Geesteswetenschappen

Grief is not only for the dead. When we are unable to honour other profound losses, we become strangers to ourselves

- by Derek van Zoonen

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A very modern conception of womanhood: in the Jazz Age paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, women were bold, free and stylish

- by Aeon Video

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From Colombia to Syria, I’ve seen that capitalist logic can’t help to rebuild postwar countries but cooperatives can

- by Azize Aslan

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Tribologists study friction: what happens when things rub together. It’s indispensable, from the wheel to the paths of stars

- by Jennifer R Vail

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What happened when people in Bhutan, the last country on Earth without television, were allowed to watch it in 1999?

- by Aeon Video

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CD – Gruenrekorder

The SoundLapse project, promoted by the Universidad Austral de Chile, was born with the aim of connecting the characteristics of local fauna with the global issues related to the environment, culture, and sustainability. In this context, through →

The invisible intrusion of systems that quantify and record our faces has faced some boycott since the introduction of the first surveillance cameras, with people using masks, garments, and make-up techniques. Jip van Leeuwenstein’s sophisticated mask (“Surveillance Exclusion”) is a →

Open Humanities Pres, book, ISBN 978-1785421433, English, 416 pages, 2025, UK

History requires context to connect facts and events, and art history equally needs context to understand art movements, artists, and artworks. This →

CD – PAN

The nine tracks Florian Hecker chose for Natural Selection reflect an approach based on highly specific methods of synthesis. Unlike previous works, the album’s unity is not conveyed through a linear narrative, but it rather develops as →

The devastating assault still underway in the Gaza Strip has produced harrowing images that have flooded our eyes, but in such abundance that they now seem almost normalised. Israeli artist and architect Eyal Landman, while completing his master’s degree in →

Nation’s favourite play makes London comeback amid renewed debate about future of humanities teaching

The History Boys is to return to the West End for the first time in two decades, with a warning from its director of an “almost terminal decline” in humanities teaching in state schools.

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Alan Bennett’s play at the National Theatre and its 2006 film adaptation, said the themes of education, history and the value of literature for its own sake felt especially relevant amid renewed debate about what schools should teach.

Seventy years after CP Snow warned of estrangement between the sciences and arts, breadth in education should be encouraged

After the playwright Tom Stoppard died last year, one of the most striking tributes to his work came from a clinical scientist. Michael Baum explained in the British Medical Journal how, in the interval of a 1993 performance of Arcadia, he experienced an epiphany. Thomasina Coverly’s attempt to plot the equation for a rose prompted him to realise that chaos theory was the best way to explain breast cancer’s pattern of recurrence. It was, he wrote, “the bond that links the arts and the sciences as one enterprise rather than the contents of two silos”.

Mr Baum was not the first person to celebrate the bridging of this gap. CP Snow famously criticised the incuriosity of “literary intellectuals” about technology in his essay The Two Cultures (later turned into a lecture and a book). Whether or not this was justified at the time, many literary intellectuals besides Stoppard have since taken a close interest in science; Richard Holmes’s latest book, about the influence of evolutionary theory on Tennyson, is just one example. But the split between the humanities and sciences remains pronounced, and will be evident when this year’s A-level results are released on Thursday.

Prof Abbie Garrington reflects on an interview with the physicist Laura Grego about the battle for our skies

Where are the arts and humanities in current debates about space research? The physicist Laura Grego tells us we “have to be aware of what is happening in space”, that we should probe Elon Musk’s potential “appropriation” of space via satellite, and that our spacefaring era raises questions about our stewardship of the Earth for future generations, and the significance of human culture (‘Most people don’t know we’ve set up a doomsday system’: physicist Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies, 20 July).

Meanwhile, your interviewer Aida Edemariam notes both the Artemis mission’s potential to inspire, and the relegation of most of us to an audience agog, with no say in civilisational decisions about major space missions.

Literature, the arts and social sciences must not be sacrificed as higher education funding is squeezed

“I ask nothing more from you than to do what you have been doing. Go out into the fray and keep reading,” was Percival Everett’s advice when he addressed graduating students at Wesleyan university in Connecticut last summer. Fitting words from a prize-winning novelist, at a time when gambling has become a more common leisure activity in the US than reading a book. In the UK, too, concerns are growing about the decline of reading, partly due to ubiquitous screen-based entertainment. Last week, parliament’s education committee called for the National Year of Reading to be extended to a decade, to inculcate the habit in children and young people.

All academic disciplines use books to convey information, but for literature and the humanities more widely, they are an indispensable currency. As the 2026 graduation season draws to a close, and robes and mortarboards are put away for another year, there is growing anger that these subjects are under attack from university administrations looking for ways to save money – while ministers look away.

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Exclusive: Prof Evelyn Welch, vice-chancellor of Bristol University, believes her daughter’s success shows value of arts education

One of Britain’s leading university vice-chancellors has described sweeping cuts to arts and humanities across the sector as “absolutely tragic”, citing her famous daughter as an example of the value of a creative arts education.

Prof Evelyn Welch, the vice-chancellor of Bristol University and incoming chair of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, is the mother of Florence Welch, the singer-songwriter from Florence + the Machine.