The DRC is based in the School of Music, English, and Theatre at Goldsmiths. It is the founder of the interdisciplinary online journal, Volupté, and the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS), providing intellectual anchorage for an international community of decadence scholars.
Decadence has different meanings depending on context. The moral conception of decadence relates mainly to personal behaviour (hedonism, over-indulgence, ‘sinfulness’, etc.); the historical conception focuses on imperial decline (Rome is not the only empire to have ‘fallen’); the philosophical conception involves questions of both morality and history (as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche); the social conception considers the moral, historical, and philosophical issues that arise with the development of modernity in the nineteenth century (growth of cities, technological progress, emergence of the bourgeoisie, etc.); the cultural conception includes literary and artistic responses to all of the foregoing moral, historical, philosophical, and social developments.
Such responses may have begun in the nineteenth century with seminal decadent figures like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, but cultures of decadence continue – in one form or another – to this day.