Free Thinking 2017

Episode

Title

First
Broadcast

Comments

Monks, Models And Medieval Time

20170320

The ruined priory of Tynemouth nestles on a Northumbrian clifftop, staring out at the fog and foam of the North Sea. In the 14th century it was a proving ground - and occasional prison camp - for monks from the wealthy mother monastery of St Albans. But the monks here didn't just isolate themselves, pray and complain about the food (though they did do those things). They also studied astronomy. Writing treatises, computing tables and designing new instruments, they contemplated the nature of a divinely-wound clockwork universe.

New Generation Thinker Seb Falk from the University of Cambridge brings to life a world where science and religion went hand-in-hand, where monks loved their gadgets, and where a wooden disc, a brass ring and some silk threads were all you needed to model the motions of the stars.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Seb Falk discusses the 14th-century monks who studied astronomy.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Alexander The Great's Lost City

20170321

New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson with the story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram airbase, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks. For centuries, it was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1832, it was discovered by the unlikeliest person imaginable: a ragged British con-man called Charles Masson, on the run from a death sentence. Today, Alexander's lost civilization is lost again. And Masson? For his next trick, he accidentally started the most disastrous war of the nineteenth century.

Edmund Richardson's Essay tells the story of the liar and the lost city, of how the unlikeliest people can change history.

Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

The story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram air base, Afghanistan.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

In The Shadows Of Biafra

20170322

New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike from Manchester Metropolitan University considers images of war and ghosts of the past.

News reports of the Biafran war (1967-1970), with their depictions of starving children, created images of Africa which have become imprinted. Biafra endured a campaign of heavy shelling, creating a constant stream of refugees out of fallen areas as territory was lost to Nigeria.

Within Igbo culture specific rites and rituals need to be performed when a person dies. To die and be buried 'abroad', away from one's ancestral home or to not be buried properly, impedes the transition to the realm of the ancestors. Louisa Egbunike explores the legacy of the Biafran war and considers the image of those spirits unable to journey to the next realm, and left to roam the earth.

Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike explores the legacy of the Biafran war.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

The British Writer And The Refugee

20170323

New Generation Thinker Katherine Cooper looks at literary refugees in the Second World War and tells the untold story of the work done by British writers to save their European colleagues. She shows how H G WELLS, Rebecca West and JB Priestley became intertwined with the lives of writers fleeing persecution on the continent. Katherine peeps into drawing rooms, visits the archives of PEN, scrutinises the correspondence and draws on the fiction of key literary figures to explore crucial allegiances formed in wartime London. Why did these British writers believe that by saving Europe's literary voices they were saving Europe itself?

Katherine Cooper is Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year and then work with them to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Katherine Cooper on the work by British writers to save colleagues in Europe during WWII.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Russia's Sacred Ruins

20170324

New Generation Thinker Victoria Donovan from the University of St Andrews explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia and asks why the atheist Communist regime was prepared to spend millions on the restoration of religious architecture.

On encountering the war-charred ruins of historic Novgorod in 1944, the Soviet historian Dmitry Likhachev mourned Russia's transformation into a 'graveyard without headstones'. Yet, just 20 years later, the town had risen from the ashes; even the onion-domed churches had been restored. How did this happen?

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Victoria Donovan explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Faith, Fire And The Family

20170327

From 1941 to 1968 Catherine Fletcher's grandfather Donald Hudson was a missionary in India. Catherine tells his story during those turbulent years and reflects on the way British people with family history in India understand that past - in this the anniversary year of the end of colonial India.

Originally from Yorkshire, Donald Hudson arrived in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, to find a city in chaos amid communal riots. He stayed for two years and then moved to one of the most significant British missionary institutions in India, the Baptist Missionary College at Serampore, outside Kolkata, where he was based through famine and then Partition in 1948.

Catherine Fletcher is a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker from Swansea University.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Catherine Fletcher on the story of her grandfather, a missionary in India.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

The Magic Years

20170328

Matthew Smith, a New Generation Thinker, goes deep into the American Psychiatric Association archives, where lies an unpublished historical manuscript entitled The Magic Years. Written during the early 1970s, it eulogised the giant strides of post-war American psychiatry made in this period of hope and promise when even the complete eradication of mental illness was thought possible. As a medical historian Matthew argues that, while psychiatrists today might dismiss The Magic Years - and the science behind it - as misguided or nave, it actually has much to teach us.

