At Clare we do not teach according to any preferred line of approach, but see our role as being to help the students to discover their own interests and to clarify their own thinking.
Overview
The minimum offer is A*AA at A-level, or 7 7 6 (42+ overall) from Higher Level subjects in the IB. For other qualifications, please see the University entrance requirements page.
A-level/IB Higher Level or equivalent in English Literature.
Modern or ancient languages and other essay-based subjects such as History will be good preparation for the English Literature course.
Written work required to apply
Two essays will be required, which can be on any literary text or topic, with your teachers' comments on it if possible. You will also be asked to provide a list of recently read works of literature. These may come up for discussion at interview. You may also be asked to comment on a passage of text as part of one or both interviews, if invited.
English at Clare
English at Clare extends beyond formal teaching. Fellows have been known to arrange subsidised visits to theatres in Cambridge and London; to turn seminars into communal play-readings; to invite directors to discuss their productions; to arrange for film evenings introduced by specialists in film studies. On two memorable evenings one summer, Dr Stillman and the English third-year students took over the college gardens to produce a site-specific, multi-media performance for voices of Tennyson’s poem Maud (complete with original music and the arrival of Death on a punt).
The Clare Actors company and the college Literary and Writing Society flourish in line with the enterprise of the students who run them. The tradition has sprung up of an annual English dinner.
But perhaps most valuable are the wholly informal ways in which students interact with each other – sharing literary enthusiasms, discussing ideas, reading each other’s writing, and appreciatively responding to the special qualities, intellectual and creative, which each English student brings, in her or his own way, to the table.
Students are supervised in pairs or singly and this means that someone who has or who comes to develop particular interests – in theatre, for example, or music, or gender studies, or historical context, or philosophy, etc – will be able to slant their course of work accordingly.
English is a humane discipline, and as a student's skill and knowledge grow, supervisions will evolve away from the teacher-pupil situation towards being a sharing and comparing of experiences between equals, who have in common a strong love of literature. That is an ideal, but one which is frequently approached, and sometimes achieved.
Visit the University's subject page for more information.
My current research is on Chaucer, the literature of the early Tudor period, and in the field of the medical humanities.
Two of my most recent articles focus on Robert Henryson, both as an author exploiting a Chaucerian legacy, and also as a major fifteenth-century writer. The Henryson research leads on from my previous edition of the work of Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas: The Makars.
In addition, the interaction between literature, science, and theology is one of my prevailing research interests. I have published previously on such topics as the foetal existence of Christ and on the apocryphal lives of a post-lapsarian Adam and Eve, examining the ways in which authors negotiate scientific knowledge and theological demands. This work continues in my current research into the phenomenon of angelic voices in medieval literature. I am also completing a book on Geoffrey Chaucer.
I mostly teach early modern literature, but I have a particular interest in drama — whether written in the early modern period or well outside it. These interests have expanded to think more widely about the many ways in which we read the not-words of dramatic performance, considering in particular the methods by which playwrights explore and exploit the physicality of their actors.
I’ve explored the power dynamics and ethics bound up in those methods in a forthcoming book, Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy (visit www.shakespeareforsnowflakes.com for more details).
As well as liking to spend time (of course) with Shakespeare, I teach the period from Milton through to the Romantics, from many angles - one of which is Love, Gender and Sexuality, a thriving Part II paper that I founded a few years ago; this generated my most recent book, On Declaring Love, which is partly focused on Austen. I also teach Tragedy, from the Greeks to the present day, and have just finished a book on the figure of the witness in tragedy, about the need and the difficulty of having acute distress properly heard and understood, and how this plays out in the theatre. Most of the research I do arises out of working with students at Clare, and hopefully feeds back into their experience too. A list of what I've written can be found here: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Fred.Parker
I teach literature from 1830 to the present day, which means that I guide Part I students through the broad shape of that period and help Part II students explore and refine their own interests in modern and contemporary literature. I initially trained as a Victorianist, but my current research stretches into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on prose, from nineteenth-century novels to psychoanalytic case histories to feminist pamphlets. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between literature and social history, as well as the relationship between the psychoanalytic case history and narrative style. My first book, Mother State: a political history of motherhood (Penguin/Allen Lane) came out in 2024. A creative writer as well as an academic, I invite practicing poets and prose writers to give readings at Clare, and I often collaborate with art galleries, literary festivals and other public organisations, most recently the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Wellcome Collection, and the Southbank Centre.
