Dr Victoria Avery, curator of our Rise Up exhibition, shares her fascinating new research alongside violin performances by Nicole Cherry, the Assistant Professor of Violin from University of Texas at San Antonio and founder of the ForgewithGeorge project which commissions new violin compositions inspired by Bridgetower.
Curated by historian of abolitionist ideas, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, this unique programme of short films showcases highlights from the University of Birmingham’s groundbreaking conference, last year, Undoing 2007; Preparing for 2038.
Challenging familiar, but misleading, narratives of 'abolition’, the rigorous presentations and surprising conversations archived in these fifteen short films consider how communities can commemorate freedom-fighting, resistance, and abolition by harnessing reparative histories
Bishop’s sculptural work celebrates the countless unrecorded Jamaican market women of West African heritage whose skills, knowledge and empowerment ‘exemplify resilience and agency’ and helped ‘shape the legacy of Caribbean and African heritage’.
Today, natural history museums are starting to research the full histories of how their collections were built, and this can bring to light some surprising and troubling stories. Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, are icons of extinction, and some of the world’s best-preserved specimens are in Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology. New research there has uncovered an uncomfortable truth about how the history of the extinction of the thylacine had strong parallels with the violent events that took place in Tasmania in the nineteenth century.
It is a perhaps surprising fact that one of the most numerous types of document to have survived from Greek and Roman antiquity are accounts: account inscriptions from classical Athens and other cities, temple accounts from, among others, Delos, and accounts on papyrus from various places in Egypt. Accounts are also discussed by ancient authors in the context not of the economy, but of politics, indicating that there may have been a link between accounts and accountability.
In the next century it is predicted that more than half of the world's 7,000 languages, and up to 90% of its distinctive writing traditions, will be lost. To try to protect the cultural heritage of today's minoritised communities, we need to understand how and why languages lose or maintain their vitality.
“Carpe diem”, often translated as “seize the day”, is one of the most recognisable Latin phrases: in our day it is a popular slogan on T-shirts, and millions know the words through the movie Dead Poets Society. But how did the ancients seize the day? What pleasures made life worth living for them?
According to the late antique historian Orosius, the appearance of Augustus as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire was part of God’s plan for the Christianisation of the world: “Caesar’s empire was established with a view to the future coming of Christ”.
Join Tim Whitmarsh to explore to what extent did the spread of early Christianity depend on the emergence of the new world order. Is the success story of the new cult separable from that of the new political dispensation?
This event is part of Cambridge Festival.
Classics is thriving in Ghana. It is taught in two public universities (the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast) and undergraduate numbers there are bigger than here in Cambridge, and still growing. Classics Beyond Borders is a new initiative in the Faculty of Classics that has formed a collaboration with the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast to learn about how colleagues there have dealt with the challenge of decolonisation, increased student numbers over the years, and reinvigorated the discipline.
Grab a glass of wine and engage in an evening of unconventional conversation where we will celebrate the body, both sculpted and flesh-and-blood.
What is the place of our body when we enter a museum? How can we find space amongst a roll-call of sculpted perfection for our own embodiment, however messy and real? Choreographer Sivan Rubenstein’s dance performance will foreground the mother’s growing body in transformation, while Caroline Vout and Sarah Fine bring academic and philosophical discourse back to the body.
