REVIEW 2011-12

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

2www.crassh.cam.ac.uk

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social

Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)

Management Committee

Director Simon Goldhill Professor in Greek Literature and Culture, Faculty of Classics; Director, CRASSH 2011-

ChairSimon Franklin FBA Professor, Department of Slavonic Studies; Chair, School of Arts and Humanities

Ash Amin FBA 1931 Chair in Geography, Department of Geography

Graeme Barker FBA Disney Professor of Archaeology; Head, Department of Archaeology; Director, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

William Brown Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations, Faculty of Economics; Chair, School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Master, Darwin College

Tim Crane Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy

Caroline Humphrey FBA Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology

Hans van de Ven Professor of Modern Chinese History, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Megan Vaughan FBA Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Faculty of History; Director, Centre of African Studies

Andrew Webber Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, Department of German

Advisory Board

Danielle Allen UPS Foundation Professor, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton

Homi Bhabha Anne F Rothenberg Professor of English & American Literature & Language; Director, Harvard Humanities Center

Geoffrey Crossick Vice-Chancellor, University of London

Lorraine Daston Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

David Edgerton Professor of the History of Science and Technology, Imperial College, London

Conor Gearty FBA Professor of Law, London School of Economics

Maarten HajerProfessor of Public Policy, University of Amsterdam

Onora O’Neill CBE FBA House of Lords

Deborah Posel Director, Wits Institute for Economic & Social Research

Richard Sennett Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics & NYU

Sally Shuttleworth Professor in English, Head of Humanities, Oxford

Quentin Skinner FBA Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London; Regius Professor of History

Marilyn Strathern FBA Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology

Deborah Swallow Marit Rausing Director, Courtauld Institute, London

Lord Wilson of Dinton Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Alison Richard Building7 West RoadCambridge CB3 9DT

+44 (0)1223 766886enquiries@crassh.cam.ac.uk

Cover image and page 15 image courtesy of Nicholas Hare Architects LLP © Alan Williams photography.

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We have moved from the shabby genteel old rabbit warren of a building at Mill Lane into the splendid new Alison Richard Building at the heart of the Sidgwick Site, right at the centre of the arts and humanities campus – all glass, metal and soaring views. Our two lecture theatres and the other meeting rooms have been bustling with conferences, colloquia and workshops. And we have started to fulfil the vision of CRASSH with which I took up the post of Director.

My first year as Director of CRASSH has been even more exhilarating, exhausting and fulfilling than I could have

imagined.

Simon Goldhill Director, CRASSH

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CRASSH is taking a new direction in supporting long-term collaborative research projects, which will provide

a new core of fellows for the centre.

This year, we have successfully set up and raised funds for two multi-person five-year projects. The first, supported by the European Research Council, is on ‘The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’. We have a team of five directors, and six new fellows, who will collaborate in exploring a key element of Victorian culture: the project will investigate not just the nineteenth-century obsession with religion and classics but also the pressing question of what pasts matter in the formation of British public and intellectual life. The second project,

funded by the Leverhulme Trust, also has six new fellows for five years, with three directors, and is on the subject of ‘Conspiracies’. Why is it that in the nineteenth-century conspiracies were imagined largely to be outside government and its institutions, while in the twenty-first-century conspiracies are so often located inside government and its institutions? This team will be looking at issues as broad as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the role of the internet in contemporary plotting, and the history of political assassination.

Both projects will have weekly seminars, regular colloquia, and visiting professors every term. The two teams overlap in their concerns with nineteenth-century history, and, along with two shorter term research groups working on the history of archaeology and on Victorian interdisciplinary cultural history. In the coming years CRASSH will be an extraordinary hub for research in nineteenth-century studies.

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Next year, we will have 22 junior research fellows at CRASSH. Our twelve new five-year research fellows will join the four two-year research fellows (co-funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Newton Trust) – an initiative of my predecessor, Mary Jacobus, now in the second year of a five-year programme, which is proving very successful, both in the superb quality of the applicants and the broad and surprising topics of the research undertaken. New joint

programmes with European Institutes – the EURIAS fellowship and the Swedish Pro-Futura Fellowship – bring us year-long fellows; a small group of three fellows (AHRC and CIGRIF) will provide a locus for work on digital humanities on projects with partners in Law, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the UL and CUP. It has been an extraordinarily immediate and exciting growth.

