Martlet Newsletter of Pembroke College Cambridge Issue 21 Spring 2017
Pride of Place The Master, Lord Smith of Finsbury
Contents 3 Reflections on Becoming Senior Tutor 4 A Birthday and a Bard 5 In Praise of Idleness? The Work of the Humanities 6 After All is Said and Dung... 7 Desiring Muslim Women, or, a Feminist Study of Istanbulite Women’s Exercise 8 The Time and the Place 10 Migration and the Psychology of Places 11 Paying it Forward 12 Connecting Data to Action 13 Gossip 15 Poet’s Corner
Published by Pembroke College Cambridge CB2 1RF Telephone 01223 338100 Email: martlet@pem.cam.ac.uk Editor Alex Houen Gossip Editor Colin Wilcockson Illustrations Martin Rowson © Pembroke College 2017 Photography and illustrations copyright of the owners Design cambridgesesignstudio.org Print Langham Press
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xperiencing the rhythm of College life as Master for a second year is even more delightful than for the first. You have become just a little bit familiar with the Parlour calendar, you know what’s likely to happen at each stage of the year, and you have rediscovered the joy of people, events and a whole range of different duties. You feel very much at home. It strikes me that I have the very best of worlds: I’m living in an incredibly beautiful place, I’m surrounded by highly intelligent people doing groundbreaking work, and I’m surrounded by young people at the outset of their lives. There’s something very special about Pembroke. As I write, at the end of Lent Term, this has been even more strongly reinforced. This past weekend, we held the launch of our Campaign for Pembroke, ‘The Time and the Place’: our fundraising campaign to raise a total of £75 million for the new Mill Lane development that will transform the future of the College. The Saturday of the launch was breathtaking. Through the course of the afternoon, some twenty of our Fellows and postgraduate students gave quick-fire insights into their work – ten minutes for their presentation, fifteen for questions. It was an intellectual feast, all accompanied by a series of our graduate students’ research posters setting out the key issues they are working on, with them standing by ready to talk it all through. From Russian art to cancer medicine, from fertilisation to Ted Hughes: this showed the world in just a few hours the sheer scale and breadth of work that is going on, here at Pembroke. The richness of the experience went on into the evening. Emma Johnson played the clarinet (brilliantly), and we had a delicious dinner in a marquee set up on Bowling Green lawn with a backdrop of New Court specially lit for the occasion. The Choir sang grace, the Pembroke Players performed a sketch, there were speeches from students and alumni, and the whole evening was rounded off by Eric Idle who had us all in stitches, and brought the house down. I have to confess I felt very proud that evening to be part of Pembroke. Of course, the pride doesn’t just last for one evening. Pembroke is flourishing. Academically, we came second in last year’s ranking of academic success across all Colleges and all years of the Tripos; this really was a fitting tribute to Mark Wormald’s sixteen outstanding years as Senior Tutor. Our students have been competing for the Richard Parmee prize for entrepreneurship. Our musicians have been putting on a series of wonderful concerts, culminating in the Choir singing the St John Passion in the United Reformed Church across the road. Our actors and budding directors had a discussion session with the great theatre director Michael Grandage. Our political students held a fascinating seminar on the Dutch elections. And in a unique achievement, both of the two 2017 Henry Fellowships available to any UK graduating student to go for a year to Harvard or Yale have gone to Pembroke students. On the sports field, our Women’s Football Team have done us incredibly proud by winning Cuppers. The Men’s Team, sadly, again went down to noble defeat in the Cuppers final. Fifth time lucky, next year! Two of the three finalists playing for Cambridge in the Varsity Table Tennis match against Oxford were from Pembroke, including the captain – and they triumphed. The Lents on the river weren’t perhaps as successful as last year, with the men’s first boat ending up in fifth place, though the Men’s second
boat went up one place, taking themselves into the second division. I never cease to be amazed by the sheer breadth and richness of activity going on around College. And when a bit of ghastly, stupid silliness finds its way into the student press and then gets hyped and magnified beyond measure in the national media, we really do have to remind ourselves what the real Pembroke is. It’s the students organising an entire evening collecting parcels and food and distributing them to all the homeless people around Cambridge. It’s the musicians putting on a series of concerts each week in the Chapel to raise funds for Syrian refugees. It’s a group cycling to Oxford to raise money for the Jo Cox studentship we are establishing in refugee and migration studies. It’s the Pembroke student who is running and leading the Cambridge Development Initiative to help build sustainable sanitation in Tanzania. I couldn’t be more proud of them. One of the wonderful additions to College this past year has been the arrival of our Henry Moore sculpture, Figure in a Shelter, on loan from the Henry Moore Foundation. It looks perfect, set in front of Foundress Court – almost as if the two were made for each other. It will be even better when we manage to get the lawn back in place, surrounding it. The turf had to be removed, alas, because of the infestation of chafer grubs – they are so succulent that birds come and dig up the lawn to get at them. But I’m reliably informed that the grass will be back in a few months’ time. The College will be fully back to its beautiful self. And the perfect setting for our students, graduates, Fellows, and alumni to continue doing what they do so well: making us proud to be part of Pembroke.
