Bedrooms

From sleeping space to work space? Matthew Sweet is joined by historian of emotions Tiffany Watt Smith, expert on the suffragettes and a history of sex Fern Riddell, author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World Laurence Scott and Tudor historian Joe Moshenska.

Matthew Sweet's guests recording in their bedrooms are all New Generation Thinkers, which now has 100 early career academics on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.

Fern Riddell's books include Death in Ten Minutes Kitty Marion: Activist, Arsonist, Suffragette; The Victorian Guide to Sex. She presents the history channel podcast Not What You Thought You Knew.
Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune. She is director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.
Laurence Scott has written Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and was a winner of the Jerwood Prize.
Joe Moshenska is the author of A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby and Iconoclasm as Child’s Play. He teaches at the University of Oxford and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary about Milton's Paradise Lost.

You can find more information about the New Generation Thinkers scheme on the website of the AHRC https://ahrc.ukri.org/
and a playlist of discussions, essays and short features showcasing the different research topics of New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn
From beer to Vegetarian pioneers, dams in Pakistan to gangs in Glasgow, disabled characters in Dickens to remembering Partition, the Japanese Stonehenge to a Medici prince.

You can also find Professor Russell Foster giving the Free Thinking Festival Lecture about sleep habits https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hz9yw

Producer: Luke Mulhall