Programme announced for the Cambridge Festival 2024
The Intellectual Forum runs a number of events in College throughout the year, and will be offering tickets to four events in this year’s Cambridge Festival.
Information about individual events, and links to reserve free tickets, can be found below.
Unlock the 'Secrets of Nature': Exploring history, film, and environment
Saturday 16 March 10.00am, West Court, Jesus College
This interactive workshop is aimed at children aged 10-14.
This workshop showcases a new set of teaching resources developed by Dr Max Long based on his research into natural history films from the 1920s and 1930s. Usually shown to popular cinema audiences prior to a feature-length movie, Secrets of Nature were some of the earliest precursors to today’s Planet Earth and Blue Planet. Through a series of fun activities that make use of the original films, participants will be immersed in the environments and places of interwar Britain, learning in the process about environmental change and the history of science communication.
The session will be led by two secondary school teachers, Molly Riglin and Jason Langford, who developed the teaching resources alongside Max. It is being generously supported by the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.
Tickets are available on our Eventbrite page.
Masculinity and the 'natural' body
Monday 18 March 7.30pm, West Court, Jesus College
Why did a philosopher go to a bodybuilding competition? Professor Clare Chambers explores what the history and current practice of bodybuilding shows us about masculinity, about the idea of nature, and about the philosophical and political significance of our bodies.
Tickets are available on our Eventbrite page.
What's novel about a novel? Storytelling and travelling knowledge
Tuesday 26 March 7.30pm, West Court, Jesus College
Prizewinning author Shida Bazyar will discuss how novels take their characters and their readers on journeys across cultural contexts, and how this can make both characters and readers re-assess the things they think they know.. How sound are our belief systems, viewed from another perspective? How easy or difficult is it to let the new knowledge gained from reading novels travel into everyday life?
Shida will be in conversation with Miriam Schwarz and Dr Tara Talwar Windsor, who are both part of a project that is developing free materials for book groups. This event is co-hosted with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the CAPONEU project (Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe) at the University of Cambridge.
Tickets are available on our Eventbrite page.
Monstrous Archives: Colonialism and the emergence of data
Thursday 28 March 7.30pm, West Court, Jesus College
For centuries, the archive has intrigued and fascinated us. Often imagined as a dusty room in a crumbling old library, it is where we go to locate our collective memory. But with the advent of information technology, and its drive to accumulate vast amounts of data, the archive itself is changing. In this talk, Dr Siddharth Soni will tell the story of the industrial transformation of the archive into a large and inscrutable monster.