Amitav Ghosh and Natalie Zemon Davis in conversation

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The core of CRASSH’s working diary, however, and our detailed research efforts this year, have been in two

major programmes: our conferences, and our graduate and faculty working groups.

The conference programme – fiercely competitive: we turn down many more than we can help – has selected, funded and organized twenty-six international, interdisciplinary meetings, all wonderfully supported by the administrative team at CRASSH. The topics varied hugely – from rather traditional sounding areas that may not get the attention they deserve –

Medieval Church screens, say – to the most cutting edge social science topics – reproductive policy in China – to the more experimental areas of ‘filming transnational interiors’, part of our continuing support for screen media in Cambridge, a topic ripe for development through cross-faculty channels.

The CRASSH conference programme brings hundreds of researchers from around the world into the centre each year, and now, in the ARB, into a setting that befits the flagship programme. We were delighted that an anonymous donor is funding the programme this year, along with matched funds from the Newton Trust.

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Visualising Violence: Art, Memory and Dictatorship in Latin America

One especially productive discussion centred on who owns memory, who has the right to remember and the different appropriations of the memory of the victims of the traumatic past by art, academia, the relatives of the disappeared and human rights organisations.

Jordana Blejmar Latin American Studies

Nationalism and the City

The idea for this conference was to provoke an encounter between two extremely prominent but equally elusive

concepts – to read ‘the city’ and ‘nationalism’ together – and in doing so, seek to disrupt and expand the existing

theoretical literature around these terms. Perhaps as a result of congregating such a wide range of scholars, questions

around methodology emerged as a key theme of discussion.Christopher Moffat History

Amrita Narlikar introduces the conference Rising Powers in the International System

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The faculty/graduate working group programme consists of fifteen groups of university teachers and graduate students, each of which comes together to

look at a new problem that crosses current disciplinary boundaries.

Each group meets fortnightly throughout the year, each with a programme of visiting lectures or other discussion formats. One example will show how innovative and exciting this work can be. The group called ‘Things’ is dedicated to analyzing the material culture of the long eighteenth century. Each fortnightly session had two speakers presenting on the topic of a ‘thing’ – porcelain, cotton, ships, pressed flowers… And each session had a long debate about the role of this thing in society, culture, art, literature.

A similar research group had also grown up in California, and – in addition to the funding generously provided for the faculty/graduate programme by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and Isaac Newton Trust – matching funding was secured from the Cambridge Humanities Research Fund for six academics and five graduates to meet with their counterparts at the Huntington library; and the Californian team has come back to Cambridge for further discussion and a public meeting. This will result in two special editions of journals – showcasing the work of the group, both

graduates and established academics, which has benefitted from the long critiques in the seminars. What’s more, this project will lead to ‘Things 2’ (echoes of Dr Seuss…), a longer-term collaboration with the University of Southern California and the Huntington Library, with a joint fellowship and graduate exchange programme with a focus on the visual and material culture of the early modern period. This is one area where CRASSH is looking to develop the remarkable resources of Cambridge in collaboration with international partners: watch this space!

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City Seminar

We were able to hear an urban planner’s perspective on cities in film, a geographer’s take on the use of theatre, art and architecture in repairing damaged communities, and a sociologist’s account of sites of urban power.

Urban studies questions are relevant to almost all arts, humanities and social science disciplines and the City Seminar plays an important role within the University in promoting a significant area of contemporary research. Thanks to the support from CRASSH, it has been possible to provide audio recordings online for almost all the talks, which collectively have received 800 hits.

Michal Murawski Social Anthropology

Edward Saunders German and Dutch

Andrew Hoolachan Architecture

Gruia Badescu Architecture

Taking Place

Our impression is that Taking Place is helping to foment interdisciplinary conversations about landscape. We finished the year by breaking out of the seminar room with a field trip to Orford Ness, whose shifting significances illustrate the complexity of response afforded by the study of place.

Beryl Pong English

Kavita Ramakrishnan Geography

Vidya Ravi English

Philip Sidney English

Screen Media

Through the seminar series, there have been returning questions about affect, environment and technology; while the industry constraints and media specificity of the art forms discussed has been highlighted in understanding the first media age and the digital turn, a sense of the intimacy and involvement between art forms in their use of narrative, their navigation of space and address to materiality and emotion.

In just five months, our video/audio podcasts have received 1,686 hits, around 11 hits a day, the majority from outside the University.

David Trotter English

Emma Wilson French

Taking Place field trip to Orford Ness

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A fixed point in the Director’s week is the work-in-progress seminar.

