Creative / The call of Cambridge

THE CALL OF Cambridge

Jan-Melissa Schramm (1984, née Turner) is from a Launceston Grammar family. Her father Mervyn boarded in the 1950s, and Jan came to the School in 1977 in the first cohort of girls admitted to the School when her mother Margaret took up a job teaching in the Log Cabin (the then Primary School). Her sister Susie (1987), her husband Chris (1986) and his sisters Leonie (1982) and Lil (1984) all attended Launceston Grammar.

King's College, Cambridge

Jan is now University Reader in Literature and Law at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and Deputy Director of CRASSH, the University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities – one of the largest interdisciplinary research institutions in the world. Jan has published five books and many articles, all on the relationship between law and the humanities. News from Launceston Grammar spoke with Jan recently.

Q. Tell us about the journey which led you to the University of Cambridge.

I loved all my subjects at Launceston Grammar, especially English Literature. My teachers, Fran Morris and Caroline Sangston, were inspirational and encouraged me to read above and beyond what was on the syllabus.

I worked hard and matriculated in 1984 as Dux of the School and winner of several state and national prizes, including a National Undergraduate Scholarship to study Arts/Law at the ANU in Canberra. At ANU, I became particularly interested in the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, when the rise of science challenged traditional thinking about theology and social organisation: writings by authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning really captured the excitement of that moment in time.

I graduated from ANU with First-Class Honours and the University Medal in English, and although I then finished my law degree and practised in Hobart for a couple of years while my husband Chris finished medical school, I knew fairly early on that I wanted to do a PhD. In 1993 I was awarded a prestigious Cambridge Australia Scholarship to do doctoral research in Cambridge, and after that I held a Research Fellowship which enabled me to publish my first book. In 2000 I was offered a tenured lectureship and have now been in Cambridge for 25 years.

Q. Is there a need for creativity in your work at CRASSH, drawing together disciplinary perspectives within the University of Cambridge?

Yes, definitely. A combined degree like Arts/Law speaks to both the creative and the professional aspects of academic enquiry. In an Arts degree, you learn to value beauties of style and expression, and the importance of personal responses to works of literary, material or visual art. The argument of writers in the nineteenth century like Dickens and Eliot was that if you read a high-quality novel, you will inevitably be moved to change places in your imagination with the characters, feeling for them on their own journeys, and thus extending your own capacity for compassion. In other words, readers should learn their ethical lessons in life from novels and poetry and plays – readerly sympathy for human difference encourages kindness and tolerance, and the generation of emotion enables art to instruct people in ways that the law cannot. Inevitably this is rather idealistic, but the broader question with which Victorian authors were wrestling – how and what to teach in order to foster engaged citizenship in an age of increasing democratization – remains as important as ever.

Being Deputy Director of CRASSH involves trying to bring the different disciplines of the University into conversation with one another, recognising their similarities and their differences and enabling them to communicate in ways that all participants find fruitful and constructive. CRASSH runs around 300 events a year, aiming to bring university research in various fields into wider public life.

Q. Tell us about your field of expertise; the history of the English novel. Who is a stand-out writer for you and why?

In my work with undergraduates, I teach literature and history from about 1700 to the present day, but in my graduate teaching and in my research, my field of expertise is specifically the relationship between the law and the English novel.

My first book was on the history of the rules of evidence and the ways in which novelists like Henry Fielding (who was also a judge) contributed to their development. My other books have looked at topics like the relationship between literary culture and philosophies of punishment, ideas of sacrifice in writing about war, and censorship and the extent to which legal regulation shapes literary texts for better and for worse. I’m most fascinated by writers who can best interrogate what academics call epistemology – that is, how we know what we know.

Launceston Grammar alumna Jan-Melissa Schramm, at school

Launceston Grammar alumna Jan-Melissa Schramm, today.

The best novelist of the nineteenth century for me is George Eliot (the pseudonym of Marianne Evans) – she was a polymath who translated works of German philosophy into English, she read and respected both Darwin’s evolutionary thought and works of Christian theology, and she depicted strong heroines like Dorothea and Romola (from Middlemarch and Romola respectively) at a time when the social position of women was so constrained. Above all, she created moving and detailed portraits of how people's consciences work when they’re faced with complex questions with no easy answer.

There’s also a lot of fantastic writing coming out of Tasmania at the moment – I am a huge fan of Richard Flanagan’s writing (Wanting is a moving commentary on some of the many moral blindspots of Empire) and Launceston’s own Rohan Wilson has recently written a very powerful pair of novels on nineteenth century colonial atrocities, The Roving Party and To Name those Lost, both of which I heartily recommend if you want to get to grips with the Tasmanian past.

Q. How did your education at Launceston Grammar shape who you are today?

I value my time at Launceston Grammar enormously – we were well-taught, and there was an emphasis on all aspects of the educational experience. I particularly enjoyed the events which fostered collegiality – performing in the School orchestra and singing in the choir.

I also really appreciated the Outdoor Education Programme – bushwalking was a huge part of our lives growing up; Tasmania is such a special place and there are lessons that you can learn when you’re out in the wilderness that will stay with you forever. Tasmania’s big multi-day walks – the traverse of the Western Arthurs, the Overland Track – also serve as great metaphors for some of the harder tasks in life that involve delayed gratification and require enormous perseverance; slogging your way across the ‘sodden Loddens’ at the base of Frenchman’s Cap in the pouring rain is rather like the final stages of writing up your PhD! You have to just keep plodding on despite the misery of the moment, and then suddenly you’re on the summit basking in the sunshine.