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Arts and Sciences Festival of Research
06 May 2025, 11:00 am–4:00 pm
The Arts and Sciences Festival of Research celebrates the research undertaken in the Department of Arts and Sciences. We invite colleagues, collaborators, and the general public to familiarise themselves with the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work we do, strengthen existing connections, and foster new collaborations. The festival, which includes academic talks, workshops, exhibitions, and performances, will hopefully transform research from a bureaucratic compliance process into a collegial, intellectually stimulating quest for new knowledge and new collaborations.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Dr Temenuga Trifonova
Location
-
IAS Common Ground005: Wilkins Main BuildingGower StreetLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
11am – Welcome
11:15pm – 12:15pm, MEMORY MAPPER (WALK) - Dr Duncan Hay and Dr Leah Lovett
Memory Mapper, a web toolkit that we’ve made for making interactive maps of local history.
https://www.europeanliterarylondon.org/
https://www.cityofwomenlondon.org/
https://ucl-history.memorymapper.org/
- A one hour walk through Bloomsbury/Somers Town exploring the history of the development of the area.
- A one hour ‘pinning party’ workshop in which we use Memory Mapper to upload photographs/observations collected through the walk.
- Attendees will need a laptop/tablet to upload material to Memory Mapper, and should have their phones with them to take photos.
12:45pm – 1:15pm, Primer for embodied attention - Dr Ali Baybutt
This 30-minute workshop will lay the ground for the diversity of the festival programme through non-verbal modes of relating. Starting from the body anticipates a day of listening, thinking and discussing by attending to the multiplicities of sensing first. Going slow to go quick. Pulling back to advance. Going wide to zoom in. How might we meet across different paradigms in art and science? This workshop suggests arriving the present moment with each other as a way to begin.
1:15pm - 2pm, