The Cambridge Festival, which runs from 26th March to 4th April, brings together the hugely popular Cambridge Science Festival and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas to host an extensive programme of over 350 events that tackle many critical global challenges affecting us all. Coordinated by the University of Cambridge, the Festival features hundreds of prominent figures and experts in the world of science, current affairs and the arts, and has four key themes: health, environment, society and explore.
Events at the Festival span global, local, national, social and scientific history and many are based on new research and books published in the last few months or in the pipeline.
The rise of the royal mistress tells of the increasing interest in public figures during the post Civil War reign of Charles II and the beginnings of a kind of celebrity culture in which pride of place was reserved for the mistresses of Charles II. In this conversation, Annalisa Nicholson discusses these women – Barbara Villiers, Moll Davis, Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kéroualle and Hortense Mancini – to showcase their roles and influence in late seventeenth-century England. From painting and theatre to science, these women wielded enormous authority over the styles and directions of these fields. They also transformed the status and tradition of the royal mistress. Charles borrowed the notion of the maîtresse-en-titre from France where it designated the French king’s official concubine who was granted certain privileges at court. Importing the maîtresse-en-titre to his restored court in England in 1660, Charles instituted a position for his mistresses that had hitherto been unofficial and often shrouded in secrecy. Tracing the lives of these mistresses, Annalisa talks about their impact and legacies as powerful women in a bumpy and unpredictable era. The talk will be followed by a live Q & A with Annalisa Nicholson on twitter @Cambridge_Fest.
How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least 30 years, not only for himself, for professional reasons and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture. In All the sonnets of Shakespeare, experts Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells will discuss their new ground-breaking book which assembles all of the sonnets - from stand-alone poems to sonnets within plays - in their probable order of composition, debunks long-established biographical myths about them and proposes new insights about how and why Shakespeare wrote them. This event has been organised in collaboration with Cambridge University Press.
Dr Mira Siegelberg’s new book Statelessness: a modern history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond. In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organisation and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Dr Siegelberg, from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, will talk about the book’s findings and show how the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights.
Legacies of enslavement, chaired by David Lammy MP, presents a discussion arising from University of Cambridge's two-year, in-depth academic study into ways in which it contributed to, benefited from or challenged the Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labour during the colonial era. The study is also investigating the extent to which scholarship at the University of Cambridge, an established and flourishing seat of learning before and during the period of Empire, might have reinforced and validated race-based thinking between the 18th and early 20th Century. In this context, the discussion focuses on how Cambridge might address issues of reparative justice. Speakers include Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, 8th Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies who is a global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment; Professor Olivette Otele, Professor of History of Slavery and Memory of Enslavement at the University of Bristol and Vice President of the Royal Historical Society; and Sharon Mehari, President of the Cambridge African Caribbean Society who has recently joined the Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group. The Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group, which published an interim report last May, is expected to deliver its final report to the Vice-Chancellor in 2022. Alongside its findings on historical links to the slave trade, the report will recommend appropriate ways for the University to publicly acknowledge such links and their modern impact.
In A forgotten massacre: Britons and Americans at Dartmoor Prison, Dr Nicholas Guyatt, Reader in North American History in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, will talk about the War of 1812, the last time Britain and the United States went to war with each other, when more than 6,000 American sailors ended up in Dartmoor Prison. Nearly a thousand of them were Black, and by the summer of 1814 Dartmoor had become the first racially-segregated prison facility in US [and UK] history - at the request of white American prisoners, not the British officials who ran the prison. Drawing on his forthcoming book The Hated Cage, Dr Nicholas Guyatt will share the extraordinary story of how so many Americans ended up in a desolate corner of southwest England, and of the tense and defiant communities they constructed behind Dartmoor’s stone walls.
Some events focus on global history, including significant anniversaries:
In Bringing the curtain down: Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dr Jonathan Davis, Associate Professor in Modern European History at Anglia Ruskin University, examines the social, political and global forces that led to the end of the USSR in December 1991. On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, he assesses Gorbachev’s domestic reforms of perestroika and glasnost’ and consider the forces these unleashed as the USSR staggered towards its endpoint.
In Forgotten histories: the Irish in the First World War, Dr Niamh Gallagher, a Lecturer in modern British and Irish history at the University of Cambridge talks about her first book, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (Bloomsbury, 2019), the first work of Irish history to win the Royal Historical Society's 2020 Whitfield Prize. Described as a book that could lead to a major rethinking of Irish participation in the war, it explores the 'home front' and Irish diasporic communities in Canada, Australia and Britain and reveals that, despite the Easter Rising of 1916, substantial support for the Allied war effort continued largely unabated not only until November 1918, but afterwards as well.
At a time of concern about growing gender inequalities, Dr Lucy Delap will discusse her new book, Feminisms: a global history, and outline why the narrative of 'feminist waves' - a sequence of ever more progressive updates - is simplistic. She will argue that feminists have been motivated by the specific concerns of their historical moment and that those who are part of the movement have not always agreed on a single programme. She says a more diverse history of feminism can help us better navigate current debates and controversies.
In Before Gallipolli there was Homer: the new Trojan War of 1915, Professor Samuel Lieu, President of the International Union of Academics, will draw from the poems and letters of Rupert Brooke and Patrick Shaw-Stewart as well as from those of fellow scholar-soldiers who took part in the 1915 Gallipolli campaign such as A.W. St Clair Tisdall VC, Charles Lister and G.W. Claye, to bring to life the initial excitement over the chance to prove their mettle on the Plains of Troy followed by the disappointments and frustrations of a doomed military campaign. It will also examine the patriotic ideals and class-superiority of a closely-knit cultural and social elite as well as the unfailing common belief in the supremacy of a classical education.
