Recent years have seen an increased interest in landscape, space, environment and geography within English literature, History and Cultural Geography. That interest is increasingly apparent also within the discipline of Classics. Studies of space and place are of significant interest to scholars who work on representation and visualization of landscapes (especially within Art History, Classics, Film Studies, English Literature) as well as physical landscapes themselves (Archaeology, Computer Science, Geography). Those two strands have often been quite separate from each other, and a central aim of the centre for landscape studies is to facilitate the process of breaking down that dichotomy.

At its best, landscape studies can play a fundamental role in understanding how the past shapes the present; not just physical landscapes but imagined landscapes too, and the experiences of the human actors who inhabit and shape particular places.