Mr Tim Cribb
MA
Year started
1970
Subject
English
Fellow Type
Emeritus,
I’m Tim Cribb, appointed as a Fellow in English in 1970. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, a postgraduate at the universities of Minnesota and Oxford, a lecturer at Glasgow, and a visiting lecturer at the universities of Ife and Kwara State in Nigeria. I retired in 2006 but am still involved in various University and College activities. As you may infer, I have a strong interest in what used to be called Commonwealth literature and I introduced the FacultyÂ’s Part II option in the field, now under the title of Postcolonial and Related Literatures.
My main research interests are Dickens, Shakespeare, Caribbean and Nigerian literature. Associated with the latter, I helped Professor Akin Euba (an Overseas Fellow at Churchill in 1999-2000) to set up CIMACC, the Centre for Intercultural Musicology at Churchill College. This is inspired by the example of Bartok, promotes symposia and international concerts in the College and elsewhere, and is now directed by another Overseas Fellow, Prof. Valerie Ross of the Teknologi Universiti, Malaysia.
I used to direct plays for the GODS (the College drama soc) but now restrain myself to the role of Senior Treasurer to Cambridge University Marlowe Dramatic Society, founded 1907. I published a history of the Society, ‘Bloomsbury and British Theatre: the Marlowe Story’ for its centennial in 2007. This reveals the profound influence the Society had on English theatre in the twentieth century: the founders of the RSC, Peter Hall and John Barton, were members when at Cambridge, as was Peter HallÂ’s successor, Trevor Nunn, as have been nearly all the directors of the National Theatre since Olivier; another Marlovian, Domenic Dromgoole, ran Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, another the Donmar and yet another the Scottish National Theatre. The Society continues to be active, with an annual production at Cambridge Arts Theatre, and commissioned another Fellow of the College, the poet John Kinsella, to write a New ‘Comus’ for performance during the Milton centenary celebrations in 2008.
