This 1-day, in-person workshop will bring together teachers and educational practitioners from different corners of the diverse learning environment within Cambridge, to discuss and innovate around this core question: In the Higher Education context, what does clear, effective interdisciplinary teaching look like?

The workshop will be designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas across practitioners who not only teach in different disciplinary environments, but who also teach in different institutional environments, from Faculties and Departments, to Museums, Galleries, Archives and Special Collections.  

The day will begin with a plenary session, organised around identifying and discussing issues at the heart of interdisciplinary teaching, and how to do this effectively. Our roundtable discussion will be fuelled and focussed by three pre-circulated position papers. Following this plenary session, the workshop will proceed around 3 “case study” sessions. These sessions will offer an opportunity for colleagues to share examples of effective interdisciplinary learning in their own contexts. They will therefore offer a forum for the sharing of good practice(s), and an opportunity to workshop core questions arising at the heart of interdisciplinary teaching practice.

The full programme is available at: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk    

Registration fee includes refreshments.

Quentin Skinner lecture

Given by Max Skjönsberg, Quentin Skinner Fellow

The British constitution in the eighteenth century was often referred to as one of limited government. But what made it limited? Far from being stable, the meaning of the British constitution in the eighteenth century was changing and contested. But this lecture will show that one common interpretation was that the constitution had a spirit. This language has become associated with Montesquieu, but in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, the language of spirit was first made popular by the man who instructed Montesquieu about British politics, namely Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. In the Bolingbrokean idiom, the spirit of the constitution, which could be deduced from its logic and its history, was meant to promote freedom. But what precisely did this involve, and what were the consequences of this broadly held idea? This lecture engages with these questions by looking at political debate about reforming parliament between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Registration fee includes refreshments.

Please check 'More Info' tab for more details.

Website: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/46619/ 

From the first lines of Gregorian chant in the ninth and tenth centuries to the movable type of the sixteenth, the desire to spread musical repertories beyond the moment of performance sat at the heart of why music was written down and remembered. How far was it possible for music to spread across both geographical terrain and chronological time in the pre-modern world? Which technologies supported its dissemination beyond the moment of performance? To what extent do the oral and the textual coalesce? How did cross-cultural exchange influence musical performance? And how did networks of transmission alter with changing socio-political contexts?

Moving Music is a two-day conference that brings together scholars from several different disciplines to explore how, when, where, and by whom music and sound was transmitted during the medieval and early modern periods. The conference will be hosted by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and generously funded by British Academy, CRASSH, and the Trevelyan Fund. The keynote paper – 'From Arras to Alexandria: Uncovering the Musical Lives of Poets and Their Works, 1100-1300' – will be given by Dr Alice Hicklin, Dr Betty Rosen, and Dr Geneviève Young from the project Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 (MUSLIVE) at King's College London. As part of the conference, attendees are invited to a concert of early music at Emmanuel College Chapel.

Registration fee includes refreshments for both days.

The full programme is available at: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/46073/ 

The symposium explores the complex relationship between olfactory heritage and imagination, examining how cultural, material, and symbolic meanings of smells shape and are shaped by imaginative practices. It investigates the role of smell in social belonging, its cultural dimensions, and how imagination influences the perception of inaccessible or distant odours. The event promotes interdisciplinary collaboration, featuring contributions from scholars across history, neuroscience, philosophy, and the arts, with keynotes from experts like William Tullett and Sussan Babaie. Additionally, the symposium encourages participation from early career researchers and underrepresented groups.

Olfactory heritages will be analysed in their intricate relationship with imagination. These heritages refer to the power of the mind to represent possibilities and the faculty of creating a framework to understand the human sensory experience. The symposium investigates imagination as a synthetic practice of sense-making. One of the symposium’s interests is to understand to what degree imagination should be conceived as a situated activity, contextualised in its historical framework.

The full programme is available at: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/45567/