August Overview: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

3 August 2020

For the month of August, the TORCH team will be looking back on the successes so far of the TORCH Goes Digital Campaign and the Big Tent! Live Event series – a programme of interdisciplinary research-fuelled live-streamed discussions. Over the past months, with both the campaign and the event series, we continued to support research and community engagement, but in brand-new and innovative ways which we will continue as we move into the next academic year.

Each week for TORCH Goes Digital, we focus on a different theme and prepare a schedule of new and curated content working with the vast wealth of material created by researchers at the University of Oxford and beyond, with specialists and practitioners in a range of fields, and with members of the public. Previous themes have included AI and the Humanities, to Medical Humanities and Journeys.

Text reads: Looking Backwards, looking forwards, galaxy background, person on laptop

The  pinnacles of each week’s content are our weekly digital events which form the Big Tent! Live Events online event series as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. The first instalment of the series took us to the end of July 2020 and included 17 wide-ranging and fascinating sessions that covered the past, the future, and some of the biggest questions of the current day.  The full first instalment of the Big Tent! Live Events series is available to re-watch on the TORCH YouTube channel now.

The second instalment of the Big Tent! Live Events series continues from September 2020, with a line up including: Discovering Delius with Prof Dan Grimley, Dr Jo Bullivant (Music) and Villiers Quartet; Talking Afropean with author Johny Pitts, Prof Elleke Boehmer (English), and Dr Simokai Chigudu (Oxford Department of International Development); and a performance by Nadine Benjamin (English National Opera Soprano) and acclaimed pianist Nicole Panizza. Look out for more details of our upcoming Big Tent! Live Events in our newsletter and on our website, and watch the events live on the TORCH YouTube channel.