Monthly Archives: October 2014

Reading the Anthropocene

Posted on by

nasa

My next event on the Cambridge Festival of Ideas calendar is ‘Reading the Anthropocene‘ which takes place on Thursday 30th November in the Faculty of English. Again thanks to the wide-ranging interests of my PhD students, I was alerted to this term a few years back and have been following debates around it ever since. I’m delighted that joining me to talk about whether we are indeed now in a new geological era, and whether or not that actually matters, will be Philip Gibbard, Professor of Quaternary Palaeoenvironments in the Department of Geography here at Cambridge, and writer and environmental campaigner Tony Juniper. It promises to be a lively discussion that could not be better timed as the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ meet for the first time this week to assess the evidence of man’s impact on the planet.

 

 

The Cloud is More Than Air and Water

Posted on by

search

Earlier this year I was invited to Norwich to talk about the palimpsest, the subject of my early work but a topic to which I had not returned in recent years. At the symposium I met a talented young designer and filmmaker, Michael James Lewis, who challenged me to consider how the metaphor of the palimpsest might help us think about the contemporary digital age, in particular cloud computing and remote data storage. He did indeed get me thinking, so during the summer he came to visit me in Cambridge and we recorded a long interview on the topic as part of his project, ‘The Cloud is More than Air and Water’. Michael has now turned the interview into a sound piece intercut with his own work and backed by new music composed by his collaborator, Matt Parker, out of sounds recorded at a data storage site. Part I of the recording is now available here, with Part II following shortly.

 

Cambridge Festival of Ideas

Posted on by

9333014f47cf400891a493f87bbdfb0c

The Cambridge Festival of Ideas began this week and runs until Sunday 2nd November. It’s a great event that each year prompts academics to think of interesting and engaging ways to share their ideas with the public. I had the pleasure yesterday evening of taking part in one of the Faculty of English’s How to Read sessions. Two of our graduate students gave fantastic talks, one on Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution epic A Place of Greater Safety (1992) and the other on Masuji Ibuse’s 1965 novel about the devastation caused by the Hiroshima atomic bombing, Black Rain. Having triumphantly just submitted the manuscript of my edited collection (along with co-editor Dr Caroline Edwards at Birkbeck) on Maggie Gee, I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk about her work in public, focusing on the short story collection The Blue (2006). The audience were fantastic and post-presentation discussion ranged from the benefits or not of ereaders to the universality of themes across literature. I even got to talk a little about one of my favourite words and things, something a wonderful PhD student taught me about many years ago – skeuomorphism. Check out the full guide to the festival here.