We have each year fifteen visiting fellows from around the world all working on projects linked to the theme this year of ‘Transregionality’. Each week, a fellow pre-circulates a chapter s/he is working on, and faces the questions of the massed ranks of the CRASSH fellows. So my Sundays are spent preparing for debates on ‘Islamic sermons on Swahili’, ‘The bio-

politics of eco-fuels in Senegal’, ‘Bengali immigration to England’, ‘Musical responses on the BBC to the war’… The visiting fellows are joined by the early career fellows – twelve young scholars from Cambridge, each of whom gets a term’s sabbatical to follow their research in the intellectual environment of CRASSH.

Next year, at any one moment we will have around thirty fellows in residence at CRASSH, which should make this seminar even more vibrant.

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I felt very fortunate to have spent those ten weeks with some of the most stimulating peers I have ever come across.

Annu Jalais National University of Singapore

At CRASSH, given the gift of time, intellectual freedom, and stimulating and supportive colleagues from a range of different disciplines, I decided to push ahead with a more experimental iteration of my project.

Andrew Jones UC Berkeley

Rarely have I come across a more eager and generous audience. In the long run, I will particularly remember CRASSH for its persistent attempts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, research regions and academic hierarchies, and, on a more personal level, for its generosity in allowing me to hatch up new plans for the future.

Pieter R Adriaens Leuven

Perhaps the most important legacy of my time at CRASSH was the discovery of the spirit of collegiality and intellectual exchange that is part of the nature of the University of Cambridge. In a sense, I think I re-discovered the sense of excitement that is attached to the development and creation of ideas.

Claudio Aporta Carleton

In many respects CRASSH has for a long time offered me the most productive intellectual environment I have found in Cambridge.

In the longer term, my association with CRASSH provided me with a useful chance to ‘reset’ my sense of myself as an academic.

Georgina Evans Cambridge

I found the others’ presentations stimulating and got a lot out of them (bibliography, new concepts, yes, but also insight into other ways of thinking through questions). This is an absolute godsend to a genuinely early career researcher. Time to reflect, time to read and a light-touch series of lunchtime meetings to give structure to the research term.

Rory O’Bryen Cambridge

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And there’s more… We now have eight Humanitas Visiting Professorships, in different subjects from

chamber music to art history to Chinese culture to – the latest – environmental studies.

This programme brings a very distinguished world-expert to Cambridge to give three lectures and a symposium. This has led to some really sparkling occasions. Manuel Castells (who won the Holberg Prize earlier this year) came to talk about the internet and revolution in the middle of the Occupy Westminster events and the tumult in Cairo. Baroness Helena Kennedy talked

about Women’s Rights in the middle of the press brouhaha over returning radical Muslim clerics into a regime that practices torture. Helen Clark, head of UN Development and former prime minister of New Zealand spoke – and, as we live-streamed the lecture, at question time we had contributions from public officials in Cairo and New York – followed by a twitter debate that

received 10, 000, 000 impressions. Jay Winter was amazed that his moving lectures on memorializing the First World War received lengthy critiques from round the world within twenty-four hours, as our international audience instantly caught up with the sessions on our website.

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Manuel Castells has probably done more than anyone else to advance our understanding of how our world is being transformed by the great technological revolution of our time. Here was an outstanding scholar tackling big issues, pushing forward his own thinking and at the same time challenging and stretching his audience, and it was clear that the audience enjoyed it enormously.

John Thompson SociologyChair of Standing Committee for

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Media

Helena Kennedy is an indomitable public speaker, and her belief in the importance of the fight for women’s

rights is both unswerving and pragmatic: with a champion such

as her there is hope for the equality cause.

Helen Charman Varsity news editor

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The Mellon CDI programme has allowed us (among other things) to set up American-style graduate teaching

seminars in subjects designed to stimulate research-led teaching.

This year we ran two Mellon Teaching Seminars: on the history of the history of political thought – a meta-historical programme that had forty regular attendees; and on ethics and the social sciences, a series which brought together philosophers, anthropologists and social scientists to argue over some of the thorniest issues facing

researchers in politically and morally confusing terrain. These weekly meetings are greatly valued by the graduates who can really explore some central concerns in a hugely stimulating atmosphere.

