Of Influence has been published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice, and is edited by Lewis Roberts, Jacob Ridley (Oxford), and Roddy Howland Jackson (Oxford). Born of an international conference held in Oxford in 2023, 50 years after Harold Bloom published The Anxiety of Influence, these essays ask what Bloom can do […]

Published in October 1950, Alan Turing’s seminal paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ proposed a test to determine whether machines could think and speculated whether they might eventually compete with humans in all intellectual fields. But it is a very strange piece of writing indeed, one that has long intrigued and puzzled readers in equal measure. […]

Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson will speak at the Cambridge Literary Festival about her new book, Vanishing Landscapes, on Saturday 22 November at 2pm. Link to further information and to book tickets: https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/bonnie-lander-johnson-vanishing-landscapes/

The Constellational Novel aims to shed light on the field of contemporary literature by offering a definitive theory of the constellational novel.  A constellational novel is a novel that has an associative, essayistic, digressive, and densely patterned prose form.  Beginning with Marcel Proust, the argument focuses on novels published over roughly the last two decades […]

Anthony Bale’s book, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, will be published in Spanish as Guía de Viajes por la Edad Media: El mundo visto por los viajeros medievales (Madrid: Ático de los Libros) on 22 September 2025.  A programme of talks and signings will also take place in that week in Barcelona and […]

The Medieval Ideas Creative Lab hosts two innovative spoken word performances using medieval sources: Debbie Cannon, ‘Green Knight’ and Lara McClure, ‘Oral Tradition: Iron Age Ulster in the 11th-Century imagination’. October 16th at Judith E Wilson Drama Studio. Places are free but very limited so booking is essential. Further details and tickets here.  

On 4 September Anthony Bale will be in conversation (online) with Larisa Grollemond at the Getty, Los Angeles, as part of their ‘Art Break’ series, talking about ‘Pilgrimage, War, Trade: Travel in the Middle Ages’. Link to further details: https://www.getty.edu/calendar/art-break-middle-ages-travel/

Professor Anthony Bale gives the keynote lecture, entitled ‘Inside the archive of medieval travel: pilgrims’ libraries, itineraries, ephemera’, at the Univerzita Karlova/Charles University of Prague Centre for Medieval Studies summer school at Sázava monastery, Czechia, on September 5th 2025. On September 4th 2025, Professor Bale is at the Božská Lahvice bookshop in central Prague to […]

The Medieval Ideas Creative Lab is offering Digital Artists’ Bursaries, a unique opportunity for playful experimentation and the space to create. The Creative Lab Digital Bursaries are conceived as transformative artistic grants, for digital artists to explore new approaches and ways of thinking through engaging with the Middle Ages and medieval collections in Cambridge. The […]

Dominic O’Key, Teaching Associate in the Faculty, has published a chapter on Jordan Peele in Animality and Horror Cinema: Creaturely Fear on Film. The essay, titled ‘Jordan Peele’s Animals: Zoological Horror, Afropessimist Allegory and the Alien Superstar’, explores the representation of deer, rabbits, horses, chimps and aliens in Peele’s cinematic works. Animality and Horror Cinema […]