Alternate Tuesdays, during term time
CRASSH
Michaelmas Term 2011: 12.00-14.00
Light lunch provided

The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts.

11th October: Professor Simon Schaffer and Professor Nick Thomas on the Nature of “Artefacts”
25th October: Dr Kim Sloan and Dr Charlie Jarvis on the Understanding of “Botany”
8th November: Dr Richard Dunn and Dr Alexi Baker on the Universe of the “Telescope”
22nd November: Dr Catherine Eagleton and Dr Martin Allen on the Meaning of “Money”

THINGS poster

An Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium in the Arts and Humanities
Supported by Pembroke College and the Faculty of English

Pembroke College, Saturday 24th September 2011

For more information, or to register (£5), please contact Katarina Stenke (ks446@cam.ac.uk)

Draft Program:

8.45am-9.15am: Registration.

9.15am-9.30am: Welcome.

9.30am-10.40am: Panel One – The Fragments of History.
Mario Wimmer (ETH Zürich, Swiss Institute of Technology), ‘Archival Bodies and philological factish’
Mark Williams (Faculty of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), ‘Austin Clarke and the de-fragmentation of Irish myth’

10.40am-11.00am: Coffee Break.

11.00am-12.10pm: Panel Two – Fragmentation and Authorship.
Joanna Bellis (Faculty of English), ‘Fragmentation or assimilation? The case of a fifteenth-century war poem’
Ian Goh (Faculty of Classics), ‘Lucilian Satire: Already Fragmentary in the Roman Republic’

12.20pm-1.30pm: Panel Three – Fragments and Knowledge.
Cassie Gorman (Faculty of English), ‘Not quite ‘ALL THINGS’: Thomas Traherne and the Commentaries of Heaven (c. 1670-74)’
Sarah Weaver (Faculty of English), ‘Fragments as Raw Material: Julius Charles Hare and Guesses at Truth’

1.30pm-2.30pm: Lunch.

2.30pm-4.10pm: Panel Four – Micro-Fact and Micro-Fiction.
Lucy Bell (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Collecting Fragments: Augusto Monterroso’s Anthology of Flies and the Aesthetics of Micro-Fiction’
Rebecca Varley-Winter (Faculty of English), ‘Frightening fragments: Félix Fénélon’s ‘novels in three lines’ and photographic captions’
David Jiménez Torres (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Part or Whole? The Journalistic Article as Fragment’

4.10pm-4.30pm: Coffee Break.

4.30pm-6.00pm: Fragments across the Disciplines: Round-table Discussion
Chaired by Charlotte Roberts, Harriet Phillips and Katarina Stenke

6.00pm: Wine Reception.

Eating Words: a one-day CMT workshop

Gonville and Caius College. Cambridge, 13 September 2011

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day workshop will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Plenary Speakers: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre) & Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

To download a flyer, click here. A draft program is available here. A booking form is available here.

“Text, Image and the Digital Research Environment: Parker Library-Keio EIRI Conference on Medieval Manuscripts and Printed Books”

Friday 9 September 2011

Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Parker Library and the EIRI Project at Keio University (Tokyo) are co-organising a one-day conference focusing on new and future advances in digitisation and digital resources and on the ways in which they are creating new research environments for medieval manuscripts and rare books. Papers will range from individual research papers to institutional projects. More information about speakers and the registration is available at:

http://parkerkeio2011.wordpress.com/

For further information, please contact: 　Gill Cannell and Suzanne Paul (Parker Library): parker-library＠corpus.cam.ac.uk 　Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University/Corpus Christi College): satoko＠flet.keio.ac.jp

‘SHARING THE WONDER’— a collaborative approach to promoting, preserving and sharing the content of special collections

A one day conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge on 12th September 2011

The uniqueness and specialised appeal of our collections offers little protection from financial constraints. Many are under threat – of dispersal, of neglect and even disposal in favour of digitised copies – and this conference focuses on ways in which colleagues are sharing their expertise and knowledge to ensure their collections ‘work’, that is, that they continue to be relevant and available to meet the needs and interests of their varied audiences – be these scholars or the public at large.

