About the Film

This arts and humanities research film was made for Durham University’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Celebration, held on Thursday 23 June 2022, an annual event bringing together academic staff, postgraduate researchers and professional services colleagues from across the Faculty to reflect on the reach and impact of research being carried out there. Fourteen academics agreed to be interviewed for the project, each asked a version of the same question: why do the humanities matter, and what does that look like in the work you’re actually doing right now.

Dr Anna Rowlands: Why Humanities Research Matters Now

Dr Anna Rowlands, Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice, argues that the humanities matter more now than they have for a long time, precisely because questions of identity, culture and belonging have become newly politicised and are now part of everyday political conversation. That gives humanities researchers, in her view, a genuine role in helping people understand critically what kind of moment we’re actually living through.

Her own research bears that out directly. She leads a project built on 900 fieldwork interviews across three countries, extending into Germany, looking at how religion and creative writing shape the experience of people forced to move. One strand looks specifically at the role of poetry in refugee communities, working with a poet in residence who himself grew up in a refugee camp in Palestine and now teaches at the University of Oxford. Together they ran poetry writing workshops in urban refugee camps, not as a therapeutic response to trauma, but as a way of building an archive and, in her words, a politics of resistance: writing is often the last form of expression left to people when everything else has been taken away.

Professor Francis Watson: Unmasking a Modern Fake

Professor Francis Watson’s work on early Christian gospels has included an unexpected sideline: unmasking modern forgeries dressed up as ancient texts. One case, the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, was presented as a passage from a lost letter written by the genuinely historical second-century figure Clement of Alexandria, copied into the back of a book in what looked like a seventeenth-century Greek hand. It made some striking claims about Jesus, and it was convincing enough to fool a number of reputable scholars for a long time before it came to be recognised, almost universally now, as a very clever fake from the 1950s.

Watson has examined a second, similarly disputed gospel fragment too, and his conclusion in both cases is much the same: these forgeries tend to tell us more about modern anxieties and preoccupations than they do about anything genuinely ancient.

Dr George Gazis: What Icarus Tells Us About Being Human

Dr George Gazis researches concepts of death and the afterlife in antiquity, on the theory that we can’t really understand what life is until we understand what people have feared about death. Human beings, he argues, have struggled with the idea of mortality since we first became aware of it, in a way that appears to set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, and much of what humanity has built since has been either a destructive or constructive response to that fear.

He points to the myth of Icarus as an example of a much older instinct: the urge to transcend our own limits. Flying was the ancient version of that dream; now, he suggests, it’s things like the metaverse. Looking at how ancient societies dealt with the fact of death, institutionalising a kind of substitute immortality through marriage, law and procreation, tells us something real about how social norms develop, including the ones we’re living inside right now.

Dr Amanda Herbert: The Pirate Who Brought Chocolate to Britain

Dr Amanda Herbert’s research turned up an unexpected story behind a very familiar drink. The first person to popularise chocolate in Britain, she explains, had been a pirate in his youth, sailing the Caribbean with a secret passion for botany. On retiring to England he took up work on a large estate’s garden and wrote up his own record of the plants he’d encountered abroad, including chocolate, a recipe he had learned directly from First Nations people in the Caribbean, which he recommended as a drink suitable and strengthening for anyone.

Herbert’s wider point is that most people today don’t think historically or culturally about where their food actually comes from. It’s part of what’s behind a current Durham project connecting local restaurateurs and culinary professionals with students digging into the archives, so that diners can learn something of the real journey their food took to reach the plate in front of them, including the knowledge and labour of First Nations people, and of enslaved Black people, without which many of these foods would never have reached European tables at all.

A Wider Conversation

Ten further academics took part in the same project, from medieval manuscript studies to music psychology, translation and interpreting, moral injury among drone pilots, and the history of far-right movements in Britain, each answering the same question in their own way. Taken together, the interviews offer a genuinely wide-angle view of what humanities research at Durham actually looks like, up close.