Free Thinking

Mary Beard, Homi Bhabha and Seán Williams join Shahidha Bari to look at the etiquette of talks on zoom and the history of lectures. Lecturing someone can be a negative: you’re patronising or boring or telling them what to think. And yet, today we have TED talks, university staff are routinely recording lectures using video conferencing technology, and the history of thought is a history of persuasive speakers setting out their ideas before audiences.

Dr Seán Williams is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who lectures in German intellectual and cultural history at the University of Sheffield.

Readings: Ewan Bailey

Other programmes exploring aspects of language:

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Discovering his family's Nazi links is what happened to historian Martin Puchner when he set out to explore the use of a secret language by Jewish people and other travellers in middle Europe. He joins author and language expert Michael Rosen for a conversation with Matthew Sweet about Yiddish, Rotwelsch, codes and graffiti. Plus as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day hearing about new research into the takeover of railways and civic buildings in occupied France from historians Ludivine Broch and Stephanie Hesz-Wood.

Martin Puchner's book is called The Language of Thieves. He teaches English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University

You can hear Ludivine talking to Matthew Sweet about the Gratitude Train - a project of thanks given by ordinary people in France to America for their part in World War II in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hwz9

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Lab meat and robot bees: how veganism and tech can solve the climate crisis. Anne McElvoy considers how food impacts on the environment with guests Anthony Warner, Cassandra Coburn, and Alasdair Cochrane. Plus Man Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan on his new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams – about a dying planet and a dying mother.

Anthony Warner is author of Ending Hunger: The Quest To Feed The World Without Destroying It.

Cassandra Coburn is the author of Enough: How Your Food Choices Will Save The Planet.

New Generation Thinker Alasdair Cochrane, from the University of Sheffield, is the author of Should Animals Have Political Rights?

Novelist Richard Flanagan's latest book, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, recalls the devasting fires in Australia and Tasmania, and against this dying world depicts a dying woman and her three children in a magical realist fable. In 2014 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road To The Deep North, which considered the experiences of a Far East prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma Railway.

You can find more conversations in a playlist on the Free Thinking website called Green Thinking, which includes a discussion of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring - a consideration of the soil, dams, and deserts - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

Producer: Emma Wallace

In his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argued that just societies should allow everyone to enjoy basic liberties while limiting inequality and improving the lives of the least well off. He argued that "the fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have". Anne McElvoy discusses how his case for a liberal egalitarianism has fared since.

Teresa Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Her current work focuses on equality. Her first book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration was published in 2017.

Jonathan Floyd is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on he way in which we justify political principles and reflective equilibrium - the relationship between political theory and practical reason. His book include: Political Philosophy versus History? (2011); and, Is Political Philosophy Impossible? (2017); What's the point of political philosophy? (2019).

Rupert Read is Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He has written about environmental ethics, scientism and the precautionary principle. In addition to his academic work he is an environmental activist and a former national spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. His latest book is Parents for a Future.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Eddie Glaude Jr and Nadia Owusu compare notes on the relevance of James Baldwin's writing to understanding Donald Trump's America. Michael Burleigh gives his take on populism.

Eddie S Glaude Jr has just published Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Today. His previous books include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. He is the chair at the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Harlots - the TV series about 18th century female sex workers - and translating historical fact into onscreen drama. Shahidha Bari is joined by Hallie Rubenhold, Moira Buffini, and Laura Lammasniemi in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature.

Harlots depicts the stories of working women detailed in 1757 in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. Historian Hallie Rubenhold has researched their history and Moira Buffini has translated that into TV scripts. They join Shahidha Bari alongside legal historian Laura Lammasniemi to look at the opportunities and pitfalls in creating historical dramas and what we know and don't know about the lives of sex workers in the 18th century.

Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Covent Garden Ladies is about Harris’s List and inspired the series Harlots, to which she was historical consultant. She is author of The Five: The Untold Lives of The Women Killed By Jack The Ripper, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and has also been optioned as a drama series; and she is author of Lady Worsley's Whim, which became the TV drama The Scandalous Lady W.

Scriptwriter Moira Buffini is writer of Harlots, new the film The Dig, which reimagines the events of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo, and Jane Eyre. Her plays include wonder.land, Handbagged, and Dinner.

