Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
The University of Cambridge has held International Summer Programmes since 1923. Organised and run by the International Programmes Division of the Institute of Continuing Education, the offering now embraces 13 programmes and 208 courses. Visitors from 75 countries will come to the University for periods of study lasting from one to six weeks – a total in excess of 1235 enrolments has already been reached. At the core of each Summer Programme are the small, special study classes, largely taught by members of the University. Each programme also offers plenary lectures for all participants in that Summer Programme, and experts from within the University and beyond are invited to contribute to these series.
These lectures have been very well received in the past, and the organisers of the Summer Programmes would like, where possible, to make them more widely accessible to those with research and teaching interests in the subject concerned. The lectures are not open to the public, but where space in the lecture hall permits, we are willing to make places available for members of the University to attend the plenary lectures which interest them most.
Please note: for security reasons, all members of the University will be asked to confirm their status to one of the Institute’s staff in attendance at the lecture hall. We would be grateful if those wishing to attend any of these lectures would notify us in advance. Contact details are given at the end of this list. Any unavoidable changes to the list of venues or speakers will be posted in the main Summer Programmes Office (Foyer, Lady Mitchell Hall): we suggest you arrive a few minutes in advance in order to allow time to check the location.
The three teaching terms of the Institute of Continuing Education’s Interdisciplinary Summer Programme run from Monday 8 July to Friday 19 July, from Monday 22 July to Friday 2 August, and from Monday 5 August to Friday 16 August, 2019. The talks in each Term’s plenary series of lectures follow one or both of the twin themes: Intelligence. The topics have been chosen to stimulate interest amongst a group of students from a broad range of disciplines. Lectures take place in Lady Mitchell Hall. The morning lectures begin promptly at 10.30am, and finish at 11.30am. The series is arranged for the c.100 participants in each Term of the Interdisciplinary Summer Programme, but members of the University are cordially invited to attend. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
