New Generation Thinkers: Turning ideas into television

14 April 2015

Each year a group of young academics, who have the potential to turn their ground-breaking ideas into sensational broadcasting, are selected by producers from BBC Radio 3 and BBC Arts, together with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The scheme receives hundreds of applications from academics at the start of their careers who are passionate about communicating modern scholarship to a wider audience.

The 2014 New Generation Thinkers were announced at a special event at the Hay Festival, as part of the partnership between BBC Arts and the annual literary and arts festival.

This current group of New Generation Thinkers has been working with BBC Arts to develop ideas for television, having already appeared on BBC Radio 3 and at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage in Gateshead.

In the ten films below, the New Generation Thinkers reveal some of the stories they are passionate about.

Scribbles in the Margins
Tom Charlton deciphers marginalia – annotations in the margins of books and wonders what it tells us about readers and writers
Votes for Women! Yours for a Penny!
Naomi Paxton on the suffrage newspapers which spread the word in surprising places and the experiences of the women who sold them
The Barbershop in the 18th Century
Alun Withey braves the barber’s blade to tell the story of the development of the domestic razor and the changing fortunes of the barbershop
The Quiet Making of Monsters
Alasdair Cochrane examines the way humans have shaped the bodies and minds of the animals around us, and the effect that has had - on both them and us
Treason, Trials and Tribulations
Sophie Coulombeau asks what the treason trials of 1794 tell us about Britain’s supposed attachment to freedom of speech
Inside Animal Minds
Have you ever wondered what’s going on inside your dog’s head? Will Abberley traces the evolution of animal psychology from Charles Darwin onwards
A Shoddy History
What’s the origin of the word ‘shoddy’? Joanna Cohen explains how a cheap fabric from Yorkshire came to play a part in the American Civil War
Mr and Mrs Disraeli
Daisy Hay visits Hughenden Manor to tell the story of the improbable marriage between Benjamin Disraeli and Mary Anne Lewis
Pining for Nostalgia
Historian Tiffany Watt-Smith explores the pleasures of nostalgia and looks back to a time when it could still prove a deadly affliction
Romeo and Juliet in the Balkans
Preti Taneja looks at the significance of Shakespeare’s play in the Balkans, from a Serbo-Croat translation to a production staged jointly by the national theatres of Serbia and Kosovo.