Academics put on six events during the Being Human festival that showed off their research and teaching.
LONDON — Northeastern University research was recently brought to life across a series of events organized as part of one of the U.K.’s premier culture festivals.
Whether it was through walking tours, an artificial intelligence poetry workshop or a performance of the first professional plays written by British women, attendees were able to enjoy the expertise and teaching of Northeastern’s English department.
Tomas Elliott, an assistant professor, spearheaded a combined effort to put on six events in the U.K. capital during the Being Human festival.
“The Being Human festival is the biggest festival for the humanities in the U.K. and they run events up and down the country every year during this festival period,” he explains.
“We thought about how we could design what were hopefully engaging, fun, accessible events that were inspired by the research but were not a lecture.”
Here Elliott talks through the program conducted by Northeastern faculty during the festival.
Dozens of people turned up to hear assistant professor Chloe Pinto unpack the diverse history of the East End of London — something Northeastern is part of with its expanding campus in the area — during a walking tour.
The tour was based on a first-year undergraduate course called Cultures of London.
“The route traced where you could identify the boundaries of those different communities,” says Elliott, “starting with the Roman wall, going through evidence of the Jewish communities in the East End, taking in the later Huguenot Christian communities who moved in to that part of London, and then ending up with the primarily Bangladeshi Muslim community and Brick Lane mosque. It was really fascinating.”
Sam Kemp — inspired by research he carried out into protests by sacked print workers during the Wapping dispute with media baron Rupert Murdoch — combined with fellow assistant professor Sam Waterman to put on a poetry workshop at Devon House that utilized artificial intelligence.
“Tying into what the print workers had done in Wapping in the 1980s, here they were thinking about the role the writer plays now in an age of AI-generated content,” Elliott says.
“The workshop involved getting AI tools like ChatGPT to write a poem and then to take that poem and deconstruct it — to cut it up and rework it into something creative and different, as a way of restoring the human creativity to the generic, bland content that ChatGPT spews out.”
Deborah Walker has seen her Writing for Self-Expression course rolled out to National Health Service-sites across England to help people with conditions such as anxiety and bipolar.
The assistant professor in creative writing decided to design a bespoke session for the wider public to take part in at Van Gogh House, where the Dutch artist lived in London from 1873-74.
“With this, we wanted to connect artistic creativity and mental well-being, which is obviously something that Van Gogh had struggled with,” Elliott says.
Two tour groups were taken on a visual history tour of how London’s theatre district — known as the West End — came to be, with the walks based on associate professor Peter Maber’s research.
Participants learned about the history of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane — London’s oldest theatre site still in use — along with theatres lost to the pages of history.
Research by Maber also inspired a production that focused on the first women to perform on, and write for, the London stage after King Charles II, following the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660, stipulated that female roles should be played by women actors (they had often previously been played by boys).
Actors Natasha Dawn and Tom Hunter performed plays at the October Gallery Theatre in central London that had been written by British female playwrights from the Restoration era, including Aphra Behn, who is thought to have been the first professional women writer in English literature.
John Keats’ poetry may be associated with the countryside but he also had a house in Hampstead — now a leafy part of north-west London with its sprawling heath — where the Romantic poet wrote some of his most significant works.
As part of her research into the 19th-century poet’s urban influences, assistant professor Flora Lisica put on an event that introduced attendees to Keats’ poetry, took them on a guided walk through his house and then offered the chance to explore his poems and property, with its museum and gardens, through their own drawings and those of an artist who was collaborating with them.