8 July 10.30am Dr Amy Milton: ‘Forgetting pills': an intelligent way to treat mental illness?
9 July 10.30am Jane Corbett: Collective intelligence: the human version
10 July 10.30am Professor Alison Smith: ‘Intelligence’-gathering by plants and algae: chemical signalling and
information-sharing
11 July 10.30am Dr Paul Elliott: Comparative animal 'intelligence'
12 July 10.30am Max Beber: Too clever for our own good? Science, production, policy, and humankind in the 21st century
15 July 10.30am Professor Simon Redfern: Applications of AI to the study of environmental risk
16 July 10.30am Dr Leo Mellor: Seedy, clever, bleak: spies in British 20th-century literature
17 July 10.30am Dr Graham McCann: Intelligence and democracy: information, wisdom and the real lesson of Brexit
18 July 10.30am Richard Ellis: Intelligent criminals and criminal intelligence
19 July 10.30am Dr Ed Turner: Intelligent agriculture
22 July 10.30am Tim Milner: Honorary Degrees: celebrating the fruits of intelligence
23 July 10.30am Professor Simon Conway Morris: Why the evolution of intelligence is inevitable
24 July 10.30am Dr Kanta Dihal: The history of imagining intelligent machines
25 July 10.30am Speaker to be announced: You can be an intelligence analyst, too
26 July 10.30am Professor Steve Evans: Plastics: intelligent solutions to reducing their global impact
29 July 10.30am Dr Karen Ottewell: English’s impact on other languages
30 July 10.30am Dr Alex Carter: Intelligence and creativity: practical advice for creative thinkers
31 July 10.30am Janice Steed: Emotional intelligence
1 August 10.30am Dr Adrian Weller: Where AI meets ethics
2 August 10.30am Professor Catherine Barnard: An intelligent Brexit?
5 August 10.30am Dr Graham McCann: Henry Sidgwick and the ideal of political wisdom
6 August 10.30am Dr Ben Falcon: Defending the brain: understanding the molecular basis of dementia
7 August 10.30am Richard Ellis: Intelligent criminals and criminal intelligence
8 August 10.30am Carla Zoe Cremer: Paths and obstacles to Artificial Intelligence
9 August 10.30am Dr James Grime: Secrets of a digital world
12 August 10.30am Dr Paul Elliott: Comparative animal 'intelligence'
13 August 10.30am Dr John Lawson: Dark intelligence: charting the less appealing aspects of human capability
14 August 10.30am Janice Steed: Emotional intelligence
15 August 10.30am Dr Amy Ludlow and Dr Ruth Armstrong: Intelligent criminal justice: exploring the impact of
Learning Together
16 August 10.30am Inky Gibbens: Combatting worldwide cultural and language loss: an intelligent approach
Teaching for the two Terms of the Science Summer Programme takes place from Monday 8 July to Friday 2 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s plenary lecture series is Problems and Solutions. These lectures are given in Lecture Block, Room 3 on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks section below.)
8 July 9.15am Dr Tom Monie: Biological annihilation: should we be worried?
9 July 9.15am Dr Nick Bampos: Hydrogen: Nature's best Friend
10 July 9.15am Professor David Coomes: Forests in a rapidly changing world
11 July 9.15am Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright: Are physicists really superheroes? Have you got what it takes to solve a problem?
12 July 9.15am Professor Rachel Oliver: Secrets and Lights: How quantum technologies create both problems and
solutions for secure communication
15 July 9.15am Professor Ian Hutchings: Five centuries of Tribology: from Leonardo da Vinci to the present day
16 July 9.15am Dr Hugh Hunt: Refreezing the Arctic
17 July 9.15am Dr Harry Cliff: The Future of Particle Physics
18 July 9.15am Dr Ewan St John Smith: The naked mole-rat: blind and naked but oh so cool
19 July 9.15am Dr Oliver Hadeler: The pervasive use of sensors - a problem or solution?
22 July 9.15am Charlotte Connelly: Climate and the Poles: a long view
23 July 9.15am Jane Corbett: Collective intelligence: the human version
24 July 9.15am Dr Alex Archibald: More than hot air: the challenges of clear air in a changing climate
25 July 9.15am Dr Silvia Vignolini: Photonic structures in nature and Bio-mimetic Material
26 July 9.15am Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald: New horizons for early detection of cancer: lessons from the oesophagus
29 July 9.15am Dr Ewan St John Smith: Physiology of pain
30 July 9.15am Professor Beverley Glover: Predicting the preferences of the pollinators
31 July 9.15am Professor Nigel Slater: From curiosity to exploitation
1 August 9.15am Dr John Orr: Extraordinary possibilities for concrete structures
2 August 9.15am Professor James Elliott: Digital design of materials
Teaching for the Ancient and Classical Worlds Summer Programme takes place from Monday 8 July to Friday 19 July, 2019. The theme for this year’s plenary lecture series is Culture and Commerce. Morning lectures take place in the Little Hall, on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
8 July 9.15am Dr Jan Parker: Odysseus the negotiator
9 July 9.15am Professor David Jacques: Stonehenge: a landscape through time
10 July 9.15am Dr Beatriz Marin-Aguilera: The Carthaginian Empire: beyond Rome
11 July 9.15am Dr Anastasia Christofilopoulou: Society, culture and commerce during the Hellenistic and Roman times
in the Eastern Mediterranean
12 July 9.15am Dr Matt Symonds: Why all roads lead to Rome: on the trail of a commercial and communications revolution
15 July 9.15am Dr Matt Symonds: Prosperity or penury? Counting the true cost of Hadrian's Wall
16 July 9.15am Dr Nigel Strudwick: Twisted culture and commerce: some social and economic implications of tomb robbery
in ancient Egypt
17 July 9.15am Dr John MacGinnis: Culture and commerce in the cradle of civilisation: the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire
18 July 9.15am Dr Cameron Petrie: The Indus Civilisation: old questions and new insights
19 July 9.15am Professor Roel Sterckx: Philosophers on ethics and riches in the age of Confucius
Teaching for the two terms of the Literature Summer Programme takes place from Monday 8 July and to Friday 2 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s plenary lecture series is Relationships. Morning lectures are held in the Little Hall, on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
8 July 11.15am Dr Kate Kennedy-Allum: The spaces between: Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten and the War Requiem
9 July 11.15am Dr Jenny Mander: The commercialisation of storytelling. What happens to human relationships when
stories become books?