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Ethics at the Intersection of Philosophy and Anthropology

The paucity of engagement between philosophy and anthropology was clearly visible, where anthropologically-trained participants would sometimes be puzzled by the choices made by philosophers of anthropological sources, and philosophically-trained participants would equally be surprised at some of the philosophical sources used by anthropologists. Rather than being an obstacle to constructive discussion, however, these moments of surprise functioned as creative spurs to the exploration of mutually recognisable themes: from theoretical discussions of ethical relativism, virtue, or social explanation on the one hand, to ethnographic discussions of spirit possession in Madagascar, Islamic revival in Egypt, or ‘criminal castes’ in south India on the other.

James Laidlaw Social Anthropology and Hallvard Lillehammer Philosophy

A Cultural History of the History of Political Thought

This seminar had the ambitious aim of trying to map out the contours of a field that is apparently very well known, but which to our mind is hardly understood at all. That field is the history of modern political thought (by which we largely

mean the aftermath of the American and French revolutions).

Ultimately, where we have ended up is with a new set of questions (or rather, the updating of a series of old questions) as absolutely central to the study

of the history of modern political thought, which force us to remain resolutely sceptical in the face of sterile current debates about realism in political theory, about the validity of ‘ideal’ theory, and about the possibilities of non-historical

understandings of politics.

Istvan Hont History and Duncan Kelly POLIS

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The CRASSH lectures – a weekly series in Michaelmas – got the year off to a more controversial start

than intended.

The well-attended series was on ‘The Idea of the University’ – a topic which must be debated seriously in the current conditions. The penultimate lecture, due to be given by David Willetts, the Minister under whose remit the universities fall, was prevented from being given by student-led protests. The fall-out from this rumbled on unpleasantly for some months,

though it did not prevent the other lectures leading to further important discussion around the world. They were screened, for example, for students and academics in Prague; and discussed at a seminar in Toronto, and most have been published now in various places.

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The Idea of the University: Stefan Collini (left), Onora O’Neill (top right), Simon Franklin (middle right) and Sir Leszek Borysiewicz (bottom right)

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So: exhilarating, exhausting and fulfilling.

It has been a huge treat to be able to build on the wonderful work of my predecessors and to share in so many projects with committed researchers and the exceptional staff at the centre, who make things really hum. It is worth looking back ten years. In its first years, the Centre ran on average 25 events and had a sprinkling of visiting fellows.

This year, we ran over 300 events including twenty-six major conferences; we hosted twenty-seven visiting fellows, seven visiting professors; eight lecture series; fifteen work groups; five reading groups; the digital humanities network; and two teaching seminars. Next year promises even more. So: exhilarating, exhausting and fulfilling...

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Statement of Financial ActivitiesYear ended 31 July 2012

2011-12(£000)

2010-11(£000)

Incoming Resources

Donations/Foundations (1) 401 155

Humanitas Visiting Professorship Fund 166 85

University Funding (2) 228 150

Trading Income 85 112

Research Grant Overheads -1 2

Roberts Funding/AHRC (3) 98 16

Investment Income 1 1

Central Funding furniture for new building n/a 61

Total Incoming Resources 977 583

Resources Expended

Staff Costs 364 319

Programmes 372 312

Running Costs 24 39

Central Funding furniture for new building 61

Expenditure from 2010-11 8

Total Resources Expended 828 670

Net Expenditure 150 -87

Brought forward in previous year 390 477

Total Funds brought forward 540 390

Notes

1. Donations to core programmes from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Isaac Newton Trust, Mr Brian Buckley, Charles Wallace India Trust, EURIAS, Thriplow Charitable Trust, Anonymous Donors including a donor to the Vice-Chancellor’s Endowment Fund.

2. Includes Chest Funding for core programmes; University strategic support for Digital Humanities Network; School support for Early Career Fellowships; awards from Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme.

3. Funding for projects: Digital Humanities & Transferable Skills Training, Scoping Employability, Postdoctoral Researcher Forum, AHRC Social Media Knowledge Exchange Project.

Research Grant Funding

• The Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture European Research Council €2.5 million 2012 - 2017, awarded to Professor Simon Goldhill

• Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political Theory and Internet Research Leverhulme Trust £1.5 million, 2013 - 2017, awarded to Professor Sir Richard Evans (History) and Dr David Runciman (POLIS)

• The Creative Economy, Digital Technology and Innovation AHRC Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange £250K, January - December 2013, awarded to Professor Simon Goldhill

• Intellectual Property Law and Freedom: between the National and the InternationalCIGREF Foundation €78K January - December 2013, awarded to Professor Simon Goldhill