At present, set texts and authors are only found within a few papers of the English Tripos. For example, the Part I medieval paper has a compulsory translation of Sir Gawain and Green Knight, as well as choice of commentary questions on either Piers Plowman or Troilus and Criseyde. The compulsory Part I Shakespeare paper also includes the study of one set text, which is currently Cymbeline. Within the Part II tragedy paper, students are also expected to have studied Shakespearean tragedies.

Aside from these papers, the choice of texts is more open. Although the Faculty and individual directors of studies offer reading lists to their students, these are suggestions and not mandatory reading requirements.

With this in mind, including a diverse range of texts may be easier than some anticipate. In a comment to Varsity, Dr Ewan Jones, fellow and director of studies for Part II at Downing College, expanded upon this: “Neither BME texts nor any other texts are presently ‘excluded’, insofar as students can write about any work from the period that seems appropriate, provided that it meets the requirement of having been written in English”.

Jones added, “students already can write on these topics. The question is: might the Faculty do more to allow them to realise that they can, or guide them towards such texts? I think that the Faculty can do this, in the form of both reading lists and lectures.”

Some have questioned if it would be possible to offer a decolonised curriculum across the whole-time period of the Cambridge English Tripos, which covers the years 1300 to the present day. Dr Lucy Allen, Director of Studies for Part I at Newnham College, used her recent blog post, ‘Decolonising the Canon: Why Medieval Literature is the Place to Start’, to discuss such questions. Allen noted that “medieval literature also offers a breath-taking diversity of writers, readers, and perspectives”, citing the north African theologian St Augustine as one example of this. Allen wrote further that “people of colour were not just occasional, exoticised additions to medieval visual images of the world, but commonplace presences”.

As well as this, the contextual background to medieval texts could also be considered. Allen points to Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and the romance The King of Tars as examples of stories which “reflect histories of interracial violence and propaganda, of anti-Semitic pogroms and militant Holy War”.

Trinity Hall English alumnus Rianna Croxford, who co-authored the original student letter regarding decolonising the curriculum, used her Twitter account to offer her take, suggesting that one could study “The Tempest in juxtaposition with 20th century adaptions that re-entered the subaltern voices of Caliban and Sycorax” or “give an intersectional reading of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella Oroonoko, the first slave/travel narrative set in Ghana”.  

In terms of the practicalities of such changes, Dr Chris Warnes, a university lecturer in African Literatures and Cultures, pointed out that “a crucial area of this issue is the question of staffing and decisions about the allocation of new posts”, adding that there are “currently three staff members working on the literatures of the entire world outside Europe and the US”.

Aside from staffing, however, changes to the curriculum could be less complex in implementation than they may seem. Dr Ewan Jones explained that changes to the Faculty reading lists are “very easy to make; we are continually renovating these documents”, whilst changing the content of lectures “would require UTOs [university teaching officers] to think about the content and the description of their courses”.

Referring to his own experience, Jones explained that he had “previously lectured on the nineteenth century, on topics that include the reception of Tennyson’s poetry in India, Thomas Carlyle’s slavery polemics, and Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rebellion”; he “had not thought to advertise such themes under the heading of ‘postcolonial’ studies, but I certainly could”.

Decolonisation could also be approached through examining the contexts of texts. Minutes from an English Faculty Teaching Forum discussion on the 5th October, which were emailed to students, suggested that there could be an introductory lecture course in Michaelmas to “offer perspectives on the global contexts and history of English literature”