Faculty of English

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/the-british-association-for-romantic-studies-international-conference-2026 The keynote lecture, ‘Shared Composition: Writing and Editing in the Wordsworths’ Notebooks’, launches two editions of Wordsworth family notebooks: Ruth Abbott, A Wordsworth Family Notebook: Dove Cottage Manuscript 16 in Facsimile with Transcription and Commentary, 2 vols boxed (Wordsworth Trust, 2026) The Wordsworths’ Notebooks, ed. Ruth Abbott (Cambridge University Digital Library, 2026), https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/wordsworth An […]

Symposium: For Lancelot Andrewes, 1626 – 1926 – 2026 23-24 September, English Faculty (9 West Road) and Pembroke College A two-day gathering to discuss the work of Lancelot Andrewes on his quatercentenary; and the critical and creative legacy of the essay T. S. Eliot wrote for the tricentenary. Keynotes: Peter McCullough (Oxford) and Jeff Dolven […]

Dr Trudi Tate (Emeritus Fellow, Clare Hall), is organising the annual Virginia Woolf Summer Course for Literature Cambridge. The theme is Woolf and the Natural World, with lectures, classes, talks, visits, and much else over five days in August.

‘Pryce’s Buoy’, a six-page, scruffily hand-written fragment of a short story cared for by archivists at King’s College Cambridge has been transcribed and fully studied for the first time. Professor Sarah Dillon’s findings, published today in The Review of English Studies, call for a reassessment of Turing’s character. “We’ve distilled a version of Turing that […]

How do we make theatre in a climate crisis?  Dr Zoë Svendsen talks to Maddy Costa of Exeunt Magazine about developing a climate dramaturgy: a holistic approach to theatre-making that centres artistic practice, treating climate crisis as a context for all aspects of theatre-making. Exeunt is an online magazine for theatre-lovers in the UK and […]

Dr Zoë Svendsen was selected as winner for the d’n (dramaturgs’ network’s) Established Dramaturg Award 2026 by a panel comprised of Robert Awosusi, Sudha Bhuchar, Frey Kwa-Hawking and Réjane Collard-Walker. The d’n is a home for dramaturgs in the UK – and anybody who wants to become one, or work with one. Link to further […]

Professor Pettitt will deliver her lecture on ‘Tennyson’s Garden: Idylls of the King and the Technologization of Nature’ on Thursday 16 July at 11.15am. ‘Tennyson 2026’ is an international conference organised by The Tennyson Society.  The venue is Lincoln Bishop University. Link to the conference programme: https://tennysonsociety.com/tennyson-conference-provisional-programme/

Dr Gabriel Rolfe has won the 2026 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for his proposal for a book-length essay, Interior Station, described as ‘a genre-bending account of colonial violence and complicity’. The book centers around the 2019 killing of a young Warlpiri man by police in Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal township in the Central Desert Region of Australia. […]