Speakers will include:
Dr Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and mainstay of the ‘Cambridge Illuminations’ project to exhibit, catalogue and publish information about  the entire body of illuminated manuscripts held in the Colleges and other parts of the University.

Dr Alison Walker, retired head of the National Preservation Office at the British Library, who is coordinating a project to catalogue the dispersed library of Sir Hans Sloane that forms the 18th century core of the British Museum and Natural History Museum libraries.

Natalie Adams, Senior Archivist at the Churchill Archives who is involved in a commercial project to make Sir Winston Churchill’s papers available online.

We will also hear from the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, which has collaborated with Stanford University to make its entire manuscript collection online; and from conservators at the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium, who will describe how their work helps to keep special collections ‘in working order’ and also offers unexpected insights into the history of the book.

The cost of attendance is £25 and the programme includes lunch and a visit to a choice of special collections within a few minutes walking distance of Queens’ College.

To Book, please complete the form here.

Two ‘brown bag lunches’ to look at & hear about grant applications currently in the pipeline.

1. Wednesday 1 June, 1-2 pm   Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Dr Lauren Kassell (History and Philosophy of Science) on the Simon Forman Casebooks project.

2. Wednesday 8 June, 1-2pm   Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College

Dr Claire Preston (English) on the Thomas Browne edition.

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

Seminar 1: Renaissance Texts and Publishing

Monday 23rd May 2011 5-6.45pm, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor Jane Taylor (Durham University) on matters of taste in sixteenth-century publishing

and

Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) on preparing digital editions of early modern literature

For more information please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

DIGITAL EDITING AND DIGITAL EDITIONS

A half-day workshop on new developments in the field of digital editing in Music, History, Philosophy and Literature

Speakers: Andrew Webber (German and Dutch, Cambridge), John Rink (Music, Cambridge), Eleanor Robson (HPS, Cambridge), Jane Winters (Institute of Historical Research), Andrew Zurcher (English, Cambridge)

1-5 pm, Wednesday 25 May 2011

CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Please email Anne Alexander (raa43@cam.ac.uk) to reserve a place.

Further information at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1638

22nd July, University of Warwick

Keynote: Professor Margaret Ezell, Sara and John Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts, University of Texas A&M

Speakers: Helen Hackett, Gillian Wright, Elizabeth Clarke, Sarah Ross, Jayne Archer, Rebecca Bullard, Johanna Harris, Sajed Chowdhury, Elizabeth Scott Baumann

This interdisciplinary one day symposium will explore meanings and dynamics of the structures of early modern female miscellanies and commonplace books, the histories of reading they reveal, notions arising of authorship and miscellaneity, the role of women as ‘vouchers’ or adjudicators of literary materials, and the transmission of knowledge in these female compilations.

For registration & programme see website: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/femalemiscellanies

For more information contact Dr Femke Molekamp (Warwick): f.s.molekamp@warwick.ac.uk

“…of things which they were not in quest of”: digital serendipity and digital design

In the simplest terms, the Bodleian Libraries’ Electronic Enlightenment Project digitizes letters, largely of the 18th century. More intriguingly, it uses what we call “scholarly technology” to reconstruct what may be the world’s first global, social network – stretching from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries! And in that process, rediscovers conversations and correspondents previously lost, or only available to the most erudite researcher. In this presentation, we will introduce our concept and application of “scholarly technology”, and consider how the design and development of this kind of digital resource can result in a system so culturally dense as to positively encourage serendipitous discoveries.

SPEAKERS: Dr Robert V. McNamee, Director

Mark Rogerson, Technical Editor

Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

DATE: 5 May, 2011. 5.15-6.30pm. Helmore 201, East Road, Anglia Ruskin University