Reflections on Becoming Senior Tutor Dan Tucker
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thought very long and very hard before putting myself forward for the position of Senior Tutor at Pembroke College, knowing that a successful sequel to my predecessor, Mark Wormald, would be a very difficult thing to achieve. I returned to Pembroke in 2003 as a Fellow in Veterinary Sciences, based at the vet school on Madingley Road, taking on Tutor work and then later directing studies for veterinary students and preclinical medical students. I had first heard mention of the opportunity more than a year before the event and, although initially at the time it did not seem to fit with my existing career structure, a seed was sown. It grew, and finally I stepped into the role in Michaelmas Term 2016. Thanks to a fair wind – but more especially to the most incredibly supportive and resourceful tutorial office team – we now see the end of the first academic year in sight! Facilitating excellence in College-based teaching and learning is at the core of any Senior Tutor’s priorities. After two Terms in the post I now have a deeper but still growing understanding of the fine balance between the diverse College functions that support the academic and extracurricular achievements of our undergraduate and graduate members. A student-focused, cohesive, and motivational Fellowship and staff synergises with an enthusiastic, sharp, engaged, well-rounded and outward-looking student body. The result is the attainment of academic and personal potential with the promise of significant impacts for society as each cadre of new alumni move forward in their chosen career paths. Although most of my time (70% to be precise, if somewhat hypothetical) is dedicated to the Senior Tutor role, I share my remaining time between teaching and research at the Department of Veterinary Medicine and some policy work at the Food Standards Agency. My academic background now falls within the remit of global food security – a focus of one of the University’s crossdepartmental research initiatives. Human disease caused by animal derived pathogens in the food chain accounts for around one million human deaths per year globally with around 800 million people being affected, most of them children under five-years-old. Specifically, my expertise falls in the areas of livestock infectious disease prevention and food chain safety; I work in multi-disciplinary projects that bring together the social sciences with biological sciences to address fundamental hurdles to the prevention of foodborne infections and antibiotic resistance of livestock origin. Somewhat tangential to my current research, my PhD was done at the Clinical School at Addenbrooke’s in the Department of Surgery, addressing the technical feasibility of pigs as organ sources for people – a procedure known as xenotransplantation. A spin-out company followed, but we soon realised that the risk of infectious diseases capable of transferring from pigs to humans was an obstacle of equal size to the immunological hurdles that needed to be overcome. Although this field of work was ultimately superseded by emerging stem cell technologies, it left me with a deep and lasting connection with the lowly pig; I still get involved in interesting pig-related disease issues around the world when time permits. My research has also allowed me to build a network of friends, and to gain experience working in Vietnam, China, the US, Europe, and most recently in Myanmar. This latter project, funded by The Department for International Development, entails a truly interdisciplinary collaboration
between farmers, veterinarians, government, social scientists and medical anthropologists, and is a hugely rewarding exercise in helping the poorest people to achieve better health and livelihoods through culturally relevant training in food supply chain practices. The opportunities of interdisciplinary research are only beginning to be recognised in the University and more widely. On reflection, this interdisciplinarity is something we live and breathe on a daily basis in Pembroke. The exciting opportunities in the Mill Lane development – afforded by the extraordinary generosity of the Dolby legacy and by each and every supporting contribution to the College’s ongoing Campaign – will, I hope, enable the space and environment to germinate and foster further interdisciplinary outputs from the remarkable diversity of research expertise that rests within the College. I plan to apply my best attributes for the benefit of the College. I originally came up to Pembroke in 1986, from a comprehensive school in Somerset and via the admissions pool, the first in my long family history of farmers to go to University, so I have a deep understanding of Cambridge student pressures – and weaknesses! Above all, though, I have a strong feeling of gratitude to the College. In what is now undoubtedly a period of remarkable opportunity, I am excited by the chance to contribute to shaping the College’s next chapter for the coming generation – both in terms of the fabric, function, and membership but also in terms of the broader community in Cambridge and beyond. Our previous Senior Tutor is a seriously difficult act to follow: a careful balance of fairness and firmness, consistency and flexibility, humour and dignity, inspiring and celebrating achievement while also dealing objectively with failure, and, when needed, offering kindness. I can only strive to match that.
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A Birthday and a Bard Katherine Fender (2011) on the tercentenary of Thomas Gray, 1716-1771
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th December 2016 marked an important literary anniversary for Pembroke. Three hundred years earlier, in his father’s house in Cornhill, London, the poet and literary scholar Thomas Gray – widely celebrated for his 1751 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ – had been born to Philip and Dorothy Gray, the only one of the Grays’ twelve children to survive infancy. After attending Eton College, Gray commenced studies at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, on 4 July 1734. Training for a career as a barrister, he decided not to pursue a BA degree, and left Cambridge in October 1736. He would return six years later, settling in Cambridge for the rest of his life. It was to Peterhouse in the first instance that Gray returned in 1742 as a Fellow-Commoner. However, he had long held an affinity with the college just across the road; namely, Pembroke (also known as ‘Pembroke Hall’ at the time). The famous Gray biographer, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, once remarked that Gray’s interests and affections were centred in Pembroke long before the day in 1756 when he sought refuge there from the unsympathetic Fellows and rowdy undergraduates of Peterhouse…. it is hard to understand why he had not moved across the road much earlier. Fifteen peaceful years still lay before him in his adopted college, and then he was to die within its walls. His memory has always been honoured there as it deserves.1
Gray’s attachment to Pembroke stemmed predominantly from his friendships with various members of the College, including Fellows such as James Brown, William Mason and Thomas Wharton. The poet was not only indebted to Pembroke contemporaries for friendship, but also to one of the College’s past poets for inspiration: Edmund Spenser. In November 2016, Professor David Womersley (University of Oxford) gave a talk for the Master’s Seminar entitled ‘Thomas Gray: Poets and Collegiality’ to honour the poet’s tercentenary. Highlighting the significance of Gray’s time at Pembroke, Professor Womersley also gave us a fascinating insight into Gray’s repeated allusions to Spenser. The day in 1756 to which Ketton-Cremer refers – on which Gray ‘sought refuge’ in Pembroke once and for all – came in early March after a cruel prank at Peterhouse had been played on poet. Gray’s London home had fallen foul of fire in March 1748, heightening his long-held pyrophobia. Indeed, such was his fear of flames that in January 1756 Gray had asked Wharton to purchase a rope ladder for him, which he hung from his second-story Peterhouse window. Unfortunately, by investing in a means of escape so visible from Trumpington Street, Gray had effectively advertised his phobia. Two months later, a group of students led by Viscount Percival – then a FellowCommoner of Magdalene College – raised the alarm for a non-existent fire, and then lured Gray – in a state of panic and undress – out of his window. When Peterhouse did not respond to Gray’s indignation about the incident with what he considered to be
appropriate diligence, he left for Pembroke, signing the College’s Admission Book on 6 March 1756. He was housed on the first-floor of the seventeenth-century Hitcham building in what is now named Ivy Court – the same room which was later inhabited by William Pitt, and is known today as the Thomas Gray Room. Following the poet’s death on 30 July 1771 in his rooms at the College, his papers found their own resting place at Pembroke. At the centre of the College’s Gray archives is the poet’s Commonplace Book: three bound volumes which have been described by Margaret M. Smith as the ‘single most important repository of Gray’s autograph verse and prose’.2 It is fitting that Gray’s Commonplace Book lay at the heart of a joint exhibition on the poet – arranged collaboratively by Pembroke and Peterhouse – that was displayed in Peterhouse during January 2017. My own fascination with Gray’s works began during my MPhil studies at Pembroke when I encountered the Commonplace Book for the first time. It has proven to be essential to my subsequent doctoral research, which explores how Gray’s 1757 poem ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ thrust the figure of the sublime and prophetic ancient Welsh bard to the forefront of the eighteenth-century literary stage and imagination. The skill with which Gray crafted ‘the Bard’ can only be fully appreciated when one considers his detailed notes in ‘Cambri’: a seventeen-page section in his Commonplace Book wherein Welsh verse, mythology and history are explored in impressive detail. Gray’s ‘Bard’ not only profoundly influenced Romantic poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans, but also visual artists such as Richard Bentley, Thomas Jones, Benjamin West, Philippe de Loutherbourg, Henry Fuseli and John Martin. The figure of the ancient bard is also key to the poetic mythology of William Blake, who notably produced no fewer than 117 illustrations to Gray’s poems. ‘The Bard’ marked the dawn of a new poetic and artistic form while catering to the aesthetic tastes of the period: it is a mode which I describe in my research as ‘the Bardic Sublime’. Gray was always reluctant to publish his poems: fewer than 1000 lines of his verse were printed in his lifetime, and he even declined the poet laureateship in 1757. Yet his poems (including both the ‘Elegy’ and ‘the Bard’ – were, and continue to be, deeply influential. The celebration of his Commonplace Book and the tercentenary events at both Pembroke and Peterhouse are deserved tributes to the talents and legacy of Gray, one of Pembroke’s most beloved bards.
