People


Cambridge Authors was conceived, planned, written, and edited by members of the Cambridge English Faculty community, harnessing contributions and resources generously shared by partners in Cambridge and beyond. Our aim has been to invite as many people as possible - including you, the reader - to join this community of reading and thinking. This page records our acknowledgments and debts, and provides some information about the key contributors to the project.


Credits and Acknowledgments

General Editors: Andrew Zurcher and Raphael Lyne

Section Editors (all of whom were graduate students during the academic year 2008-9, when the site was written): Jamie Castell (Byron), Simon Calder (Tennyson), Adam Crothers (Hughes), Josie Gill (Smith), Sylvia Karastathi (Byatt), Pete Newbon (Wordsworth), Harriet Phillips (Marlowe), Lucy Razzall (Herbert), Bridget Vincent (Plath), Mi Zhou (Forster)

Contributing Authors (all of whom were undergraduate students during the academic year 2008-9, when the site was writter): Stephanie Bain, Duana Chan, Lizzie Davis, Stephanie Derbyshire, Robyn Drury, Rocco Falconer, Samantha Fong, Rachel Haworth, Judith Jacob, Laura Kilbride, David Lowry, Kathryn Maude, Kirsten Nyborg, Kate O'Connor, Yvonne Reddick, Sophie Sawicka-Sykes, Derica Shields, Catherine Watts, Claire Wilkinson, Frances Winfield

Other Contributors: Emily A. Bernhard-Jackson (Research Fellow, Darwin College), Tom Durno (graduate student), Josh Farrington (recent graduate), Simon Jackson (graduate student), Emma Leadbetter (graduate student)

Design and Illustration: Anna Trench (artwork), Black Pig (web design), Dan Sheppard (CARET)


The Cambridge Authors team is grateful to many individuals and institutions, both in Cambridge and elsewhere, without whose help or encouragement the project could never have been completed. Elisabeth Burmeister and her colleagues at the Cambridge 800th Anniversary Fund have supported the project from its inception, as have Adrian Poole, Tamsin James, and Jen Pollard at the Faculty of English. We are grateful to other colleagues at the Faculty of English for their advice and generous contributions: Stefan Collini, Heather Glen, Leo Mellor, Rob Macfarlane, Stephen Logan, and Gavin Alexander, in particular. Members of the Scriptorium project -- especially Christopher Burlinson, Angus Vine, and Sebastiaan Verweij -- helped with photography and coding. The librarians and staff at several local libraries have donated time and offered indispensable cooperation at various stages, especially Frances Gandy at Girton and Mark Nicholls and Jonathan Harrison at St John's College. We are indebted to Madeleine Lovell and the choir of Queens' College, Cambridge for their help in recording settings of Herbert poems, and to Nick Sutcliffe for mixing the audio files. To Anthony Bowen of Jesus College, former University Orator, we owe our sincere thanks for recording a selection of Herbert's prose. Jeremy Hardingham, the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio Manager in the Faculty of English, recruited Ollie Evans to develop, record, and edit experimental interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Dan Sheppard, at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, managed the technical side of our WordPress development -- with skill, patience, and grace.

To several institutions we owe acknowledgment and thanks for permission to reproduce images used on the site. Images of books and objects in the St John's College library appear by leave of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge. Permissions to reproduce artworks are detailed on the pages in question, and we are grateful for the assistance of Leeds Museums and Galleries (especially Christine Sitch), National Museums Liverpool / The Lady Lever Gallery (especially Nathan Pendlebury, and the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust / Dimbola Galleries and Photographical Museum (especially John Holsburt). We are very grateful to David Ross and Daniel Weissbort, the editors of St Botolph's Review, for their cooperation. Finally, we thank Zadie Smith for giving us an interview.



About The Contributors

Here you will find a bit more information about some of the people who made this site. We asked them to tell us a bit about themselves and to pose for an embarrassing photo. Here you'll see two different kinds of snapshot of the contributors when they were writing for Cambridge Authors.


Stephanie Bain was in her third year studying English at Queens' College when she contributed her essay on Marlowe and Magic to the Cambridge Authors Project. She grew up in Wigan. Among the things she loved about studying literature were the gore and madness of Jacobean revenge tragedies, and the plays of Chekhov, where people talk about tea when what they ought to say is 'I love you'. Despite being a happy person, she was hoping to make a career after leaving Cambridge playing miserable, tragic women on stage.


Jamie Castell grew up in Essex and was an undergraduate at Homerton College. Having never outgrown his  adolescent love for Romantic poetry, he is currently studying for a  PhD on Wordsworth and contemporary philosophy focussing in particular  on the 'animal life' of man. Sadly more Wordsworth than Byron in lifestyle, he spends most of his life scaling piles of books in the library and picking his way up more literal mountains at every other opportunity. He was a second-year PhD student at St John's when he edited the Byron pages for the Cambridge Authors project.


