Faculty of English

To mark the publication of online catalogues of a remarkable collection of material by and relating to Ted Hughes at his alma mater Pembroke College Cambridge, Mark Wormald and Robert Macfarlane talk about Mark’s recent book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about poetry, fishing and Hughes’s passionate advocacy for wild fish […]

Prof. Michael Hurley lectures on ‘How to be Superstitious’ Lancaster University, 15 March 2023: Professor Hurley will address the Literature & Religion Reading Group. Modern society likes to think it is governed by entirely rational, evidence-based beliefs. But is this true? Or even desirable? Professor Hurley’s lecture explores the nature and counterintuitive value of ‘superstition’, […]

Owned by Everyone? The Wonder, Plight and Future of Chalk Streams is an interdisciplinary conference on the culture, science and future of chalk streams, taking place 30-31 March 2023. Organised with  partners the NGO WildFish Conservation, the conference is co-hosted by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Pembroke College. As part of the Cambridge Festival, the […]

Edward’s Boys, an all-boy theatre company comprising students from King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon (“Shakespeare’s School”), have received critical praise and popular success as a result of their work exploring the repertoire of the boys’ companies from the early modern period. This rarely performed city comedy is the company’s fourth staging of Middleton, following A Mad […]

Lewis Roberts, PhD candidate in English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and supervisor for the Faculty, has been awarded the Jane Eliza Procter Fellowship at Princeton University for the academic year 2023-2024. Lewis will use this time at Princeton to work on historical poetics, including a critical appraisal of this method for the study of […]

Romanticism and the Black Atlantic 7.30pm-8.45pm on Tuesday 21 March West Court, Jesus College In the wake of calls to decolonise the curriculum, what is the Romantic period’s legacy in our own time? Romanticism is best known as a movement celebrating political and imaginative liberty – the human mind freeing itself from the shackles of […]

Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th March 2023 Basil Bunting: Symposium and Recital, English Faculty Please join us for a symposium celebrating the British Modernist poet Basil Bunting with papers from established and newer Bunting scholars. The keynote speaker will be Dr Alex Niven, who edited the first edition of Bunting’s letters last year, published by OUP. On […]

Dr Diarmuid Hester leads The Really Popular Book Club, 28 February 7-8pm Dr Diarmuid Hester (Emmanuel) will lead a discussion of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Hours for Cambridge University Library’s The Really Popular Book Club. The event is free, it takes place online, and everyone is welcome to attend. For more information […]

Professor Hurley will give a lecture on ‘The Shattered Majesty of Newman’s Spontaneous Style’ at a symposium on studying Newman through Literature at St Mary’s University, London (20th and 21st February). For a list of speakers and further details, including how to register for the symposium, please see the attached flyer and link: Links for further information: […]