Notes 1 Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, The Review of English Studies, 5:19 (July, 1954), p. 331. 2 Margaret M. Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume III, 1700-1800, Pt 2 (London, 1989), p. 73.
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Katherine Fender recently completed her doctorate at St John’s College, University of Oxford, researching her conception of the bardic and the Welsh Sublime in eighteenth-century and Romantic period poetry. She previously studied at Pembroke, where she completed an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies, following an undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick. She was formerly a convenor of the interdisciplinary Romanticism Seminar ‘Romantic Realignments’ in Oxford’s English Faculty.
In Praise of Idleness? The Work of the Humanities Helen Small (1987)
Phil Sayer
L Helen Small is Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the author of The Value of the Humanities (2013). She was a doctoral student in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1987 to 1990.
et me start with an old argument – still, I think, pertinent. It comes from Bertrand Russell’s capricious essay of 1932, ‘In Praise of Idleness’. Russell claims (to summarize) that the university is the place in which people are given the leisure to do the serious thinking for which there is otherwise very limited space in the culture. Arguing that one of the aims of modern civilization should be to release as many people as possible from the burden of alienated labour and give them the benefits of a ‘wise use of leisure’, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ participates in a long line of writing (predominantly, but not exclusively from the left/liberal end of the political spectrum) that has challenged the rightness of the dominant work ethic. In its 20thcentury forms, that line of thinking runs from Keynes’s ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (1930), through to Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work (1995) and Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth (2009).1 Unlike most of these writers, Russell has a special interest in the university. Having made a case for decreasing the quantity of mechanical and procedural work done, and for improving the kinds and quality of our leisure, he ruminates on the as-yet very partially democratised state of the intelligentsia: In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books …2 A defence of the leisured class’s existence by way of its cultural productivity must be an inadequate justification, Russell reflects, given how ‘extraordinarily wasteful’ the model proved: ‘one Darwin’ for every ‘tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers’ (13). In 1932, by contrast, ‘the universities [we]re supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product’ (13). The most pressing modern problems for the university, as Russell saw them, were:
1. enlarged access to the privileged conditions of academic work had not of itself done much to close the gap between ‘the occupations and problems of ordinary men and women’ and the occupations of the few who earn a salary for intellectual labour (in other words, there just were not enough intellectual jobs to go round); 2. increasingly democratic access to the university had not ushered in what Russell would have considered an improvement in the highest levels of intellectual achievement. The academic institutions of the 1930s were, in his view, too utilitarian, too instrumental in their conceptions of teaching and research, for really original minds to flourish in them. The benefits of intellectual freedom had, in that respect, not kept pace with advances in social justice – though whether Russell was diagnosing a fault of institutional systems, or making a vaguer complaint about the dearth of originality at all levels of society, isn’t entirely clear. The hazard of a defence of idleness, issuing from the university, is that in theorizing the value and virtue of having the leisure to think the philosopher-critic will seem primarily to be justifying his or her own position as a privileged kind of employee whose work may appear to others suspiciously like pleasure. Orwell’s ‘rentierintellectuals’ cast a long shadow here: enjoying freedoms made possible by money they have not directly earned, all too often ‘convicted of … a too great readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical problem’.3 But, recast the wording slightly and Russell’s seems to me to have a very good argument for modern professional academics – perhaps the best we have. Universities create the space (not the ‘leisure’) in which the kinds of thinking and experimentation and testing of ideas can happen that would otherwise be the preserve of a class ill-equipped in the main to do that work. Framing the question of the university’s ‘work’ around the status of intellectual labour puts the focus of discussion on academic freedom, understood as a necessary condition for higher scholarship and cutting edge research. Framing the discussion around the teaching function of the university puts the focus on the work asked there of the students and, often, on the fitness of educational content to future employment purposes puts. Either focus has repercussions for how we think about the university administration’s work: what should university leaders’ and administrators’ goals be as they assist and manage the work of both the academic staff and the students? What does government think those goals should be? Putting together these several perspectives on the labour of the university is one of the first challenges for any sensible public conversation about how our various individual interests in higher education relate to the general public interest. This article is based on the opening of the William Pitt Seminar talk given by Helen Small on 14 October 2016. © Helen Small, 2016.
Notes 1 Parts of this genealogy are given in http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/?s=persistence+of+work&submit=Search. 2 Russell, In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (London, 1996), 13. 3 ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), in Orwell, Essays (London, 2002), 228. The phrase ‘idle rich’ is from ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), 306.