Other events look at the history of education:
The history of school life - what can it teach us? is an interactive workshop, led by Dr Peter Mandler and history teacher Molly Navey, which explores changes in the UK education system since 1945. Based on a project called Secondary Education and Social Change in the United Kingdom since 1945 which involves Cambridge academics teaming up with four secondary school history teachers, the aim is to show secondary school pupils how experiences of going to school in post-War Britain are a good measure of how society has changed since 1945.
In Safe sex for teenagers: a journey through historical and educational resources, Caroline Rusterholz, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Faculty of History, will provide a historical overview of the evolution of educational materials aimed at young people and produced by sexual health charities from the 1960s. Focusing on a range of leaflets and short films produced by the Brook Advisory Centres and the Family Planning Association, she will highlight some controversies surrounding their publication and explore how boundaries have shifted over time.
The history of science is also another focus at the Festival with academics exploring the beginnings and development of IVF, organ transplantation and artificial intelligence:
Histories of Artificial Intelligence: a genealogy of power aims to shed light on the history of artificial intelligence and seeks to answer the question of what our digital future might look like and why. The panel unites experts in the History of Science and Technology and in Literary Studies for an interactive hour-long presentation drawn from sustained dialogue with hundreds of scholars based around the globe. They include Dr Sarah Dillon, Co-editor of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines, Dr Jonnie Penn, a Research Fellow at St. Edmund’s College and Harvard University and Dr Richard Staley, author of Einstein’s Generation and co-organiser of Making Climate History.
In The horrible history [and bright future] of organ transplantation, surgeons Professor Mike Nicholson, Director of the NIHR Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) in Organ Donation and Transplantation, and Paul Gibbs will provide whistle-stop tour of the history of organ transplantation and preservation. They’ll start way back in the 1800s, with some of the earliest attempts to preserve organs, and journey right up to today to explain some of the latest research.
The archives of IVF pioneer Professor Sir Robert Edwards will be discussed in an in-depth symposium by a range of eminent researchers, including Professor Edwards’ official biographer Dr Roger Gosden, and by his daughter, Dr Jenny Joy. It will focus on ways of working with the newly opened archive.
For those more interested in local history, there are a number of different events, starting with An evening for Allan Brigham which celebrates the well-loved local historian, a stalwart of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, who passed away in September. Allan was one of the founder members of the Mill Road History Society and a valued contributor to Capturing Cambridge, the website where its research is posted. The evening will involve tributes from those who knew him at work, as an author, a social activist, a historian and an inspiring tour leader as well as some rarely seen filmed material made by Allan. The evening will end with a chance for anyone attending to share their memories and stories.
Other events which touch on local history are:
Botany in 18th Century Cambridge: a first look inside the Martyn Collection unveils some of the treasures in the Martyn collections held in Cambridge University Library and Cambridge University Herbarium. Dr Edwin Rose and Dr Lauren Gardiner from the University of Cambridge will explore the practice of botany in 18th century Cambridge through these previously poorly studied but important materials. Many of Martyn’s books survive and contain annotations relating to specimens in his ‘hortus siccus’ collection of dried plants in addition to those he and a series of curators attempted to cultivate in the Botanic Garden. These represent species collected on a truly global scale, from the walls of the colleges of Cambridge through to species collected on the first European voyages to the South Pacific.
Potatoes and ale: an environmental history of a British plate examines the long and hidden histories of the Maris Piper potato and Maris Otter barley - both developed at Cambridge's former Plant Breeding Institute and introduced to the market in 1966 - which have become two of the most popular varieties grown in Britain today.
In Slavery and abolition: collections uncovered, Wisbech & Fenland Museum and St John’s College present a panel discussion on the issues raised in their online exhibition 'Slavery and Abolition: Collections Uncovered' which brings together their collections of material on slavery and the abolition movement in public for the first time. As well as the personal campaign materials of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, the exhibition includes original manuscript material relating to the day-to-day economic realities of Jamaican sugar plantations and printed works that variously expose and conceal slavery's horrors. Panellists will consider what the historical documents reveal to modern readers, and the material's relevance to ongoing matters of social injustice and political campaigning.
In Murder and witches crime writers Cathi Unsworth, Syd Moore and Mick Finlay, whose books draw on the Hagley Woods murder of 1943 when a woman’s body was found in a tree trunk in Worcestershire, the history of witches in Essex and murder in London and East Anglia will talk about some of the events in history that have inspired their books.
The Museum of Cambridge has also put together a short documentary on Crime and punishment in Cambridge in the 1850s which takes a look at Victorian crime, using the personal stories of those recorded in Cambridge jail in the 1851 census.
In How to guide: research your house history, public historian Helen Weinstein shares how to research the history of your Cambridge property using sources in the Cambridgeshire Collection, the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Family History Society resources, the Cambridgeshire Archives and the Cambridge University Library. Weinstein also leads a blue plaque exhibition tour of a Victorian Cambridge neighbourhood, Sturton Town, once a well-known area linking Mill Road to East Road in Cambridge's CB1. The event involves two introductory films and a tour of one of the wider streets covered in blue plaques and pop-up exhibition windows about the Victorian era.
View the full programme via www.festival.cam.ac.uk from 22nd February. Many events require pre-booking, please check the events listings on the Festival website.
Keep up to date with the Festival on social media:
Instagram: @Camunifestivals | Facebook: @CambridgeFestival | Twitter: @Cambridge_Fest
The Festival sponsors and partners are AstraZeneca and RAND Europe. The Festival media partners are BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and Cambridge Independent.
If you are interested in viewing an event after the published time and date, please check the event page on the Festival website, as many are on demand, or get in touch with the Festival team via mandy.garner@admin.cam.ac.uk.
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