Spread the word!
18 November 2024Dr Mark Wormald helps launch Elemental Poetry Cambridge – a new project to get the city writing.
Poems on the Underground archive arrives at Cambridge University Library
23 February 2024Beloved poetry project archive contains letters from Nobel Prize winners and Poet Laureates
The poetry scholar, the Black Atlantic and the Trembling Hand
13 March 2023Mathelinda Nabugodi investigates the impact of colonialism and the slave trade on Romantic poets. Her research has taken her into the archives with unexpected results.
The social scientist who inadvertently became a poet
25 March 2022At the age of thirteen Mona Jebril found herself stranded in Gaza, becoming a refugee for the second time in her life. Her talent and determination brought her to Cambridge where she became the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from the Gaza Strip. She completed her PhD in education in 2017. Today she is using the arts to give a voice to those in areas of conflict.
Virgil has the edge on Shakespeare in helping students to love literature
14 February 2022Students who study Virgil’s Aeneid at school find it significantly more engaging than other ‘high-prestige’ literature, even though they only learn tiny fragments of the text, research suggests.
The Lost Words: a ‘spell book’ that closes the gap between childhood and nature
01 January 2022The Lost Words is a book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris that summons the magic of nature to help children find, love and protect the natural world.
Ancient Greek ‘pop culture’ discovery rewrites history of poetry and song
08 September 2021New research into a little-known text written in ancient Greek shows that ‘stressed poetry’, the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already in use in the 2nd Century CE, 300 years earlier than previously thought.
A treasure trove of unseen writing by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney reveals a vital creative friendship
14 November 2020A unique archive acquired by Pembroke College Cambridge transforms our understanding of the two poets, showing how they drew career-defining inspiration from a little known friendship circle, and a shared passion for Ireland, water and fishing, spanning five decades.
The forgotten poet of Fordham
10 December 2019Handwritten verses from a nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire poet – who died destitute despite royal patronage – have been saved by Cambridge University Library.
Shelley’s Peterloo poem took inspiration from the radical press, new research reveals
16 August 2019Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, the most celebrated literary response to the Peterloo massacre – which has its bicentenary on 16 August – drew on accounts of the tragedy written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile.