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After All is Said and Dung... Hannah Mumby on her research with elephants
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atching elephants is one of the best ways to spend time. Minutes and hours fly by as you’re listening to rumbles and trumpets, trying to disentangle the complex social interactions and watching for the telltale signs of dominance, such as one elephant displacing another from a prime shady spot. Even when it’s getting late, it’s hard to tear me away from a group, particularly if the elephants I’m watching haven’t defecated yet. I always want to hold out to get some of that grassy gold. To me, it seems so logical, but I’ve been to enough dinners to realise that some people may not be familiar with the many aspects of biology we can address with dung (and others may not be keen on my bringing up the topic as we delve into a sticky chocolatey dessert).
Moritz Muschick
A group of male elephants, including focal males Napoleon and Sweetie, drink from a swimming pool in Limpopo, South Africa.
I spent a good chunk of my PhD drying out elephant dung samples in northern Myanmar and Thailand. In the monsoon, the atmosphere was so soupy with humidity that the samples wouldn’t air-dry so I bought a hot-air oven to do the job. The disappointment that I was filling it with faeces rather than pizza was loudly and repeatedly aired by the mahouts and vets I worked with. My aim was to extract ‘stress’ and sex hormone metabolites from the dung. In some ways it is preferable to blood samples; I have observed elephants becoming increasingly uneasy as they watch others go through the procedure of having blood taken. One bolted with his mahout clinging onto his ear. A faecal sample is non-invasive and isn’t as vulnerable to fear-based fluctuations because it captures an average value across the intestinal tract transit time (around 24 hours). The sex hormone metabolites help me analyse the annual musth period of males – a testosterone surge characterised by aggressive behaviour, jostling for dominance with other males, sometimes in fights to the death, and a strong urge to track, mate with and guard oestrous females. All of this behaviour comes at the expense of the everyday focus on eating, and as a male’s body condition drops he also slowly falls out of musth and returns to his usual state. Diet is another key question we can address with dung. What is potentially even more interesting than the 100300kg bulk of leaves, grass, and bark that an adult African elephant can eat in a day, is the micronutrients that make up a much smaller, but vital, part of the diet. Elephants have sometimes visited caves for their mineral deposits, travelled miles to saltlicks, and even eaten weaverbird nests
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containing eggs and chicks, possibly all in search of nutrients. In my study area, a team led by Michelle Henley (Elephants Alive) and Lisa Yon (University of Nottingham) is investigating if elephants may be attracted to minerals brought to the surface by mining activity. Before we had fancy satellite tracking technology, we tracked elephants with their dung as well as signs such as broken branches and footprints, and it’s still useful to know your spoor in the field. Luckily elephants defecate up to 1520 times daily. I’ve measured dung ball circumference to estimate the age of its originator, stuck a thermometer right into the steamy core of a fresh ball to estimate body temperature, and helped my colleague count worm eggs in elephant dung. My Master’s student Teresa Santos is currently extracting DNA from elephant dung to determine patterns of relatedness between males at our study site in South Africa. This will give us insight into whether social relationships are based on kinship, and which males are having successful reproductions. On a population level, we can investigate the genetic evidence of the population bottlenecks we humans have caused with our big game hunting and penchant for ivory. In the sad instances when ivory is seized, we can also determine which area the elephants that were killed came from. Even if you’re not particularly keen on elephants, dung is key for ecosystem functioning. We all know dung beetles use and treasure elephant dung; I’ve had field assistants battle them for it! There is also evidence of several frog species living in elephant dung ball piles. Recent work by colleagues at my study site showed that savannah elephants can carry seeds for up to 60km before dropping them with a coating of fertiliser. It’s a shame that the elephants’ stripping of bark and uprooting of trees is visibly more noticeable than their important role of seed-dispersal that counterbalances the impact of their eating habits. Then there are human uses for elephant dung. A number of companies have sprung up using elephant dung as a component of paper – it’s certainly a robust building material. I’ve had a cup of coffee made from beans that had travelled through an elephant digestive tract, supposedly enriching their ‘smoothness’. I failed to mention that as I wasn’t a habitual coffee drinker I was woefully incapable of judging the merits of the extremely expensive product I was presented with! However, it’s certainly preferable to the traditional bush cure for dehydration: wringing the water out of an elephant dung ball right into your mouth. So on those times in South Africa when the light starts to mellow and the moon rises in the sky, there’s nothing better to me than hearing the thud, thud, thud of elephant dung dropping. The field assistants smile – ah, another data point! We take a sample for science, and leave the rest for the dung beetles and trees.
Dr Hannah Mumby is a Drapers’ Company Research Fellow at Pembroke, and Society in Science – Branco Weiss Fellow at the Department of Zoology. Her PhD at the University of Sheffield was on the ecology and life histories of logging elephants in Myanmar. She is currently researching the social and genetic relationships underpinning the formation of fission-fusion groups of male elephants, and how male traits linked to evolutionary ‘success’ may also be associated with risk of anthropogenic death. She undertakes fieldwork in the Greater Kruger biosphere in collaboration with the nonprofit organisation Elephants Alive as well as the University of South Africa, with funding through the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Cambridge-Africa Alborada research fund.
Desiring Muslim Women, or, a Feminist Study of Istanbulite Women’s Exercise Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah Research Fellow in social anthropology and specialises in gender and subjectivity in the Middle East. Before completing her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, she studied sociology (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul), anthropology (Concordia University, Montréal and University of Toronto) and Women and Gender Studies. Currently working on various book projects, Sehlikoglu is the recipient of a number of awards and grants, has published several articles, and has edited journal special issues.
