Dr Jenny Bavidge awarded prestigious teaching prize

We are delighted to announce that Dr Jenny Bavidge, ICE’s Academic Director for English Literature, Film and Creative Writing, has been awarded a prestigious Pilkington Prize for her outstanding teaching.

The 20th annual Pilkington Prizes, which honour excellence in teaching across the University of Cambridge, were held at Murray Edwards College on 20 June 2013.

Jenny was one of 13 inspirational academics to receive an award at a ceremony attended by Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and Lord Watson of Richmond CBE, the University’s High Steward.

The Pilkington Prizes were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington, the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, who believed passionately that the quality of teaching was crucial to Cambridge’s success.

About Dr Jenny Bavidge

Jenny took her BA in English Literature and Language at Worcester College, Oxford, and then an MA and her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. After her PhD (on representations of urban space in the contemporary novel), she took up a Lectureship in English at the University of Greenwich, where she stayed, becoming Senior Lecturer, until she joined ICE on 1 October 2011. She is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

Jenny’s teaching includes 19th and 20th-century American and British literature, close reading and critical theory, and film. She is particularly interested in writing about London and other cities, and is Vice-President of the Literary London Society. Other interests include cultural geography, children’s literature, eco-criticism, and theories of place and space.

In her first 18 months at ICE, Jenny has made an enormous difference to the teaching of literature, film and creative writing. She has academic responsibility for all the Institute’s courses in these areas and teaches and supervises many herself, including day schools, weekend courses, weekly courses, online courses and part-time University qualifications.

Jenny has given a number of public and academic lectures during her time at ICE, including a talk on ‘queer dreams’ in the work of the Brontës as part of the 2012 Cambridge Festival of Ideas, a Gresham College Lecture on contemporary London crime fiction, and a keynote address at the University of Northampton: ‘The Personal is Political Revisited: Investigating Notions of Place and Space’.

Jenny’s latest publication is: ‘Vital Victims: Senses of Children in the Urban’, Children in Culture Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood, Ed. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, (Basingstoke), Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 208-221 and she has recently been writing about New York in children’s fiction. She is currently planning a book on the child and the city.