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.

Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College)

Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College
Wednesday, February 15th
2.00-3.30pm

Part of the Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar.

Wednesday 15 February 2012, at 5.30 p.m.
JOHN GARDNER

‘“Radical” is a new word since my time – it was not in the political vocabulary in 1816’
— Byron in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse, April 1820

Following the end of the war with France, street literature, in the form of pamphlets, broadsides, illustrations, pornography, pirate publications and advertising, became increasingly radical, and ephemeral. This paper will examine radicalism in this period and its literary and cultural legacy.

Free for junior members of the University of Cambridge
£2.50 for members of the Friends of Cambridge University Library
£3.50 for non-members

Events take place in the Library’s Morison Room, unless noted otherwise.

Tea will be served half an hour before the evening talks starting at 5.30 p.m.

Please see details of the Friends of Cambridge University Library’s full programme.

Date and location

Tuesday 6 March 2012
Elton-Bowring Room, the Gillespie Conference Centre,
Clare College, Cambridge (in front of CUL)

Programme

9:30 Registration

10:00 Opening Remarks: Ed Potten (Cambridge University Library)

10:10 Production: Chaired by Margaret Lane Ford (Christie’s)

• Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University), ‘Rubrication of Caxton’s Early English Books’
• Paul Needham (Scheide Library, Princeton University), ‘Ulrich Zel’s Printing’

11:20 Tea/Coffee

11:35 Collection: Chaired by Richard Linenthal (Antiquarian Bookseller)

• Eric White (Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University), ‘Gutenberg Bibles on the Move in England, 1789–1834’
• John Goldfinch (British Library), ‘British Museum Incunabula in Cambridge; Cambridge Incunabula in London’

12:50 Lunch

14:00 History: Chaired by Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Darwin College, Cambridge)

• Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio University), ‘John Oates, Sir Geoffrey, et al.: Bibliophiles in Darwin, 1975−78’
• Lotte Hellinga (formerly British Library), ‘Six Summers at CUL in the 1960s: A Reminiscence’

15:00 Round Table Discussion: Chaired by David McKitterick (Trinity College, Cambridge)

16:00 Tea/Coffee

16:15 Book Viewing at CUL (1)

16:45 Book Viewing at CUL (2)

17:15 End of the Conference

Registration

If you would like to attend, please return your completed registration form and the registration fee (not refundable) to the conference organiser by 14 February. The full registration fee is £30 (£25 for students), which includes lunch and refreshments. For further information and enquiries please contact Dr Satoko Tokunaga.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

12:00 – 14:00
Location: CRASSH, 7 West Road [please note new location]

At a symposium on digital editions held at CRASSH in May 2011, we resolved to convene a series of informal, termly meetings to stimulate development of and foster collaboration on digital editing projects in the Cambridge research community. For those interested in, or working on, digital editing projects, this will be a great opportunity to get together, share methodological and conceptual insights, and talk about the field of practice. This event is designed to challenge traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries, and we hope it will appeal to a wide range of participants from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. If you are in any doubt about participating, please get in touch.

As this is the first meeting of the group in 2011-2012, we will use the occasion to constitute the group and introduce participants to one another. We will also discuss two short readings from a 2009 special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, ‘Special Cluster: Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future’:

• Kenneth M. Price, ‘Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.
• Julia Flanders, ‘The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.

See http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/index.html for the relevant issue, and do feel free to read the other essays in the collection, which might also stimulate discussion.

It would be very helpful if participants could come to the meeting ready to share ideas about their own projects – whether already achieved, or still in embryo. We will suggest and briefly present at the meeting a few resources that present models and challenges to editors working in the electronic environment.

At some point we will decamp for lunch into ‘The ARC’ (the tearoom in the new Alison Richard Building at 7 West Road).

For further information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) or Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk). We look forward to a lively discussion and creative planning for the rest of the year’s meetings.

The event is free to attend but registration is required.  To book your place please visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1820/ and click on the link.

