lectures for peace 2024
At Literature Cambridge we have a regular lecture to support refugee charities. This year we also want to do something to help the people of Gaza and to support those working for peace.
We are offering some extra lectures in 2024-25, live online. All proceeds to be shared between three charities:
• Oxfam Gaza and Lebanon Campaign (food and medical relief to Gaza and Lebanon)
• Standing Together (Palestinian and Israeli joint peace campaign, currently taking aid into Gaza); updates on their Instagram page
• Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (helping refugees in the UK)
In 2024 we raised £2,100, shared between the charities from our lectures on Woolf and Forster. Very many thanks for your support.
Why pay the charities directly? Because, if you donate directly to the charities, they get the full sum. Whereas if you book via our website, 20% VAT (Value Added Tax) is deducted from the payment (even though it is for charity, VAT is still payable).
Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out.
Thank you.
‘Large as life and twice as natural’: Planting Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, with Karina Jakubowicz
Karina will discuss gardens in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
Alice's journey through Wonderland takes her through a fantastical landscape filled with strange delights, but the destination she most ardently wishes to find is a fairly domestic one – a quiet, country garden. Gardens are at the heart of Carroll's Alice books, featuring heavily in his fictional world-building and playing a significant role in inspiring it. Known for his love of games, wordplay, and mathematical riddles, Carroll's interest in the garden space was more than purely whimsical. To him, they represented complex systems where social and scientific rules could be turned upside down. Carroll's Wonderland is, in many ways, a 19th century garden flipped on its head. It is a thriving, frightening, chaotic dimension that, as Alice discovers, exists deep underground.
Recommended edition: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Hugh Haugton (Penguin, 2003).
Sunday 16 February 2025, live online
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas
To book, please make a donation to one or more of the charities via the buttons below, to a total of:
£33.00 full price (£11.00 to each charity)
£27.00 students and unwaged (£9.00 to each charity)
£27.00 CAMcard holders (£9.00 to each charity)
We suggest that people support all 3 charities equally, but it is up to you to decide how to distribute your donation.
Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out. Thank you for your support.
Timing: please note that bookings close at 5.30 pm on the day of the lecture. We can’t monitor the mailbox once we are in the zoom call, so please book before 5.30 pm to be sure that we see your email. Thank you!
Orts, Scraps and Fragments: Thoughts on Peace in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), with Claire Davison
Set on a midsummer’s day in a remote English village where the annual pageant is to be performed, Between the Acts nevertheless engages directly with conflict. It offers a biting, yet often hilarious satire of ‘Merrie England’, where family traditions, small communities and age-old customs all play a part in the war-mongering violence of imperialism, nationalism, and patriarchy.
The astonishing beauty of the novel, however, is that at the very heart of disharmony and cacophony, the still, small voices of peace and resolution can yet be heard. This lecture will pick up on these fragmented, dispersed echoes, and their offer of hope and appeasement beyond and in spite of an inevitable countdown to war. Focusing particularly on the rich sonic environment, it traces what we might call a pageant of peace emerging from the gaps within the disruptive village performance. This medley of musical fragments, ‘stray voices’, random quotations and calls from the natural world will in turn be explored in terms of Woolf’s vivid interest in the radio.
Although essentially on Between the Acts, the lecture will also evoke Woolf’s essay ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid’ (1940). A copy of the essay will be attached to the handout. You can also find it on our Blog page on this website.
Saturday 6 September 2025 live online
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas
To book, please make a donation to one or more of the charities via the buttons below, to a total of:
£33.00 full price (£11.00 to each charity)
£27.00 students and unwaged (£9.00 to each charity)
£27.00 CAMcard holders (£9.00 to each charity)
We suggest that people support all 3 charities equally, but it is up to you to decide how to distribute your donation.
Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out.
Thank you so much for your support.