The Sandars Reader for 2013 is Professor Jim Secord who will lecture on ‘Visions of science: books and readers at the dawn of the Victorian age’

Professor Secord is giving the lectures on Monday 25 February, Tuesday 26 February and Wednesday 27 February, at 5.00 pm in the Yusuf Hamied Theatre, Christ’s College.

Monday 25 February: ‘Fantastic voyages: Humphry Davy’s “Consolations in travel”‘

Tuesday 26 February: ‘The conduct of gentlemen: John Herschel’s “Preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy”‘

Wednesday 27 February: ‘Nature for the people: George Combe’s “Constitution of man”‘

The final lecture on Wednesday 27 February will be followed by a reception in the Old Library at Christ’s from 6.00 pm to 7.00 pm. A small selection of books related to the lecture series will also be on display.

Click here for further information

Networking Australasia, Researching Novel-Worlds in the Cyberage

Thursday, 14 February 2013
16:00 – 18:00
Location: S3

Please note that this event has been postponed.

Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds), ‘Resistance and New Media’
Tuesday, 5 February at 5:30pm
Umney Theatre, Robinson College
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/people/20058/russian_and_slavonic_studies/person/944/vlad_strukov

Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto), ‘Resistance and Textuality’
Thursday, 14 February at 5:30pm
Umney Theatre, Robinson College
http://www.utoronto.ca/slavic/faculty/Komaromi.shtml

The lectures are part of a year-long lecture series on Resistance cosponsored by the Department for Slavonic Studies and the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies. The series is exploring the theme of Resistance from a variety of disciplinary angles (Nationalism, Gender, Memory, Rights, etc.), tracing continuities and changes from the Soviet period to the present day. As it is a public lecture series, the lectures are designed to be accessible to people with a broad range of interests and expertise. Please click here for more information: http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/slavonic/Research/Current%20research%20events/PLS-Resistance%202012.html

On Friday 25 January, Cambridge University Library will be holding its 7th masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project.

The masterclass, entitled “Discovering Provenance in Book History”, will be led by David Pearson, Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries at the City of London Corporation. David has published and lectured extensively in this area of book history and his books include Provenance Research in Book History (1994) and Books as History (2008); he also teaches a course on Provenance at the University of Virginia Rare Book School.

There is a growing recognition of the value of looking at provenance evidence in early books — the lessons about the social impact of books which can be learnt by looking at the ways they have been owned, marked, read, annotated, mutilated or ignored.  This workshop will explore these themes alongside some practical guidance on identifying the various kinds of evidence that can be found, with the help of examples from the early collections of Cambridge University Library, and the opportunity for hands-on exploration and discussion.

The seminar will be held in the Morison Room at the Library. It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book your place, please email <incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk>.

Please come for tea & mince pies

& a spin of the new book-wheel

on Tuesday 18 December

between 3.30 and 5 pm

 
G6, Walnut Tree Court, Queens’ College

(Andrew Zurcher’s rooms)

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Chris Hilliard (University of Sydney), ‘What do the masses read? Popular literacy and social investigation in Britain, 1850s-1930s’.

The Seminar meets at 5 pm in the Senior Parlour, Gonville Court, Gonville and Caius College.

Hosted by the Centre for Material Texts, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Friday 1st February 2013

This one-day event will take as its starting point the recent opening to wider research of a number of significant great house private libraries in the United Kingdom, thanks to the on-going cataloguing work being undertaken by the National Trust. Papers and discussion will treat themes including the migration of books and ideas in and out of libraries; communities of the library (how ‘private’ was a private library?); libraries as repositories of cultural history.

Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please contact Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk) or Abigail Brundin (asb17@cam.ac.uk) for more information.

Come and see Queens’ Old Library any day this week between 12.30 and 3.30

All this week (October 22-26) Queens’ Old Library is open between 12.30 and 3.30 for visitors to have a look round the library and view our current exhibition: “The Advancement of Learning at Queens’ College in the 17th century” (http://goo.gl/XafJL).

Please enter the college via the Queens’ Lane entrance and knock on the door of the Student Library (the building on the right hand side of the courtyard as you enter). Access to the Old Library will be from the first landing on the spiral staircase in the Student Library (WML) entrance area.

Library & Information History Group

David McKitterick (Wren Library) will give a talk on *Seventeenth-Century Libraries*

Monday 2 July, 3pm, Morison Room, University Library

All welcome

Josie Gill (University of Cambridge)

17 February, 5pm
Wolfson College, Gatsby Room

Amongst the hundreds of files which make up the Francis Crick archive is a file dedicated to Crick’s correspondence with Arthur Jensen, an American educational psychologist whose work focuses on proving a link between race and intelligence. The letters, which date from the early 1970s, provide an insight into Crick’s views on this controversial topic, and his role in galvanising support for a statement on academic freedom in the face of calls for the study of racial differences to be halted. However the file also contains two literary documents; a photocopy of The Poetry of Richard Nixon, a satirical collection of found poetry based on the Watergate tapes, and an essay on feminism by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. What do these documents tell us about Crick’s thinking about race and why are they included in a file of his professional correspondence on the matter? In this paper I will suggest that the poems and essay reflect Crick’s ambivalent relationship to the political culture of the early 1970s which his participation in the debate over race exposes. Crick felt threatened by the questioning of traditional sources of authority such as science, yet embraced the more liberal movements of the time through an interest in beat poetry and drugs. Examining the authorship, production and content of the texts reveals a complex web of connections between Crick and the politically conservative, as well as countercultural, figures of the period, providing an alternative view of the relationship between literature and science in the second half of the twentieth century.

Part of the Countercultural Research Group, Lent 2012.