All existing and prospective members of the CMT are warmly invited for start-of-year tea and cake in the social space on the ground-floor of the English Faculty, 9 West Road, from 4 – 5.15 pm on Thursday 10 November (before Linda Bree’s HMT seminar).

Books beyond Boundaries

A symposium in the Old Combination Room, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Thursday 24 November 2011.

Organisers: David McKitterick, James Raven and Alex Walsham.

Supported by the Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History and the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together various scholars from Cambridge, the UK, the US and Europe to reflect on recent developments in and approaches to the History of the Book and to discuss both the potential and the problems posed by the ever-growing number of electronic resources available to scholars working in this broad and flourishing field. The last 15-20 years have seen the commissioning and publication of a series of histories of the book (Britain, Ireland, America, etc): these enterprises have borne considerable fruit and extended our knowledge of the worlds of manuscript production, printing, publishing and textual consumption within particular national contexts. But their self-imposed parameters have also restricted our understanding of initiatives and interactions that cut across these boundaries and connected people who were members of other types of imagined communities, including churches and sects and the wider republic of letters that united scholars across borders, continents and oceans. They have eclipsed other dimensions of the topic that demand attention in the context of burgeoning interest in transnational and global history. Building on these reflections, the second aim of this symposium is to consider how major digitisation projects and other databases are transforming how historians study past cultures of communication, as well as other related themes.

Programme:

10am – Coffee

10.30-12.45 – Session I: Histories of the Book

America: Prof. David Hall (Harvard Divinity School)
Britain: Prof. David McKitterick (Trinity)
Ireland: Dr Toby Barnard (Hertford College, Oxford)
France: Prof. Dominique Varry (Lyon)

12.45-1.45 – Lunch

1.45-4.00 – Session II: New Resources

Universal STC: Prof. Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews)
The Electronic Enlightenment: Dr Glenn Roe (Oxford)
Bibliopolis: Prof. Paul Hoftijzer (Leiden)
Old Bailey Online and other resources: Prof. Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire)
Digitised newspapers: Dr Mark Curran (Leeds and Munby Fellow 2011-12)

4.00-4.30 – Tea

4.30-5.30 – Round Table Discussion and Future Directions

All are welcome to attend. It would be helpful if those intending to do so contacted Alex Walsham (amw23@cam.ac.uk) to let her know.

*NEW FOR 2011-12* *Practical, short introductions to the UL’s amazing special collections and the rooms that house them*

In response to student feedback, the University Library has created two new training sessions introducing some of the jewels of its special collections, along with practical advice on how to access them. The Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Rooms house unique material, and for that reason these rooms have extra regulations that may take you by surprise on your first visit! These sessions are designed to help you find out what to expect and how to make the most of the UL’s special collections.

‘Rare Books Room: An Introduction’ and ‘Manuscripts Department: An Introduction’ can be found and booked at http://training.cam.ac.uk/cul/, along with the rest of the UL’s training courses on finding, using and managing information.

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) & the Centre for Material
Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar II: The Impact of Digital Publishing Platforms for Academic Scholarship on Libraries and Readers

Hannah Perrett (Cambridge University Press)
&
Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford (ebooks@cambridge)

Tuesday 1st November 5.30-7pm
Lord Ashcroft Building 207, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge
For more information, please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

download a poster for this event here

On Tuesday 1 November 2011, Cambridge University Library will be holding its second masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html).

Prof. David McKitterick, Librarian at Trinity College Cambridge, will lead a seminar under the title ‘Mix and match: making up incunabula’.

“When we look at a copy of a book, we make many assumptions. But books may not be what they seem. This class will examine some of the ways in which the make-up of books can be changed and muddled between the time that they leave the printer, and when they are read today. Examples will be drawn from Caxton, and from fifteenth-century printers in Italy and the Low Countries.”

The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room. 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. Attendance is open to anyone with an interest in the topic.

To book your place, please contact Katie Birkwood (kib21@cam.ac.uk).