10 July 11.15am Dr Jacqueline Tasioulas: Five weddings and a funeral in The Canterbury Tales
11 July 11.15am Dr Andy Wimbush: Odd couples and double acts in stage drama from Shakespeare to Beckett and beyond
12 July 11.15am Dr Ross Wilson: Criticism and dialogue from the 18th century to today
15 July 11.15am Dr Raphael Lyne: Shakespeare's depiction of marriage
16 July 11.15am Dr Louise Joy: 18th-century women's writing: a conversation
17 July 11.15am Dr John Lennard: Answering in print: novel/ists in dialogue
18 July 11.15am Dr Elizabeth Moore: Fatal attraction: romantic love and suicide in 19th century literature
19 July 11.15am Dr Fred Parker: Alexander Pope and Mary Leapor
22 July 11.15am Dr Hero Chalmers: Shakespeare: space and performance
23 July 11.15am Professor Helen Cooper: Aeneas and his women
24 July 11.15am Dr Corinna Russell: Mother-child relations in Romantic-period women's poetry
25 July 11.15am Dr Jon Phelan: The virtue in literature
26 July 11.15am Dr Ian Burrows: "Those parts that men delight to see": translation and titillation
in the works of Christopher Marlowe
29 July 11.15am Dr Jenny Bavidge: Ship shopping: narrative desire and readerly response
30 July 11.15am Dr Claire Nicholson: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield: "A public of two"
31 July 11.15am Dr Claire Wilkinson: Writing friendship in poetic form: Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam
1 August 11.15am Dr Philip Connell: Talking down: literature and class relations in the 1790s
2 August 11.15am Clive Wilmer: The relation of syntax to metre in certain English poems
Teaching for the Summer Programme in History takes place between Monday 22 July and Friday 2 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s plenary lecture series is Reputations. Morning lectures take place in the Law Faculty, room LG18 on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