Laura Lammasniemi is Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick Law School. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow working on a project called Narratives Of Sexual Consent In Criminal Courts, 1870-1950, which looks at how the concept of consent has been understood historically in contexts, such as rape, age of consent, and BDSM.

Producer: Emma Wallace

The devil's daughter features in a new novel from Jenni Fagan; Salena Godden's debut novel imagines Mrs Death. To discuss conjuring fear, they join Shahidha Bari alongside a pair of historians - Tabitha Stanmore, who researches magic from early modern royal courts to village life, and Daniel Ogden, who has looked at werewolf tales in ancient Greece and Rome.

Jenni Fagan's latest novel is called Luckenbooth, and her first book, The Panopticon, has been filmed. Fagan was listed by Granta as one of the 2013 Granta Best of Young British Novelists. There is more information about her drama and poetry collection, There’s A Witch In The Word Machine, on her website - https://jennifagan.com/

Salena Godden's novel is Mrs Death Misses Death, published on 28 January 2021, and she's been made a new Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. You can find more about her poetry and her radio show, Roaring 20s, on her website - http://www.salenagodden.co.uk/

Tabitha Stanmore is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, working on witchcraft.

Daniel Ogden is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His book is called The Werewolf In The Ancient World.

You might be interested in other episodes looking at witchcraft:

Author Marie Dariessecq - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000qkl

The relevance of magic in the contemporary world - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kvss

Historians Marina Warner and Susannah Lipscomb look at Witchfinding - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kckxk

Novelists Zoe Gilbert, Madeline Miller and Kirsty Logan compare notes on Charms - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q0xc

Producer: Emma Wallace

New research on female slave owners in Britain, women on Caribbean plantations, and the daughter of a prominent slave trader. Christienna Fryar talks to researchers Katie Donnington, Meleisa Ono-George, and Hannah Young.

We hear about the daughter of Thomas Hibbert - one of the most prominent slave traders in Kingston, Jamaica - and the revelation that before she died she had intended to ask her mother to free the enslaved people she held; the risks taken by women who had children with their owners and who fought for the rights of those children; and female absentee slave owners in Britain.

Katie Donnington lectures in history at London South Bank University. She has published a book called The Bonds Of Family: Slavery, Commerce And Culture In The British Atlantic World. She was an historical advisor for the BBC2 documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave-Owners (2015), and co-curated Slavery, Culture, and Collecting at the Museum of London Docklands (2018-2019).

Dr Meleisa Ono-George is at the University of Warwick. She has researched the ways in which women of African descent in Jamaica were discussed in relation to prostitution, concubinage, and other forms of sexual-economic exchange in legal, political, and cultural discourses in nineteenth century Jamaica and Britain.

Hannah Young is at the University of Southampton, where she focuses on late eighteenth and early 19th century Britain, with a particular interest in exploring the relationship between Britain and empire and absentee slave ownership.

This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI. You can find more about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90 - where you’ll find other episodes in the New Thinking strand showcasing academic research.

You might also be interested in this conversation featuring Katie and Christienna and a novelist and dramatist who have considered slavery history: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f7d5

This episode looks at the law on modern slavery: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jnmc

Producer: Emma Wallace

If, and, then are the 3 words which underpin Simon Baron-Cohen's exploration of how humans reason and develop solutions to problems in his latest book The Pattern Seekers. He joins author Michelle Gallen, film historian Andrew Roberts and Bonnie Evans whose research includes the history of childhood and developmental science in a discussion about how we understand autism presented by Matthew Sweet.

Michelle Gallen's novel Big Girl, Small Town is available now.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From spy to one of the first professional woman writers in Britain - Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer in the Restoration period. Claire Bowditch has spent years comparing different printed versions of her dramas to work out what were printer errors and how involved was Aphra Behn in the printing process. Annalisa Nicholson is researching a French salon in London created by the French noblewoman Hortense Mancini - whom Behn dedicated a play to. Is this evidence of a relationship between them? Tom Charlton looks at the politics of the period and Behn's loyalty to the Stuart crown. John Gallagher hosts the conversation.

Claire Bowditch is an AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University working on this project https://www.aphrabehn.online/front-page/

John Gallagher is a New Generation Thinker who lecture in Early Modern History at the University of Leeds https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/history/staff/774/dr-john-gallagher

This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find a playlist focused on New Research on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Ruth Watts