Sertaç Sehlikoglu
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n one of my flights between Istanbul and London, I came across a gripping artwork entitled Impossible Dream by the Gaza-born Palestinian artist Laila Shawa in the in-flight magazine of Turkish Airlines. The picture depicts ten women in colourful burqas, leaving uncovered only their closed oriental eyes, outlined in dark kohl. Holding ice cream, they Impossible Dream by Laila Shawa are unable to eat it because of their face veils. By the time I saw this artwork I had been presenting parts of my research in several conferences, and, despite the detailed ethnographic description of my chosen subject I kept receiving at least one awkward question, a question that suggests a mental barrier combined with an academic etiquette working against bluntness. The picture gave me one of those ‘eureka’ moments a researcher experiences in her life, since this marvellous artwork was summarising the major obstacle standing in front of me. My latest work is about ordinary Istanbulite women’s involvement in the exercise trend, or, as women often refer to it, their spor merakı (interest/curiosity in sport). According to unofficial numbers, one and a half million Istanbulite women were involved in this trend during 2012, including those exercising at various gyms and public parks, attending free sessions run by the municipality, and so forth. The way women follow and create this trend has been extraordinary and against many odds – including religious, familial, and even secular ones. It’s also true, that middleto lower-class women’s exercise has been seen as a trivial matter by the young and educated Istanbulites. In my eyes, the extraordinariness combined with the perceived banality deserved 12 months of ethnographic research. Sports have been used by the Turkish Republic as a tool for transformation from the 1920s onwards. Highly influenced by eugenics discourses of the time, unfit Eastern bodies of Turks were to be moulded into a shape fit for the nation through a series of initiatives, such as physical education classes and annual Youth and Sport Fest celebrations. Coming from elite backgrounds, the first sportswomen of Turkey were role models to those who embraced the Westernizing values of the nation. Even after Turkey’s decades-long investment in biopolitics, exercise, gymnastics, sports, and women’s and girls’ physical education, the idea of female engagement in sports was felt to be somewhat incongruent, if not outrageous or repugnant in the minds of the non-elite majority. The compulsory physical education classes in high schools had famously been opted out of by girls with medical reports (it was always thought that the parents, most likely the fathers, were responsible for that) and the gymnastics performances of the annual Youth and Sport Fest celebrations have always been a matter of public anxiety when mixed-sex youth are seen parading in shorts. However, by the time I started my research in 2008 the middle-aged Istanbulite women who went walking in the
Women using outdoor gym equipment in Cumhuriyet Park. To respect the women’s requested anonymity their faces are not shown.
parks had already become city legends known as ‘Sporcu Teyzeler’ (Sporty Aunties). While the outdoor gyms replacing playgrounds were strange to the majority of Istanbulites, they were nevertheless swiftly discovered by the middle-aged women (often wearing long robes and large headscarves) – a discovery that made the equipment even less appealing to the youth. The contrasts between the unfit, joyful, ordinary, and often covered bodies of Istanbul’s sporty aunties and the fit, disciplined, serious, less covered, and elite bodies of early Republican sportswomen, are at the heart of my research. These contrasts present one of the few occasions where the veil drawn over women’s desires becomes relatively transparent. Taking a feminist approach, I refuse simply to see Istanbulite women as mindless followers of a neoliberal trend. Rather, I have developed a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to manifest a desiring self, that takes them out of the domestic zone, physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Coming back to the thought-provoking painting by Shawa, desire and Muslim women are simply incompatible in some people’s minds – impossible, as the artist herself put it. Desire, in this mind-set, is decaying and temporary, like the ice-cream cones the women are holding in the painting. Because of the very barriers Islam poses for women’s lives in particular, it is difficult to reach the objects of desire. Shawa’s artwork was very vocal, even without its title. In this mental framework, Islam is a regulatory, nonliberating religion and it therefore denies women’s desires. My interlocutors are simultaneously Muslims, women, citizens of Turkey (that is now in a sad state of tension between the ‘developing’ and ‘developed’, the traditional and modern, the religious and secular), and residents of Istanbul (a metropolitan city with a population of over 15 million). Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise is the very product of their ability to act against multiple norms and to cope with changing habits and embodiments, as well as the lifestyles of their city and the world. It is this capacity of desiring selves which enables women to transform the meanings and categories that limit their bodies physically, temporally, and spatially towards the formation of a collective trend. In contrast to overtly oppositional resistance, this capacity is purposefully unthreatening and so often remains veiled and understated, which is why it hasn’t previously received the anthropological attention it deserves.
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The Time Matthew Mellor, Development Director, on ‘The Time and the Place’ Campaign
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t’s official. The College is in ‘Campaign Mode’. Perhaps you thought it always was; after all, the need to seek your support has never gone away, so we have continued to ask. This time, though, it’s different. It really is ‘The Time’. I hope you can make time to watch the campaign video www.thetimeandtheplace.org.uk/ so you can see how it captures the awe that students feel at coming to Pembroke. If you were able to attend the Campaign’s launch, I’m sure you saw how the graduate students gain from and contribute to life at the College more than ever. And I’m sure that the message from the Master at the end conveyed to you the urgency of our task. The Dolby family has been incredibly generous; they have given us the chance to seize an opportunity that won’t come again and that, as the Master has said, future generations would not forgive us for missing. And what of the Place? There is more written on it opposite this page, but my objective in this piece is to lay out the vision that the Place, the whole of Pembroke, medieval to twenty-first century aims to be, needs to be, even. The foundations of the place are physical, but as Pembroke Members like you tell me again and again, it is the people who make it: the extraordinary, and indeed ordinary, things they do, the lasting friendships that are founded here, as solid as the buildings, the contribution that is made to their lives by a supportive environment that is, dare I say it, peerless in Cambridge. So while we need to raise funds for buildings, the key commitment is to the people who will benefit. In the words of the graduate student Matt Mahmoudi (see his article on p. 12): ‘Pembroke College is a community where ideas can be cross-fertilized and new insights can be drawn from a chance meeting in the Library, or a conversation over coffee. It may be relatively small, but Pembroke College is a place that has the capability to change the world. The way in which Pembroke enables us to share ideas so freely is inspiring. Imagine then, how much more will be achieved when the Mill Lane development is completed.’