22 July 9.15am Dr Niamh Gallagher: The changing reputation of the First World War in Irish historical memory
23 July 9.15am Dr Caroline Shenton: Mr Barry's War: rebuilding the Houses of Parliament after the great fire of 1834
24 July 9.15am Professor John Morrill: Charles I: tyrant and martyr
25 July 9.15am Dr Matthew Neal: The reputation of Sir Robert Walpole
26 July 9.15am Dr Jonathan Davis: Saviour or blundering surgeon? How should we remember Mikhail Gorbachev?
29 July 9.15am Dr Harriet Lyon: Lady Margaret Beaufort: representations and misrepresentations
30 July 9.15am Dr Sarah Pearsall: Defence of polygamy by a Lady
31 July 9.15am Dr Colin Shindler: The reputation of Harold Wilson
1 August 9.15am Allen Packwood: Churchill and his legacy
2 August 9.15am Dr David Smith: "A brave, bad man": the historical reputation of Oliver Cromwell
Teaching for the Summer Programme in Art and Visual Culture takes place between Monday 22 July and Friday 2 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s plenary lecture series is Patrons and Collections. Morning lectures take place in The Institute of Criminology, room B3 on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
22 July 9.00am Dr Susanna Avery-Quash: Collecting Old Master paintings in Britain from the Tudors to today
22 July 10.45am Catharine MacLeod: Saving van Dyck
23 July 2.00pm Mark Purcell: The country house library
24 July 9.00am Henrietta McBurney Ryan: A 17th-century visual encyclopaedia: the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo
24 July 10.45am Dr Seb Falk: The art of science? Objects of scientific history from the Whipple Museum
26 July 9.00am Christina Faraday: Patronage and collecting in Elizabethan England
26 July 10.45am Siân Griffiths: “All Art is Theft” I: Provenance and Appropriation in the Parthenon Sculptures
29 July 9.00am Jeremy Musson: A neo-Palladian patron in the 1980s: Sebastian de Ferranti and Henbury Hall Cheshire
29 July 10.45am Dr Spike Bucklow: Westminster Abbey and its Retable
30 July 9.00am Dr Susanne Turner: Copy and Paste? Probing replication and authenticity in a cast collection
30 July 2.00pm Joanne Rhymer: Collecting the Modern: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection
31 July 9.00am Charlotte Connelly: Arctic art
31 July 10.45am Dr Elizabeth Fisher: H S Ede: a collector in hindsight
1 August 9.00am Professor Frances Spalding: Helen Sutherland, Patron and friend of Ben Nicholson, David Jones
and the poet Kathleen Raine, among others
1 August 2.00pm Siân Griffiths: “All Art is Theft” II: The Artist as Collector, Monet to Matisse
2 August 9.00am Dr Jane Eade: Ham House: ‘inferior to few of the best Villas in Italy itself; the House furnished like
a great Prince’s’ John Evelyn, 1678
2 August 10.45am David Adshead: Wimpole Hall: 300 years of design patronage and collecting
Teaching for the Medieval Studies Summer Programme takes place between Monday 5 August and Friday 16 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s morning plenary lecture series is Ambition and Aspiration. Morning lectures take place in the Faculty of Divinity, Runcie Room on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
5 August 9.15am Dr Rowena E Archer: Made by marriage: the best way to get on in medieval England
6 August 9.15am Dr Ted Powell: ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers’: Ambition, reaction and the legal profession, 1300-1500
7 August 9.15am Dr Philip Morgan: Was Christ a gentleman? Policing social mobility in the later Middle Ages
8 August 9.15am Dr Sam Lane: Climbing through the Church: the Church and social mobility in Later Medieval England
9 August 9.15am Professor Nigel Saul: Images of mobility: climbers and fallers on English medieval tomb monuments
12 August 9.15am Richard Partington: Martial ambition: social mobility among fighting men
13 August 9.15am Dr James Ross: Falling from grace: the English nobility in the later Middle Ages
14 August 9.15am Richard Partington: Elite ambition: to what did kings and lords aspire?
15 August 9.15am Professor Caroline Barron: Women in medieval London: rising by marriage - and widowhood
16 August 9.15am Dr Francis Woodman: Building castles in the air - reconstructing one's descent
Teaching for the Shakespeare Summer Programme runs from Monday 5 August to Friday 16 August, 2019. The theme for this year’s morning plenary lecture series is Transformation. Morning lectures take place in the Little Hall, on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
5 August 11.30am Dr Fred Parker: Transformations in late Shakespeare: reversals and surprises
6 August 11.30am Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson: Fairytale to Classical Epic: transforming genre in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
7 August 11.30am Dr Charles Moseley: Shakespeare and love: the Italian Job
8 August 11.30am Dr Will Tosh: Shakespeare’s gay best friend? Richard Barnfield’s sexy sonnets
9 August 11.30am Dr John Lennard: Very tragical mirth: transforming tragedies in A Midsummer Night's Dream
and Romeo and Juliet
12 August 11.30am Christina Faraday: Small wonders: the secrets of Elizabeth I's miniatures cabinet
13 August 11.30am Sam Dastor: ‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’
14 August 11.30am Patrick Spottiswoode: The transformative power of a playhouse
15 August 11.30am Alexzandra Hildred: The Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s Renaissance ship
16 August 11.30am Kelly Hunter: Shakespeare and the brain
Teaching for the Creative Writing Summer Programme takes place between Monday 5 August and Friday 16 August, 2019. Morning lectures for the Creative Writing Summer Programme will be held in SG1, Alison Richard building on the Sidgwick Site. (See also ‘Evening talks’ section below.)
