The Cambridge Festival 2021
The new, interdisciplinary Cambridge Festival, which replaces the Cambridge Science Festival and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, will host an extensive series of free, online events between 26 March and 4 April this year.
Link to The Cambridge Festival website: https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/
Faculty of English Events
American English: Dialogues in Dialect
Available on demand from Friday 26 March.
How does our speech shape us? This talk by Molly Becker looks at how dialect influences and reflects identity, and at how American authors use dialect in their writing.
Link to 30-minute talk aimed at adults, which goes live on 26 March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGRgWxwKMZI
There is also a short introduction to dialect aimed at children aged 8-12, which looks at how dialect influences the words we use. A downloadable activity pack and answer key are included.
Link to 5-minute introduction aimed at children, which goes live on 26 March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tesrn_I_9sw
Bringing Death to Life
Available on demand from Sunday 28 March.
Is death beyond words? How can we understand and live with its inevitability? A theatrical journey through contemporary languages and experiences of mortality and death.
Developing the creative collaboration between Dr Laura Davies and Menagerie Theatre Company (https://good-death.english.cam.ac.uk/collab/) this is a curated performance of fictional encounters with death. It draws on Dr Davies’ research into the history of death writing and explores how we imagine death, dying and being dead from our perspective of life, living and being alive.
Recommended age: 15+.
This pre-filmed event will be available on demand on the University YouTube channel from 28 March. Further details available on The Cambridge Festival 2021 website on Monday 22 February.
Crazy Collections: Healing, Ordering and Representing the Body in Medieval Medical Recipes
5pm, Monday 29 March, Zoom Talk/workshop.
This talk/workshop by Hannah Bower explores how recipes for cures – thousands of which were copied in the flyleaves, margins, and pages of medieval manuscripts – were used to order, navigate, and represent ailing bodies.
The workshop also explores connections between medieval tendencies to collect, accumulate, compile, and order recipes within larger processes of self-fashioning and modern habits of curating images of ourselves and our bodies through social media.
The event incorporates opportunities for an interactive question and answer session in relation to manuscript images. Further details available on The Cambridge Festival 2021 website on Monday 22 February.
