Projects

Being Human Festival

The Being Human festival of the humanities started life in 2014 as the first (and only) national festival dedicated entirely to humanities research. It offers a forum for people to engage with the humanities and encourages researchers across disciplines to find inspiring and fun ways to involve non-specialist audiences in their work.

I acted as Manager/ Curator of Being Human from 2014 – 2021. During that time the festival featured well over 1,000 events across the UK, as well as across the globe in places like Rome, Paris, Melbourne and Singapore.

The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury

The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury (2017-2021) was a long running multi-site installation developed by myself and folklorist, artist and maker Elizabeth Dearnley. We installed twelve bird-boxes across Bloomsbury, each containing a ‘Secret Diary’ where people recorded secrets, stories and impressions of daily life in central London. Thousands of small stories were submitted, building to an incredibly rich multi-authored palimpsest of this unique part of central London.

This project received media coverage in The i and on BBC London.

Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia

Between August 2013 and June 2014 I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia’. This formed part of the UK-wide Cultural Value Project.

Working with the Bloomsbury Festival and Age UK Camden, and with co-investigators at UCL, we designed and delivered a mobile festival experience which went into the homes of people living alone with dementia in Bloomsbury and Camden. The project developed a number of miniature ‘archives of engagement’ which acted as records of the Festival in a Box visits and provided a way of exploring their impact as well as connecting them back to events and activities in the Bloomsbury Festival itself.

A more detailed write up of the project can be found in our final report to the AHRC and in our peer-reviewed article in Dementia.