This collaboration by nineteen historical linguists shows why the current textbook explanations of the origins of Standard English are incorrect, and sugges an alternative explanation. https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/573343      

Michael’s project is: The Cultural History and Documentary Poetics of BBC  ‘Arena‘, 1975–present. Chris’s project is: Culture and Change in South Africa, 1994-2017. https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/listings?field_grant_scheme_target_id=11

This book explores the act of declaring love in works of literature written between the middle of the eighteenth century and the death of Jane Austen – and uncovers the uncertain boundaries of the self in the force-field of courtship. This was a period highly sensitive to the propriety and artificiality of public forms, and […]

Dr Laura Davies writes the fourth article in the University’s ‘Beyond the Pandemic Series’, in which she reflects on the need to talk about death. Read the article here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/BeyondThePandemic_agooddeath

Seven Arguments with Grief, End of Life Care – A Ghost Story and A Look, A Wave explore, through personal stories, some of the questions and emotions that the pandemic has prompted or intensified. Written and recorded during lockdown, along with video interviews with all those involved, Seven Arguments with Grief, End of Life Care […]

Louise Joy has published a new monograph called Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections. https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030460075 The book assesses the mediating role played by ‘affections’ in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form. It examines the formulation and idealization of this affective category in works by Isaac Watts, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Hays, […]

Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry attends to the work of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes, and to scenes of communication not often considered in relation to lyric poetics: telegraph posts, snowed-in farmhouses, sickbeds, recording booths, and antebellum watering holes, to name a few. For further information, click here: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/modernist-invention-media-technology-and-american-poetry?format=HB

Professor Nicolette Zeeman has published a new book called ‘The Arts of Disruption. Allegory and Piers Plowman’ (Oxford University Press, 2020). For more information, click here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-arts-of-disruption-9780198860242?cc=gb&lang=en&  

On 25th September at 7.30pm (UK time) Dr Ian Burrows will launch his book Shakespeare for Snowflakes live on Youtube. Dr Burrows will be answering questions from members of the public while in conversation with Dr Lesel Dawson (organiser of the Good Grief Festival; co-editor of Revenge and Gender from Classical to Renaissance Literature; author […]