New Generation Thinker Matthew Smith is from the University of Strathclyde.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Medical historian Matthew Smith explores 1970s US psychiatry: a time of hope and promise.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

England's First European

20170329

John Gallagher, New Generation Thinker, marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of what might be the greatest, but littlest-known, book of travels of early modern England. Fynes Moryson was a young fellow of a Cambridge college when he left on a journey to Jerusalem and back. His monumental book 'An Itinerary' is a colourful, funny and touching account of one man's curious journey, meeting bandits in northern Germany, disguising himself as a Catholic Italian in order to see Rome and burying his brother's body by the side of the road on his return.

John Gallagher's Essay brings to life one of the great travel accounts of any period which includes detailed instructions to English travellers on how best to disguise themselves when travelling through Catholic Europe.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Exploring Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary, a European travel book from the early 17th century

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Creating Modern India

20170330

New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University, on the creation of modern India.

How did a modernist style develop in India between the 1900s and the 1950s? Preti Taneja, who grew up in Letchworth Garden City, traces the way the Garden City Movement inspired the work of Edwin Lutyens in his reshaping of her parents' New Delhi. The first generation of post-Independence architects built on this legacy, drawing also from Le Corbusier, who designed India's first post-partition planned city, Chandigarh, with its famous 'open hand' sculpture; and from Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, to create some of the most iconic public buildings across India today.

In art, something similar was happening: painter MF Hussain and a group of fellow radicals wanting to break away from Indian traditions and make an international statement. They formed The Progressive Artists Group in December 1947, just months after Partition.

Preti Taneja's essay explores this cultural re-imagining of the new nation, when architects and artists tried to come to terms with India's political and aesthetic history, looking forward to a future they could design, build and express themselves: one that was meant to shape human behaviour for the better.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Preti Taneja on the architectural links between Letchworth Garden City and New Delhi.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Killing Time In Imperial Japan

20170331

Christopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of 'time' was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless 'clock time' of new factories and businesses and the 'leisure time' of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechanical.

New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding contemplates the way these attempts at escape became useful fodder for Japan's militarist ideologues - working for the Emperor, his palace tucked away amongst the trees in central Tokyo, whose own sense of time stretched back into myth and from there into divinity.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Christopher Harding discusses Tokyo in the early 20th century.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Episodes

