Literature Cambridge
info@literaturecambridge.co.uk
Literature Cambridge was set up in 2015 by Trudi Tate, an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall who teaches Victorian and modern literature at Cambridge and has a passion to bring great literature in English to readers all over the world.
Literature Cambridge launched with a series of summer schools in which participants spend a week immersed in the life and works of their favourite authors. Enlisting many luminaries to teach, from ground-breaking Cambridge art historians Frances Spalding and Claudia Tobin to brilliant literary scholars Dame Gillian Beer, Susan Sellers, Isobel Maddison, Karina Jakubowicz, Claire Nicholson, Claire Davison, Alison Hennegan, Ellie Mitchell, Suzanne Raitt, and many others, Trudi’s summer courses have been a resounding success. They offer a summer course on Virginia Woolf each year. This runs twice: once live online, then again in person here in Cambridge. In 2024, the theme will be Woolf and Childhood, and in 2025, the courses will explore Virginia Woolf: Writing Life.
In 2020, Literature Cambridge created an exciting series of Online Study Sessions. These attract lovers of literature from all over the world as well as locally. A group of superb lecturers, all with a Cambridge connection, provide top quality lectures and seminars, live online via Zoom.
They study a great range of writers: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Ivor Gurney, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville West, Zora Neale Hurston, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Philip Larkin, refugee writers, and more. Lecturers include Gillian Beer, Kasia Boddy, Anne-Laure Brevet, Claire Davison, Clare Walker Gore, Angela Harris, Alison Hennegan, Karina Jakubowicz, Ellie Mitchell, Lisa Mullen, Fred Parker, Jan Parker, Adrian Poole, Corinna Russell, Ann Kennedy Smith, Hugh Stevens, Trudi Tate, Mariah Whelan and many others.
They run a regular season of live online lectures on Virginia Woolf. The next Woolf Season is on the theme of Woolf and Freedom and runs from September 2023 to June 2024. You can book for as many or as few sessions as you like. Places are limited and sessions often sell out. A Victorian Season of lectures runs until November 2023.
Literature Cambridge also offer live online weekly and fortnightly courses on special topics, including:
2023
Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny (4 sessions)
Elizabeth von Arnim: Women and Freedom (4 sessions)
Victorian Women course (six sessions)
The Power of Women in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy course (seven sessions)
Close Reading Irish Poets: course 1 (two sessions)
2024
Women Writers of the 1920s course (four sessions)
Jane Austen course (six sessions)
Sylvia Plath course (four sessions)
Literary Gardens course (six sessions)
Katherine Mansfield course (six sessions)
Iris Murdoch and Love course (five sessions)
George Orwell course (five sessions)
Photo credit: Seb Peters