The scheme is a nationwide search for the brightest minds who have the potential to share their cutting edge academic ideas through radio and television.

 

 

The 2015 New Generation Thinkers are:

Catherine Fletcher, University of Sheffield
Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe, specialising in cultures of politics and diplomacy. She’s recently worked on the Medici and Tudor courts. Her research also explores history in popular culture: at heritage sites, in film and TV, and online.

Sam Goodman, Bournemouth University
Sam Goodman is engaged in research on medicine and British national identity from 1750 to the present day. He has written on topics including the connection between James Bond and the Cold War pharmaceutical industry, emergency nursing in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the popularity of medical-based literature, television and film in contemporary culture.

Daniel Lee, University of Oxford
Daniel Lee’s research examines the experiences of Jews in France and in French North Africa during the Second World War. He will shortly begin a new project that explores Jewish pimping and prostitution in the Mediterranean, 1880-1940.

Peter Mackay, University of St Andrews
Peter Mackay is working on an anthology of transgressive Gaelic poetry over the last 500 years. His research interests include Scottish and Irish poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries and their place within ‘English’ literature.

Joe Moshenska, University of Cambridge
Joe Moshenska has worked on the importance of touch in religious and early scientific debates, the philosophical history of tickling and the reception of Chinese medicine in England. As a way of exploring the tastes, smells and textures of the period he is researching the 17th-century figure of Sir Kenelm Digby, a traveller who collected recipes from around the world.

Nadine Muller, Liverpool John Moores University
Nadine Muller researches the widow in British literature and culture from the 19th century to the present day. She has worked on projects exploring the Victorians in the 21st century, and on women and belief.

Kylie Murray, University of Oxford
Kylie Murray explores pre-Reformation Scottish literature, books, and culture. She has recently discovered Scotland’s oldest non-biblical manuscript, dating to the 12th century, and fresh evidence which suggests that James I of Scotland was the author of Scotland’s first dream-poem.

Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool
Sandeep Parmar is a poet and is currently writing a novel about the Green Revolution in India. Her research explores modernist women writers including Nancy Cunard, Hope Mirrlees and Mina Loy.

Danielle Thom, V&A
Danielle Thom researches connections between sculpture and print culture in 18th century Britain. She has recently explored the influence of Neoclassical nude figures on erotic prints, and is writing a book on the sculptor Joseph Nollekens.

Clare Walker Gore, University of Cambridge
Clare Walker Gore researches disability in Victorian literature, especially novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, and the biographies of the period, exploring the ways in which the lives of disabled people were portrayed.

The 10 winners, the fifth group of New Generation Thinkers, will spend one year working with Radio 3 presenters and producers to develop their ideas into broadcasts. They will make their debut appearance on Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme Free Thinking on successive editions beginning with a special edition of the programme recorded at Hay Festival and broadcast on Thursday 28 May featuring four of the winners. All of the New Generation Thinkers will be invited to make regular contributions to the network throughout the year.

Each New Generation Thinker will have an opportunity to develop their ideas for television, making short films for BBC Arts Online. A selection of short films made by the 2014 intake are available at bbc.co.uk/arts.