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As the Master has said elsewhere, the transformation of the physical College will provide, most importantly, the foundation for our students and Fellows to learn, to explore, to discover, to research, to teach, to share and indeed to go out and change the world. There is and can be no sitting back in Cambridge – there is intense competition for the best undergraduate minds, the best research students, the best academics and there is no complacency. What is being achieved in Cambridge, when one compares its resources against almost all its peers, is quite extraordinary. Pembroke has a very important role to play in all this: our intention is to create on the Mill Lane site a visionary series of buildings that will inspire the people in them to be the best they can be – whether they are students, Fellows, administrators, visiting scholars, visiting Pembroke members or friends. A handful of other colleges have faced similar challenges of capacity and infrastructure: what makes this the Time and the Place is how close to the established medieval site our opportunity has arisen. So, thanks to the Dolbys and small number of other pioneering benefactors, we have raised nearly £40 million towards the £60 million required for the redevelopment of Mill Lane, and all told, we have raised £48 million towards a minimum target of £75 million, which includes funding for students, academics and the ongoing expenses of running this extraordinary place. The arithmetic is straightforward: a little over £20 million is needed by the time the building and redevelopment is completed, with more support for the brilliant people who will fill them and there make Pembroke’s next contributions to changing the world.
... and the Place ... and the Mill Lane Site Development
The Bursar (right) explaining a model of the Mill Lane Development
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ince before I became Development Director in 2006, the College has eyed the Mill Lane site covetously. Pembroke’s finances are such that it depends on the unrivalled summer programmes for vital income annually, which enables us to maintain student rents at levels that do not put the College out of reach for undergraduate applicants from financially straitened backgrounds. Thanks to the entrepreneurialism of Clive Trebilcock, Alan Dawson, David Jarvis, and now Daniela Passolt, the summer programmes have developed from predominantly US- and Japan-focused institutional partnerships to a range of academic courses that are of such quality as can attract excellent individually-enrolled candidates from many more places. In more recent times, there has also been a huge and necessary expansion in postgraduate numbers in addition to extensions of some undergraduate degrees from three to four years. These factors have come to mean that Pembroke is bursting at the seams. Arrangement of teaching and meeting has become fraught and complex, as rooms are shared by more people, while more graduate students are hopeful of accommodation nearer to the medieval site, and administrative functions are in need of refashioning to increase the College’s efficiency. The possibility that something really substantial and transformative could be developed on the Mill Lane site seemed, for years, like a pipe dream. Surely the answer to our prayers could not be just across the road? Assiduous and astute attention to University development plans – particularly by our last Bursar, Chris Blencowe, and current Bursar, Andrew Cates – have brought us to a position where we can now plan with confidence that there will be an extension to the College across Trumpington Street. It is tremendously exciting: the prospect that many visitors to Cambridge will pass between two substantial parts of Pembroke will almost make the College the gateway to the
city. In addition, having these facilities and so many more of our students and academics close by will enhance the already strong sense of community of the place. As I write, we are still deep in discussions with the city planners, and so much of all this has to be expressed in the form of aspiration. But that is fine, because to express aspiration is also to express vision. What is that vision? First, to create new accommodation, predominantly for postgraduates but with a substantial portion for undergraduates too. The court that is built will be based at the western end of the site, and will be called the ‘Ray and Dagmar Dolby Court’. It will house over 100 students, and the remainder of the development, as it creates space in the medieval part of the College, will enable around 50 more students to reside within the enhanced site. From the late summer of 2018, the College will be able to occupy and redevelop a number of buildings which will not be knocked down, but will be reconstituted to form important teaching and administrative space, while a ‘business lounge’ will be created to enable more flexibility for the partnerships we have with other academic and corporate bodies. Even in an age when more is available electronically, it remains vital for our library to be able to grow: it is at capacity now, and it is our ambition to ensure that it remains at the heart of study and research in the College. There will be new archive and library space in the redeveloped site. To ensure that the community of the College in all its forms remains the key beneficiary of this extraordinary opportunity, great thought is being given to how students, staff, alumni and Fellows will interact socially. Pembroke already enjoys a thriving and conducive environment thanks to the Hall and the extraordinary catering operation, but with more students on site, it will be important to ensure that this is not diluted by dispersal. Stuart House will likely become the social centre of the Mill Lane extension, particularly by day, as café and study space will be created here. Other listed buildings that will come into Pembroke’s possession will be used for more teaching – either as Fellows’ supervision rooms or seminar rooms, as more group teaching and small group supervisions become the order of the day. As I implied earlier, there is also a sincere public element to the redevelopment – just as we currently take pride in being open to the public almost all the time (with the exception of the exams period), so we will be proud to ensure that the citizens of Cambridge and visitors from further afield are able to pass through and, we trust, admire the extended College. We would dearly like to create in the site an auditorium that can be used for University lectures and plenary sessions by day, and for outstanding musical performances in the evenings. All of this will place Pembroke at the heart of Cambridge life, and thereby at the heart of Cambridge’s contribution to the world at large. It is an extraordinary, once-in-a-College-lifetime opportunity that must not be missed!
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Migration and the Psychology of Places Maria Abreu, Fellow in Land Economy, discusses her research
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job. The cost of living seems to matter less to young graduates than the cultural amenities at the new location, although they also tend to prefer locations with a mild climate, and (somewhat surprisingly) higher rainfall. The latter may be indicating a preference for coastal locations on the western coast of the UK, with spectacular views and good access to natural amenities. However, even in a carefully controlled sample such as this one I find that people with otherwise very similar characteristics make significantly different migration decisions. Over the past two years, I have focused on this issue and tried to disentangle the cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics that influence migration. Using a combination of interviews and time-series data, I have analysed the importance of attitudes to risk, locus of control (and a number of other non-cognitive psychological traits) for migration decisions. I have found that migrants are generally less risk-averse than non-migrants, and tend to have higher scores on the personality trait ‘openness to experience’, which is associated with creativity, curiosity, and knowledge. In addition, migrants with these characteristics tend to move repeatedly, picking up knowledge and ideas as they go, and they tend to settle in large, diverse, and tolerant cities. My findings suggest that cities such as London, Berlin, and Stockholm attract the most creative and skilled migrants, who add to the productivity and success of these places, and in turn attract a new generation of migrants. Over time, this can lead to a skills divide, with highly-skilled, open, entrepreneurial individuals concentrating in a small number of places. The challenge is to ensure that the social benefits of higher education, and the productivity generated by highly-skilled workers, are spread more evenly across locations. Universities, anchored in their local areas, could play a unique role in attracting and retaining skilled graduates in their regions.
