English

English at Pembroke

We are proud of being in a College where (as undergraduates or Fellows) Edmund Spenser, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart and Ted Hughes have lived; Pembroke is home to an internationally significant archive of poetry, letters and artwork by Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and their close friend the Irish artist Barrie Cooke. A volume of poetry written by Pembroke Fellows and students over the 650 years of the College's existence was published in 1998, and the College hosts regular Masterclasses in combination with the founding Director of the National Academy of Writing, the novelist and non-fiction writer Richard Beard, himself a Pembroke English graduate.

English is one of the largest arts subjects at Pembroke, and the College has a strong academic record in the subject; our Tripos results have in recent years usually been among the best in the University. 

There is an active College Poetry Society, in which undergraduates write, read and discuss their own poems; the best are published in The Pem, an arts magazine. We also maintain ties with our more recent English alumni and we ask eminent Pembroke writers to judge our annual creative writing prize.

Pembroke English Teaching Staff

Dr Katrin Ettenhuber - Director of Studies for Part I

As Director of Studies for the first- and second-year English students at Pembroke, I am responsible for arranging small-group teaching and overseeing students’ academic progress. In the first year, a lot of this involves helping students to manage the transition from school to university, especially with regard to essay writing and study skills. I enjoy working individually with students to help them get the best out of their academic potential.

I came to Cambridge from a small rural state school in Germany, so I know how strange university life can feel at first – but I also have a keen sense of what a wonderfully varied and enriching place Cambridge, and Pembroke in particular, can be.

I’m fascinated by how people thought in the past: what they read, and what kinds of media they used to communicate with each other. The period I work on (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) saw the invention of the printing press, a technology that revolutionised access to texts and images much in the same way that the internet did for us. So I enjoy thinking about the ways in which people express themselves in writing, whether that’s in the context of reading a weekly student essay or of studying a Renaissance text. You can find more about my award-winning research here: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Katrin.Ettenhuber

Dr Mark Wormald -  Director of Studies for Part II

Mark specialises in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century and in contemporary writing.

Dr Alex Houen 

Alex also specialises in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century and in contemporary writing.

Dr Mina Gorji

Mina works on eighteenth-century writing and on Romantic literature and culture.

All these Fellows teach fairly broadly, going beyond their specialised areas of study. We expect to be able to benefit from the expertise of two post-doctoral Academic Associates, Dr Joanna Bellis and Dr Charlotte Charteris, both Pembroke members, who specialise in Medieval and early-to-mid twentieth century writing respectively. Between us, we do our best to ensure that a Pembroke undergraduate's experience of the subject is rich and varied: we are all dedicated to ensuring that our students find the course as rewarding as it is stretching. We encourage undergraduates who are interested in creative writing to pursue this. Pembroke undergraduates have often won the University's creative writing prizes.