Episode	Title	First Broadcast	Comments
01	Monks, Models And Medieval Time	20170320	The ruined priory of Tynemouth nestles on a Northumbrian clifftop, staring out at the fog and foam of the North Sea. In the 14th century it was a proving ground - and occasional prison camp - for monks from the wealthy mother monastery of St Albans. But the monks here didn't just isolate themselves, pray and complain about the food (though they did do those things). They also studied astronomy. Writing treatises, computing tables and designing new instruments, they contemplated the nature of a divinely-wound clockwork universe. New Generation Thinker Seb Falk from the University of Cambridge brings to life a world where science and religion went hand-in-hand, where monks loved their gadgets, and where a wooden disc, a brass ring and some silk threads were all you needed to model the motions of the stars. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Jacqueline Smith. Seb Falk discusses the 14th-century monks who studied astronomy. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
02	Alexander The Great's Lost City	20170321	New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson with the story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram airbase, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks. For centuries, it was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1832, it was discovered by the unlikeliest person imaginable: a ragged British con-man called Charles Masson, on the run from a death sentence. Today, Alexander's lost civilization is lost again. And Masson? For his next trick, he accidentally started the most disastrous war of the nineteenth century. Edmund Richardson's Essay tells the story of the liar and the lost city, of how the unlikeliest people can change history. Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Jacqueline Smith. The story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram air base, Afghanistan. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
03	In The Shadows Of Biafra	20170322	New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike from Manchester Metropolitan University considers images of war and ghosts of the past. News reports of the Biafran war (1967-1970), with their depictions of starving children, created images of Africa which have become imprinted. Biafra endured a campaign of heavy shelling, creating a constant stream of refugees out of fallen areas as territory was lost to Nigeria. Within Igbo culture specific rites and rituals need to be performed when a person dies. To die and be buried 'abroad', away from one's ancestral home or to not be buried properly, impedes the transition to the realm of the ancestors. Louisa Egbunike explores the legacy of the Biafran war and considers the image of those spirits unable to journey to the next realm, and left to roam the earth. Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Zahid Warley. New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike explores the legacy of the Biafran war. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
04	The British Writer And The Refugee	20170323	New Generation Thinker Katherine Cooper looks at literary refugees in the Second World War and tells the untold story of the work done by British writers to save their European colleagues. She shows how H G WELLS, Rebecca West and JB Priestley became intertwined with the lives of writers fleeing persecution on the continent. Katherine peeps into drawing rooms, visits the archives of PEN, scrutinises the correspondence and draws on the fiction of key literary figures to explore crucial allegiances formed in wartime London. Why did these British writers believe that by saving Europe's literary voices they were saving Europe itself? Katherine Cooper is Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year and then work with them to turn their research into radio. Producer: Torquil MacLeod. Katherine Cooper on the work by British writers to save colleagues in Europe during WWII. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
05	Russia's Sacred Ruins	20170324	New Generation Thinker Victoria Donovan from the University of St Andrews explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia and asks why the atheist Communist regime was prepared to spend millions on the restoration of religious architecture. On encountering the war-charred ruins of historic Novgorod in 1944, the Soviet historian Dmitry Likhachev mourned Russia's transformation into a 'graveyard without headstones'. Yet, just 20 years later, the town had risen from the ashes; even the onion-domed churches had been restored. How did this happen? Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall. Victoria Donovan explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
06	Faith, Fire And The Family	20170327	From 1941 to 1968 Catherine Fletcher's grandfather Donald Hudson was a missionary in India. Catherine tells his story during those turbulent years and reflects on the way British people with family history in India understand that past - in this the anniversary year of the end of colonial India. Originally from Yorkshire, Donald Hudson arrived in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, to find a city in chaos amid communal riots. He stayed for two years and then moved to one of the most significant British missionary institutions in India, the Baptist Missionary College at Serampore, outside Kolkata, where he was based through famine and then Partition in 1948. Catherine Fletcher is a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker from Swansea University. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall. Catherine Fletcher on the story of her grandfather, a missionary in India. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
07	The Magic Years	20170328	Matthew Smith, a New Generation Thinker, goes deep into the American Psychiatric Association archives, where lies an unpublished historical manuscript entitled The Magic Years. Written during the early 1970s, it eulogised the giant strides of post-war American psychiatry made in this period of hope and promise when even the complete eradication of mental illness was thought possible. As a medical historian Matthew argues that, while psychiatrists today might dismiss The Magic Years - and the science behind it - as misguided or nave, it actually has much to teach us. New Generation Thinker Matthew Smith is from the University of Strathclyde. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. Producer: Zahid Warley. Medical historian Matthew Smith explores 1970s US psychiatry: a time of hope and promise. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
08	England's First European	20170329	John Gallagher, New Generation Thinker, marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of what might be the greatest, but littlest-known, book of travels of early modern England. Fynes Moryson was a young fellow of a Cambridge college when he left on a journey to Jerusalem and back. His monumental book 'An Itinerary' is a colourful, funny and touching account of one man's curious journey, meeting bandits in northern Germany, disguising himself as a Catholic Italian in order to see Rome and burying his brother's body by the side of the road on his return. John Gallagher's Essay brings to life one of the great travel accounts of any period which includes detailed instructions to English travellers on how best to disguise themselves when travelling through Catholic Europe. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Fiona McLean. Exploring Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary, a European travel book from the early 17th century Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
09	Creating Modern India	20170330	New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University, on the creation of modern India. How did a modernist style develop in India between the 1900s and the 1950s? Preti Taneja, who grew up in Letchworth Garden City, traces the way the Garden City Movement inspired the work of Edwin Lutyens in his reshaping of her parents' New Delhi. The first generation of post-Independence architects built on this legacy, drawing also from Le Corbusier, who designed India's first post-partition planned city, Chandigarh, with its famous 'open hand' sculpture; and from Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, to create some of the most iconic public buildings across India today. In art, something similar was happening: painter MF Hussain and a group of fellow radicals wanting to break away from Indian traditions and make an international statement. They formed The Progressive Artists Group in December 1947, just months after Partition. Preti Taneja's essay explores this cultural re-imagining of the new nation, when architects and artists tried to come to terms with India's political and aesthetic history, looking forward to a future they could design, build and express themselves: one that was meant to shape human behaviour for the better. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Fiona McLean. Preti Taneja on the architectural links between Letchworth Garden City and New Delhi. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
10	Killing Time In Imperial Japan	20170331	Christopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of 'time' was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless 'clock time' of new factories and businesses and the 'leisure time' of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechanical. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding contemplates the way these attempts at escape became useful fodder for Japan's militarist ideologues - working for the Emperor, his palace tucked away amongst the trees in central Tokyo, whose own sense of time stretched back into myth and from there into divinity. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall. Christopher Harding discusses Tokyo in the early 20th century. Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.