The Homersphere. A little bit of Homerton College, written by and for Homerton members, wherever they find themselves.
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Latest Posts on the Homersphere
Recent Homerton graduate Liam Cawthorne is turning a lifelong interest in climate change in a long-term career plan.
In the latest in his series of personal musings on some of the Fitzwilliam’s treasures, Philip Stephenson introduces us to the lives and loves of early 20th century artistic Paris.
Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum gave the 2021 Kate Pretty Lecture on the purposes of a University museum collection. The complete lecture is available here.
Do politicians keep their promises? Have they ever? Richard Toye and David Thackeray give us the historical perspective, through the lens of an artefact from 1929.
From lockdown in a dozen locations, Homerton students rose to the challenge of the 2021 Music Performance Competition. A playlist to cheer your day!
Food poverty in the UK has quadrupled in the last year, as the nation faces Covid-19. Luckily, footballers are on hand to help: but perhaps that’s not the best way of solving this? Sam Strong explores the politics of responsibility.
‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’, wrote Yeats. Penned the day after a violent incursion into the US Capitol, Homerton’s Bill Foster - an historian both of Nazi Germany and the modern United States - considers how silence enables destruction.
In the Fitzwilliam Museum, there is a glorious corner where three Renaissance paintings of the Adoration of the Shepherds huddle together. Philip Stephenson tells their story.
At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Homertonians gather in the Great Hall to commemorate the fallen… except this year. This is what happened instead.
The US Presidential election is fast becoming a reality TV drama of its own. As things stand, at 8:15am in Cambridge (that’s 3:15am Eastern Standard Time) things are unclear. Currently, the Associated Press have Biden on 238 Electoral College votes, and Trump not far behind on 213.
As West House and its 223 residents went into self-isolation in October, our alumni asked if they could send messages of support.
Here’s a cracker from Simon Evans (BA Education with English and Drama 2003-6), writer and star of Staged.
As West House and its 223 residents went into self-isolation in October, our alumni asked if they could send messages of support.
Here Liam Williams (BA English 2006-9), comedian and writer, confesses to crime, sort of.
Alice White recalls advice from two sports psychologists: advice which is helping her in daily life in a pandemic
Richard Toye dares to call Winston Churchill a racist - and also to appreciate other facets and attributes of this extraordinary figure.
Director of Studies in Engineering Dr Miles Stopher muses on past cricketing glories and has an awkward encounter with his schoolboy past
Who gets priority for testing? Do your colleagues get told about your positive result? Can you decline to take a test? And how far can you trust the result anyway? Important questions in any profession, but especially so in healthcare. Mary Dixon-Woods suggests an ethical framework for considering the answers.
Of all Homerton’s alumni, Leah Manning has a claim to have affected the greatest number of lives for the better. Here, historian Peter Cunningham celebrates some new Manning material acquired by the College archive
With students scattered to their homes, Homerton College Music Society decided separation was no reason not to stage a performance competition.
Oscar Wilson writes about historical perceptions of rhinos, in this lovely and pioneering article - the first contribution by a student writer to the Homersphere!
As ‘the new normal’ expands into the summer, John Hopkins curates a further playlist, offering a glimpse of better times to come.
Richard Toye - historian and scholar of rhetoric - has been writing a book aimed at helping students succeed academically. Here he gives us an insider’s preview…
Clare Oliver-Williams is investigating links between pregnancy and heart disease, and finds good news and a challenge
In lockdown, themes of protection and incarceration are in tension. Are children ‘safe at home’, or ‘stuck at home’? Philip Stephenson explains how Henry Moore explored those themes in bronze.
Lamenting the loss of the Cambridge Beer Festival, Philip Stephenson draws inspiration from Brueghel’s festival-goers, in his latest commentary on the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection
David Clifford does prolonged battle with a leak, reluctant plumbers, reluctant social distancers, and his sense of his own DIY capabilities.
Philip Stephenson’s series of commentaries on art from the Fitzwilliam Museum continues with a reflection on VE Day 1945 and its resonances with the Armistice, as depicted by Sir William Nicholson RA in 1918.
Inspired by Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656), John Hopkins has curated a playlist ‘for these distracted times’, from his own compositions and others’.
To launch the Homersphere and to mark international Star Wars Day, we asked Bye-Fellow Robin Bunce to write about the franchise and its considerations of utopia and dystopia. May the fourth be with you all!
Richard Toye recommends five lessons that Boris Johnson should take from his hero Winston Churchill, as he treats Covid-19 as the defining war of his premiership
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Fabienne Bonnet, Bye-Fellow from 2011 to 2016, introduces her translation of a poem by René Char (1907-1988), poet and Resistance hero.