Union Withdrawal Acts, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of these projects were pilot studies conducted with the assistance of Oxford University student interns, or, in the case of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, with the assistance of interns recruited by the Maison française d’Oxford. It is our ambition to work with subject-matter experts to apply for academic funding to produce definitive digital editions of these texts.