Free Thinking

Over the last two hundred years, working class and women students, have found a place insides universities. Anne McElvoy hears about some of the stories behind the social expansion of higher education. Joanna Bourke's new book is a history of Birkbeck, the University of London college that began life as the London Mechanics’ Institution in 1823 and is now a leading centre of research in many areas. Iona Burnell Reilly has been looking at the lives of working class academics and Ann Kennedy Smith has considered women's pursuit of education at the University of Cambridge. And Clare Bucknell discusses the history of one educational resource, the anthology.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Birkbeck 200 years of radical learning for working people.

Dr Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford and author of a social history of poetry anthologies, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture.

Dr Iona Burnell Reilly is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Communities at the University of East London and she is the author of The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above your Station

Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is an independent scholar and literary critic. She was awarded a Women’s History Network Independent Researcher fellowship in 2021-22, and her blog about Cambridge women is called ‘The Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society 1890-1914’.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You might be interested in other content exploring the history of education including BBC AHRC New Generation Thinker Eleanor Lybeck's Essay on social attitudes to Victorian women pioneers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v64pk

Chaucer's widow and clothmaker is one of three characters given a longer confessional voice than other pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales and she uses her narrative to ask who has had the advantage in setting out the stories of women - "Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?" Shahidha Bari explores both the roots and the influence of Chaucer's creation and the different modern versions created by writers including Zadie Smith and Caroline Bergvall. Her guests are Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Patience Agbabi who reimagines this timeless character as a Nigerian businesswoman in her poem The Wife of Bafa, and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes.

You can hear Marion Turner discussing Chaucer's own life in a past episode of Free Thinking hearing from nominees for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j2qw

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A language is a window onto a culture, history and way of life. So what do we lose when a community stops speaking the language of its ancestors? John Gallagher is joined by Gwenno, who writes and sings in Cornish, and researchers working to reclaim endangered languages around the world.

With Mandana Seyfeddinipur of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, and Mel Engman and Mary Hermes who work in communities that speak Ojibwe, an indigenous language of Minnesota and elsewhere in North America.

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Other episodes in our series exploring language include:

Dead Languages: John Gallagher says hello in Oscan, the daily language of ancient Pompeii and looks at the translation of hieroglyphics.

The Black Country: Matthew Sweet hears about the way the region has been depicted in writing which seeks to celebrate the local accent.

Language, the Victorians, and Us: Greg Tate, Louise Creechan, Lynda Mugglestone and Simon Rennie.

And Arts and Ideas New Thinking podcast episodes on research into

City Talk: Mapping the accents of Greater Manchester with a camper van and a laptop.

Asylum and psychiatric institutions, obsession and heroin, and imagining a new self are explored in the writing of Anna Kavan (1901-1968). With the republication of her novel Ice, her reputation is now on the rise. Matthew Sweet is joined by critic and author Chris Power, Carole Sweeney, who researches experimental fiction, Sally Marlow, who studies the psychology of addiction and is Radio 3’s researcher in residence, and the literary scholar Victoria Walker, who founded the Anna Kavan Society.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You might also be interested in an episode of Words and Music curated by Sally Marlow exploring ideas about addiction and intoxication being broadcast in January.

Free Thinking has a playlist called Prose, Poetry and Drama where you can find plenty of conversations about other authors including John Cowper Powys, Sylvia Plath, Claude McKay, ETA Hoffmann

In her short life, the 18th century African American woman, Phillis Wheatley was a slave, a prodigy, a poet and a celebrity. As a child, she was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and transported to Boston, where she was sold as a domestic slave to the Wheatleys, a prominent family of merchants. She was named Phillis, after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic. Unusually, the Wheatleys took an interest in her education and within a few years, she was producing exquisite poetry. Since no one in Boston would publish the work of an enslaved black woman, she was taken to London, and in 1773 her remarkable first book of poetry was published. She was praised and feted by the literati and became a celebrated poet. But her success was shortlived. After returning to Boston, she was freed, but died in poverty and obscurity at the age of 31.

In this, the 250th anniversary of the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the historian Christienna Fryar looks back on an extraordinary life and examines why, Phillis Wheatley is still largely unknown, on both sides of the Atlantic. She's joined by Xine Yao, lecturer in American Literature at University College London, who's also a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker; the historian Montaz Marché, a PhD student researching the lives of black women in 18th century London; Brigitte Fielder, Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Ade Solanke, a British-Nigerian writer, who wrote a play, Phillis in London, depicting Wheatley’s time in London.

Producer: Jonathan Hallewell

There are more conversations like this on the Free Thinking programme website, which has a collection called Exploring Black History: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t2qbp

There is more information on Adeola Solanke's play, Phillis in London, at https://www.sporastories.com/

Insecurity, sexuality and bliss are amongst the topics explored in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923). Having left a New Zealand suburb she came to England aged 19 and made friends with the Bloomsbury set, meeting writers like Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence. A new biography by Claire Harman uses ten stories to tell the story of Mansfield's life and writing. One of her admirers was the Canadian author Mavis Gallant (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014) who spent much of her writing life in France. Laurence Scott and Kirsty Gunn join Claire Harman and Shahidha Bari to explore what these authors have to tell us about the art of short story writing.

Claire Harman's biography is called All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

Producer: Ruth Watts

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find a collection of discussions about Prose, Poetry and Drama https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

The anti-colonial leader killed 50 years ago (20th January) was a poet, influenced by Marxism and led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. António Tomás, José Lingna Nafafé and New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza join Rana Mitter to explore his life, thinking and legacy.

José Lingna Nafafé is Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. His work concentrates on the Black Atlantic abolitionist movement in the 17th Century and the Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora.

Alex Reza is a writer and lecturer in comparative literatures and cultures working in French, Portuguese and English at the University of Bristol. She is also a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

António Tomás is the author of several publications in Portuguese and English, namely Amílcar Cabral, the Life of a Reluctant Nationalist (2021) and In the skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (2022). He is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, at the University of Johannesburg.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You might be interested in other Free Thinking discussions exploring Black History gathered into a collection on the programme website and all available to listen on BBC Sounds and to download as Arts and Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t2qbp

A blind woman who temporarily regains her sight is the heroine of Wilkie Collins’ 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch. Matthew Sweet is joined by Clare Walker Gore, Tom Shakespeare and Tanvir Bush to discuss how Collins’ own poor health led him to write about disability and physical difference in a more nuanced way than many of his contemporaries. Apart from Lucilla Finch, who has more agency when blind than sighted, other examples include the apparently monstrous Miserrimus Dexter ('the new centaur: half-man, half-chair') in The Law and the Lady, and the shockingly moustachioed Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White.

Tanvir Bush is the author of Cull. You can also hear her discussing John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids on Free Thinking.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

How tennis stars developed in the 1920s. Historian David Berry and poet Matt Harvey talk to Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough about Centre Court, its opening in the new home of the All England Club in 1922, the styling of stars and how participation in tennis changed.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A new craze for body building and that distinctive figure of the 20th century, the hobbyist, are the topic of conversation as we continue our series of features looking at cultural life in 1922. John Gallagher considers what the expansion of free time in the 1920s meant for leisure and the things people did for fun. He is joined by historian Elsa Richardson and literary scholar Jon Day.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Find more discussions about culture and the arts of the 1920s in a collection called Modernism on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh