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Marina Warner, novelist and Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Essex, will deliver Newnham College’s annual Jane Harrison Lecture.

Her talk will consider how new forms of communication and entertainment have encouraged new developments in animist thought in the contemporary world.

Whilst animism, the belief system that attributes souls to animals, plants, geographic features and natural phenomena, is often associated with ‘primitive’ cultures and past beliefs, Professor Warner will argue for a more positive way of looking at such ideas.

She will suggest that such magical thinking connects well with new discoveries and inventions, and that this casts a brighter light on ways of thinking hitherto seen as fanciful, superstitious, or foolish.

̽»¨Ö±²¥talk will focus in particular on the influence of the Arabian Nights, where magic routinely brings bottles, lamps, carpets and other domestic objects to life. ̽»¨Ö±²¥stories have been the subject of numerous television and cinema adaptations, including ̽»¨Ö±²¥Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving feature-length animation.

Alongside her teaching role, in which she focuses on fairy-tales and other forms of narrative, Professor Warner is a prize-winning author of fiction, criticism and history.

Her academic works include Alone of All Her Sex, a study of Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism, and From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy-Tales and the Tellers, which won a Mythopoeic Award in 1996. Her novel ̽»¨Ö±²¥Lost Father was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. In 1994 she became the second woman to deliver the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

̽»¨Ö±²¥Jane Harrison Lecture is held annually by Newnham College in memory of Jane Harrison, one of Newnham’s first students and a noted classicist who wrote ground-breaking works on ancient Greek religion. She was active in the Bloomsbury Group and in the suffrage movement, and more or less invented the role of professional female academic as researcher and teacher.

Newnham College was founded in 1871 by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick to promote academic excellence for women. Its buildings, set in some of Cambridge’s most beautiful gardens, were designed by noted architect Basil Champneys, pioneer of the Queen Anne style. ̽»¨Ö±²¥College counts Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Iris Murdoch and Sylvia Plath amongst its many notable alumnae.

̽»¨Ö±²¥2008 Jane Harrison Lecture, Toys and Demons: ̽»¨Ö±²¥Secret Life of Things, will take place on 25 April at 5:30pm. It will be held in Law Faculty, on the Sidgwick Site, in room LG19. It is free and open to all.