Talks
Holding it Together: Making, Maintaining and Mending from the Early Modern to the Present
‘Holding it Together’, a two-day symposium taking place in late June 2026, addresses this gap, bringing together makers and scholars of material culture to co-create new and robust concepts of lastingness rooted in both historical understanding and contemporary practice.
Percy Shelley, archived at Huntingdon Library
Shelley's Steam Ship: a hidden history of romanticism and technology
Mon 11 September 2023
Cambridge Museum of Technology
This talk is about the poet Percy Shelley’s attempt to build a steam ship to trade between Livorno and Marseilles in 1820.
As Phil Connell writes, ‘Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley have typically been identified with an?unambiguous?hostility to industrial society and its intellectual apologists’ (Romanticism, Economics and the Question of Culture, 2005, vii).
Nonetheless this was a period when there were fewer distinctions between the arts of Engineering and the Humanities. In this talk, Dr Gardner will discuss these interactions at a time when amateur engineers, such as Shelley, felt that they could engage in the development of new technology.
Cost: £5 / £3 (students) cash-only
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