Dr Maria Abreu joined Pembroke as a Fellow in 2011 and is University Lecturer at the Department of Land Economy. She received her PhD from the Free University Amsterdam in 2005. Before coming to Cambridge she worked for the World Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her research focuses on the economics of migration, entrepreneurship and local labour markets. She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela.
Freedom House/Flickr
any of the big news stories of our time seem either to be about migration or have migration as a cause or effect. Think of the large and sudden flows of refugees escaping the Syrian conflict, free movement of workers within the EU, or the desperate stream of African migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean, to name just three. My own interest in migration started when I was young. My grandparents had been immigrants, and I grew up in a large city in South America, which had nearly doubled in size in the 1970s as migrants arrived from the countryside. In developing countries we tend to observe migration from rural to urban areas, but the majority of migrants end up living precarious lives in hillside slums on the periphery of large cities. This raises a set of important questions. Are people aware of the consequences when they make the decision to move? Are they willing to take the risk anyway, in the hope of finding a well-paid job? Or are the living conditions they are likely to face still better than those in rural areas? The situation is very different in high-income countries. Here, migration tends to be mostly between urban areas, and we often observe groups of migrants moving in opposite directions at the same time. As an economic decision, this is quite puzzling, and for the past few years I have been trying to understand the motivations for these moves. Migration is a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon. We know that people are more likely to migrate at a few specific points in their lives: when they finish high school, when they graduate from university, as they start a family, or when they retire. We also know that people are more likely to move to areas where they have close family members or other social ties. Until quite recently, however, there was insufficient data on individual migrants to allow us to study their preferences and motivations. The best data sources, such as the Census, at most provided demographic data and aggregate migration numbers. While thinking about these issues, I decided to focus on a relatively homogenous group – recent university graduates. Graduation offers the perfect opportunity to move to a new location at relatively low cost, since most graduates are young, have no dependants, have few formal ties to their current location, and the economic benefits of moving are potentially very high. Moreover, there is an excellent source of micro-data on graduates in the UK: an annual survey, distributed by universities to all their recent graduates, with response rates in excess of 70%. This survey provides detailed data on over 400,000 individuals every year, going back to the mid-1990s. Economists generally think of migration as an investment in human capital. We assume that potential migrants will weigh up the costs and benefits of migration, where the costs include relocation expenses and the loss of social ties, and the benefits include the present value of future earnings at the new location and the availability of local amenities. Using several waves of data, I predict the salary that each graduate could reasonably expect to earn at each location in the UK, as well as the expected costs of living (based on house prices), and access to amenities (including historic buildings, green spaces, cultural activities). My analysis shows that graduates care more about potential earnings than about the risk of unemployment, particularly in fields such as the creative arts, where being in the right location is crucial to finding a decent
Syrians boarding transport to Germany organised by the Austrian government
Paying it Forward Amelia Viney (2007) and Olivia O’Sullivan (2006) on The Advocacy Academy they founded to foster the political power of young people The work of The Advocacy Academy is made possible by donations. Financial contributions are gratefully received, as are ideas, expertise, introductions, and in-kind support. if you care about this work, we’d love to hear from you: TheAdvocacy Academy@Gmail.com.
Amelia Viney
Olivia O’Sullivan
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aking into account the current political zeitgeist, it would be easy for the civic-minded person to give up hope. With increasing polarisation and anger on both sides of the Atlantic, what kind of politics are we leaving for the next generation? The statistics tell a downright depressing story: 60% of young voters say they don’t understand how decisions are made about local or national issues. 88% feel that their voice doesn’t matter. As far as the numbers go, the kids might have a point. Politics today is as exclusive as it is depressing. Only 10% of senior civil servants come from less affluent families. More than a third of MPs were privately educated, despite this elite making up less than 7% of the population. Let’s not forget that entry into the political class remains dependent on a merry-go-round of unpaid internships and personal connections afforded to the privileged few. If an ordinary young person is angry about the refugee crisis, sexual violence, or the cost of housing, how do they even begin to make change? That’s the question we were asking upon graduating from Pembroke. Along with an unnerving number of other history students, we found ourselves living in South London and working in politics. We experienced firsthand how much of an echo chamber Westminster could be, removed as it is from the reality experienced by young people growing up nextdoor to us in inner-city London. Every morning, we’d get on the bus in Lambeth with rowdy, funny, energetic schoolkids, and by the time we approached Vauxhall Bridge, they were all gone. Parliament was just across the river, but it may as well have been another planet. By the time we entered Westminster, any sign of young, diverse, dynamic South Londoners was a distant memory. Their voices were entirely missing from the big conversations that directly affected them like education, crime, and mental health. We knew we needed to change this story. For both of us, Pembroke had been the key to so many locks, and we wanted to hold the door open for others. Our response was to create The Advocacy Academy, an immersive crash-course in democratic engagement. We design and run transformational residential programmes which unleash the power of young people to create a more just and equal society. We select our young Advocates by asking what makes them angry. Their answers don’t have to be polished, but they must be passionate and personal – we believe that change must be led by those whose future depends on it. Unlike privilege, power cannot be given; individuals and communities must take it for themselves. The Advocacy Academy began with twelve teenagers, a shoestring budget, and a community hall with a hole in the roof. This group of disengaged local kids received an intensive education in civics and activism directly from the best social change leaders in London, and the results were transformative. Since then, our week-long pilot has grown into an eightmonth Fellowship, created with the participants it aims to help. This ambitious programme consists of more than 300 hours of demanding workshops, speakers, discussion groups, and real-life scenarios. Advocates learn what it takes to win system-level change by lobbying in Parliament, running grassroots campaigns, building broad-based alliances, and taking to the streets. We rely on our network of young professional contacts
working in politics, NGOs, education and journalism – a volunteer base of more than 250 people who have been fortunate enough to enter ‘the establishment’, but remain troubled by its persistent homogeneity. We’ve stayed true to a few founding principles. The Academy shouldn’t feel like school. Participants can leave if they want. We try to get across something real about power and the way it works. We have high expectations – our graduates need to be formidable, because in politics you don’t get points simply for trying. We tackle difficult issues, but won’t do so without someone there with lived experience to give their testimony. Each of our cohorts have maintained the diverse character of the first: 75% of our Fellows are from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic backgrounds; 70% are women; and 80% identify as working class. None have experience of civic participation, until we get our hands on them. Every Advocate we work with provides their own story that makes us proud: Jake convinced his Principal to re-write his school’s inadequate mental health policy; John-Paul launched UnDivided, the official youth response to Brexit; Jemmar writes for the UK’s leading intersectional feminist journal; and, as we pen this, several Fellows are filming a video calling on the editors of the Daily Mail to meet with a group of young British Muslims to discuss their coverage of Islam. So, why are we writing this in the Martlet? We both loved our time at Pembroke. Beyond a doubt, Cambridge taught us the importance of doing well. With The Advocacy Academy, we want to take that drive and do some good. We know that many of you have been on the same journey, and so we’re reaching out to Valencians with a similar desire – we welcome ideas, thoughts and offers of help. Fighting for a vibrant democracy requires a grand alliance, so let’s talk.