Stephanie Derbyshire of Downing College wrote her essays on Doctor Faustus and A Room with a View when she was in her second year. She grew up in Lincoln, where she argued with her English teacher in Year 7; a wish to continue the argument led her to study English at University. A fan of napping, eating, and trampolining, she was wondering whether to do a Master's degree, or to retreat to an attic with a lot of cats and the complete works of Shakespeare.


Josie Gill grew up in Buckinghamshire and completed a BA at the University of Sheffield and an MA at the University of Nottingham before coming to Cambridge to do a PhD in English. Her research topic is race and genetics in contemporary British fiction.


Judith Jacob grew up in London and went to Hendon School. A great fan of William Blake, she picked out his illuminated works as a highlight in her reading experience. In her spare time? Static trapeze, of course. Jude was in her second year at Cambridge when she wrote for Cambridge Authors about Arthurian elements in Tennyson's poetry.


Sylvia Karastathi (PhD in Literature and Visual Culture, Clare Hall) grew up in a small town in Northern Greece and emigrated to the UK out of pure admiration for the British novel. She has thought about the work of A.S. Byatt for the last four years, and she still finds it exciting; she edited the Byatt pages for the Cambridge Authors project. She enjoys any heritage and museum outing, and hopes to write a book about museums in contemporary fiction.


Laura Kilbride grew up in York and went to All Saints RC Secondary School. Her favourite poets at university were A.C. Swinburne and Tom Raworth; she was also a devotee of the short stories and novels of Elizabeth Bowen. A poet herself (and a collector of old biscuit tins depicting the nine muses), she was hoping to continue reading and learning and thinking after graduation. During her undergraduate career Laura re-founded the Queens'-based literary magazine The Dial, and (in her third year) wrote about intertextuality in A S Byatt's Possession for the Cambridge Authors project.


David Lowry was in his second year at Jesus College when he started investigating Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters for the Cambridge Authors project. He grew up in Sheffield, but arrived in Cambridge after two months working in a tourism office in France, and two months at a Planetarium in Germany. He chose to study English because it combined his interests in language, history, culture, and philosophy. He was hopeful that his knowledge of John Donne's religious poetry would help him go far in any walk of life.


Raphael Lyne was one of the two general editors of the Cambridge Authors project. A fellow of Murray Edwards College and University Senior Lecturer in English, Raphael teaches and writes about Renaissance literature. In the past he has studied the influence of Ovid's writing on Renaissance poets, and has written a book about Shakespeare's later plays. While editing Cambridge Authors he was struggling to finish a book which turned into two books.


Kirsten Nyborg grew up on Mt Desert Island, Maine, USA, and came to Cambridge via Harvard. A devotee of Dickens, Dostoevksy and Faulkner, and a serious runner, she was thinking about postgraduate study. Kirsten was in her third year at St Edmund's College when she contributed her essay on Marlowe and the Puritans to the Cambridge Authors site.


Harriet Phillips, graduate editor of the Marlowe pages, grew up in Reading. She is interested in most things about the Renaissance, but currently and particularly in ballads, peasants, accents, and false noses. She is currently working on a PhD dissertation about sixteenth-century broadsides and the idea of the past.


After growing up in Scotland, England, and Kuwait, Yvonne Reddick went to university in France before coming to Cambridge. She chose English out of a love of reading, and of being envied by science students. One highlight of the course was being introduced to environmental criticism, something she was hoping to pursue at graduate level -- and something that inspired her Cambridge Authors work on Ted Hughes. Yvonne was in her third year at Girton College when she contributed to the project.


Sophie Sawicka-Sykes was in her second year of studying English at Magdalene College when she wrote her Cambridge Authors essay on Wordsworth. She grew up in Sheffield and, in adventurous / indecisive style, went to four different local schools. She felt that the study of literature had changed her way of looking at life. Her future plans were fluid: the double bass, and Plato, for starters.


Claire Wilkinson, a second-year undergraduate at Murray Edwards College, grew up not far from Cambridge, and went to Longsands Community College. Her highlight of the course so far was studying the Romantics. She was hoping to combine her interests in travel and writing by becoming a travel writer! For the Cambridge Authors project she wrote several pieces on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson.


One of the two general editors of the Cambridge Authors project, Andrew Zurcher is a fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens' College. He supervises and lectures on Renaissance literature, with a particular focus on the works of Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. He is mainly interested in the links between literature and law in the writing of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets and dramatists; but he also likes bicycles, vegetables, children's games, story-telling, and listening to his wife play the piano.


Comments are closed.