5 August 11.30am Dr Sarah Burton: Research: a hotline to the past
6 August 11.30am Dr Francesca Rhydderch: The Rice Paper Diaries: fact into fiction
7 August 11.30am Abigail Docherty: Children's fiction
8 August 11.30am Dr John Lennard: Inspired by reading
9 August 11.30am Professor Jem Poster: Beyond research: the writer’s imagination
12 August 11.30am Dr Lucy Durneen: Small wonders: the art of the short story
13 August 11.30am Professor Tiffany Atkinson: Writing the other
14 August 11.30am Lee Brackstone: The publisher's view
15 August 11.30am Elizabeth Speller: Selective truths: life writing
16 August 11.30am Dr Midge Gillies: A shed of one's own: where writers write
The evening lectures begin promptly at 8.00pm and finish at 9.00pm. All evening lectures take place in Lady Mitchell Hall on the Sidgwick Site, unless stated otherwise.
9 July 8.00pm Sir Tony Brenton: Making a better world: the place of 'values' in foreign policy
10 July 8.00pm Professor Liba Taub: Treasures and surprises: the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at 75
11 July 8.00pm Professor Lord Colin Renfrew: Early centres of congregation: the sanctuary on Keros
12 July 8.00pm Dr Fred Parker: Shakespeare's Measure for Measure: why it's hard to balance the accounts
15 July 8.00pm Mr Francis Wells: Leonardo da Vinci: anatomist or natural philosopher
17 July 8.00pm Dr Stephen Cave: Immortality in the age of AI
18 July 8.00pm Dr Hugh Hunt: Understanding boomerangs and other spinning things
22 July 8.00pm Dr James Grime: Alan Turing and the Enigma machine
23 July 8.00pm Dr Luke Kemp: The Red Queen: why societies collapse
24 July 8.00pm Dr Francis Woodman: John Wastell, the life of a Tudor architect and his crowning achievement, Kings' College
25 July 8.00pm Dr Victoria Avery: Feast and fast: the art of food in Europe, 1500-1800
26 July 8.00pm Dr Seán Lang: Never let the facts get in the way: history in the movies
30 July 8.00pm Dr Colin Shindler: The film reputations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and Richard M Nixon
31 July 8.00pm Allen Packwood: Churchill and D-Day
5 August 8.00pm Dr Seán Lang: Cambridge eccentrics
6 August 8.00pm Andrew Hatcher: Eureka moments: where inspiration comes from
7 August 8.00pm Dr Fred Parker: Shakespeare's Measure for Measure: why it's hard to balance the accounts
8 August 8.00pm Dr Francis Woodman: Ely cathedral, triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster
9 August 8.00pm Magnus Sigurdsson: The cut and thrust business of war: fighting your way to the top in medieval England
12 August 8.00pm Professor Mark Bailey: The rise of the English yeomanry out of the catastrophe of the Black Death,
1350 to 1500
13 August 8.00pm Sara Collins: A conversation with Sara Collins
14 August 8.00pm Clive Wilmer: Shakespeare and the avoidance of Tragedy
Please note
Any unforeseen or last-minute changes to this lecture programme will be posted in the main Summer Programmes Office (Lady Mitchell Hall).
Your response to these lectures is invited
We would be interested to hear your response to any of the plenary lectures you have heard. If you have comments, or wish to know more about teaching on the Summer Programmes, please email Sarah Ormrod, Director of International Summer Programmes and Lifelong Learning, Institute of Continuing Education at sjo1001@cam.ac.uk.