Photophysical properties of the excited singlet and triplet states of 2,2'-furil in different kinds of media have been characterized by steady-state emission as well as by laser flash photolysis techniques. Emission characteristics of furil is seen to be independent of the kind of solvent media, indicating the absence of any kind of conformational changes in the excited state. This fact has been corroborated by the results of transient absorption studies in ultrafast time domain. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.