Free Thinking

In 2017, Sacha Dench, founder of Conservation Without Borders, flew the 4,000 mile migration route of Bewick swans from Arctic Russia to the UK in a paraglider. Drawing on her experience, the ‘Human Swan’ talks about the birds that have become symbolic of love, beauty, and mystery. Dance critic Sarah Crompton talks about the numerous productions of Swan Lake that she has seen and why the ballet has become such a staple of the repertoire.. Presenter Hetta Howes.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Since 1983, Spike Lee's production company has produced over 35 films. His 1989 film Do The Right Thing was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in the Academy Awards. Best Picture that year went to Driving Miss Daisy. 30 years on Do the Right Thing has been re-released in cinemas in the UK and BlacKkKlansman is now out on DVD. It won Best Adapted Screenplay in the 2019 Academy Awards where Best Picture went to Green Book.

Taking their inspiration from the Russian and Finnish composers of 2019 Prom 22, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and an audience at Imperial College London hear from Mythos Podcaster Nicole Schmidt and the musical scholar and New Generation Thinker Leah Broad about the role of legends and landscapes in north European music. They'll be talking trolls and suncream, the political dimension of being folk or not folk enough, and the peculiar potency of midsummer with its emphasis on fertility, creation and destruction and unusual purple light.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC for early career academics and future broadcasters.

1996 was the summer of Woodstock, the moon landing, the Beatles’ Abbey Road and a gathering of beat poets at the Royal Albert Hall. Author and New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja is joined by poets Rachael Allen and Jacob Polley to take an un-nostalgic look at how the Sixties appear now. We'll also hear them perform some of their own poetry. The discussion is inspired by the programme for the Proms concert for Prom 11 The Sound of a Summer. For 30 days following the concert you can hear the music here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00070rj or find it on the Proms or BBC Radio 3 website.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Naomi Paxton discusses the latest science and clinical practice with psychologist Dr Daisy Fancourt, a psychologist and epidemiologist who studies the relationship between music and health, and Dr Simon Opher, a GP in Gloucestershire who prescribes music and other cultural practices for his patients.

As the Proms marks the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landings, Professor Richard Wiseman, author of ‘Shoot For The Moon’ and Melanie Vandenbrouck the lead curator of the Moon exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich join Rana Mitter to discuss the legacy of the Apollo 11 mission.

Matthew Sweet looks at book frontispieces, dust jackets, footnotes, indexes and marginalia with Dennis Duncan, and explores a research project investigating difficulty in culture, with Professor Sarah Knight and Dr Hannah Crawforth.

Plus, New Generation Thinker Jeffrey Howard discusses hate speech.

Jeffrey Howard lectures in political theory at University College London and is a 2019 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put academic research on the radio.

On Difficulty: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/research/research-projects/on-difficulty-in-early-modern-literature

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Anne McElvoy and new ways of understanding post-war Germany and Austria through history, film and literature with Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Adam Scovell and Tom Smith.

Florian Huber Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself explores a little understood wave of suicides across Germany towards the end of the Third Reich

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Hetta Howes learns that the absence of dental floss in the Neolithic era has left archaeologists with invaluable information about how our ancestors lived and where they travelled to. While piles of pig bones near Stonehenge reveal a communal society that used feasting as a form of negotiation. Penny Bickle and Jim Leary, who both lecture in the University of York's Department of Archaeology, uncover their findings from research projects in the Vale of Pewsey, Alsace and Stonehenge. Penny's current project is 'Counter Culture: investigating Neolithic social diversity', while Jim has been working on 'Neolithic Pilgrimage? Rivers, mobility and monumentality in the land between Avebury and Stonehenge'. This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language uses corpus linguistics, a statistical method that collates data on how frequently words are used and how often particular words appear alongside each other, to investigate Shakespeare's work. And the results are startling. John Gallagher talks to Professor Jonathan Culpeper and Professor Alison Findlay, both from Lancaster University, about how the project works, and the light it's shedding both on how Shakespeare worked as a writer, and on the development of the English language in Shakespeare's day.

This podcast was made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.