CANCELLED 26 April: Manon Harvey (JCR), ‘Practice of love’ as resistance to neoliberalism and climate crisis'
Pudding Seminars
Pudding Seminars take place on a Friday and are an excellent opportunity to unite two of life’s great things: new research, and pudding!
Pudding Seminars are led by members of the College (undergraduates, postgraduates, Senior Members and staff), who give a brief 20 minute talk on their current research, followed by informal discussion.
Seminars start promptly at 1.15pm and end by 1.50pm. Tea, coffee and cake are available from 1pm.
If you are interested in giving a pudding seminar, or would like further details about the series please contact Delphine Mordey (dmm36@cam.ac.uk), Eloise Hamilton, or Laura Caponetto. In 2023-24, seminars will take place in either the Lucia Windsor Room or Sidgwick Hall.
3 May: Amelia Platt (JCR), '‘Quite human really:’ The detective and the ‘crisis of authority’ in 1930s detective fiction'
This seminar explores the representation of the figure of the detective in 1930s ‘Golden Age’ crime fiction, focusing on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), as well as Ngaio Marsh’s Artists in Crime (1938) and Death in a White Tie (1938). Literary criticism has often tended to see the genre of crime fiction as upholding the status quo. A crime is committed, and the detective solves it, restoring society to its previous state of normality. This seminar will aim to show that in the texts being discussed, the detective’s authority is upheld. However, it is an authority that has been thoroughly interrogated by the texts, and thus likely compromised in the minds of readers. The detectives featured in these texts (Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn and Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey) both experience a ‘crisis of authority’ relating to their detecting, compromising the justice they administer. These ‘crises of authority’ manifest themselves in different ways and reveal the influence of contemporary social issues, including growing opposition to capital punishment, the legacy of WWI and changing gender relations. This seminar will also hope to explore the ‘crisis of authority’ happening at the level of genre, with the texts pushing back against genre boundaries and reader expectations.
Amelia is a third-year English student at Newnham, and an avid reader of crime fiction.