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Connecting Data to Action Matt Mahmoudi (2016) on Leveraging Digital Technologies to Advance Human Rights
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ou weren’t exactly sure what had happened. All you could remember were the two or maybe five police officers who had approached you at the polling station, when you had defiantly left your vote for the opposition party. You thought this would have made all the difference, but waking up outside your ransacked family home with bruises was not the kind of difference you had hoped for. You’re not really sure what to do from here. After all, going to the police was out of the question, and you knew you couldn’t afford a lawyer. You remember the posters with the phone number at the university, as you gladly discover you still have your old Nokia 3310. You type in the number and start a new text-message: ‘Help. I was attacked by the police at the polling station’. ‘This is stupid’, you think to yourself, and put the phone back in your pocket. But no more than a few seconds pass before you feel a response to your desperate plea. You pick your phone back up – ‘Hello, I’m here to help. First of all, are you hurt and do you need medical attention?’. You’ve undoubtedly heard it before. Social media is changing the world, initiating revolutions, and helping to hold governments to account. Whether this is true or not is a matter of great controversy. What we should all agree on, though, is the fact that the digital divide still very much exists – the gap between the global population with digital access and literacy, and those without – and that the distribution of technologies hasn’t led to the large-scale empowerment and democratisation we all predicted back at the dawn of the Green Revolution and the Arab Spring. In April 2015, Pembroke alum Dr Ella McPherson launched The Whistle project, aimed at developing a digital human rights reporting platform. When I first joined the team as a mere undergraduate student in the summer of 2015, the platform had recently been launched with the intention of aiding human rights organisations in the verification of civilian-witness data. As a result of the prolific effects of social media and the internet, organisations are often faced with a large volume of information, which is very difficult to make good use of without an established identity of the person who originally shared or submitted the data. As a result, The Whistle sought to mitigate this gap by enabling the verification of submitted data by facilitating the collection and crossreferencing of as much meta-data as possible (information that describes where and when certain data was collected). The thinking was that if we could make more meta-data available in one place for NGOs, and give them the tools to cross-reference this easily, we could potentially displace some of the risks associated with traditional ‘whistleblowers’ who would have otherwise had to compromise their identities in various ways.
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Over the last two years, a research effort looking into 48 digital human rights initiatives and 472 NGOs has yielded new insights and opportunities that are now helping us to be more effective as facilitators in development contexts. All too frequently, digital human rights initiatives purport to advance justice through ‘smarter’ and more technologically advanced solutions; what we’ve come to call the ‘fetishisation of smart technologies’. The Whistle works under the evidence-based assumption that there are untapped opportunities for using older and more appropriate technologies for new contexts. Rather than focusing on the most cutting-edge, we are tracing a new edge for how conventional text-messaging might be used in combination with a web-based dashboard to facilitate two-way interactions between NGOs and civilians. Such interactions will help NGOs in requesting more rich information from witnesses, whilst also providing a source that could refer witnesses and victims to medical, psychological, or legal aid. My own interest in the project comes directly out of a growing hesitation regarding the possibilities of digital technologies to change the material, political and economic circumstances of people. My undergraduate research focused on the shortcomings of digital initiatives in generating greater accountability in the international human rights framework. By far the greatest shortcomings regarding ‘apps’ are two-fold: a neglect of how data is connected to action, and an almost exclusive investment in the collection and preservation of data (probably with the expectation that a liberal-democratic system of rule of law will magically appear in a few years). The Whistle is a promise not to fall subject to those shortcomings; it’s an attempt to connect NGOs looking for particular data, with civilians willing to share said data, in exchange for redress. The project has always had a great focus on closing the ‘feedback loop’, and I believe The Whistle has the potential to revolutionise the way in which NGOs communicate with at-risk communities. It’s currently in the design phase, but we are working to iterate the first version of the platform with local NGO partners in Nigeria and South Africa. We expect this to be live in the summer of 2017.
Matt Mahmoudi is the Program Lead at The Whistle, and is an MPhil student in Development Studies at Cambridge. His current research is on xenophobic responses to migration. He is also the founder of Declarations – The Cambridge Human Rights Podcast, and Editor of Politics Made Public (PMP), an educational not-forprofit with the purpose of eliminating political apathy.
Poet’s Corner The Birds I The heron I look out for is hard to find some days, a coat-hanger caught in the riverbank’s undergrowth. I wonder if the feeling’s mutual and that somewhere in readiness to take flight, the ploy’s to merge within the twig-life, then a spindly jolt of its floppy lift-off. II Scraggy-headed pigeons arrive at dawn and sit on gutters perusing the garden before, in a flurry, they joust and cluck, the down-at-heel raggedy looks of the lost turn instantly into the spilt-petrol sheen of their amazing throats. III Or when I take the air between rugby and cricket pitch mighty gulls in light blue perform their unceasing dance that rakes up grubs through the mute grass, summoned by the strutting birds’ bombarding overhead.
Gerald Dawe is an Irish poet, professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He was a Visiting Scholar in Pembroke in Michaelmas and Lent 2016-17. He has published eight volumes of poetry with The Gallery Press, including Selected Poems (2012) and Mickey Finn’s Air (2014). His many prose books include Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015) and he has edited numerous anthologies of literary criticism and poetry, most recently, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish war poetry 1914-1945 (2008). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (forthcoming).
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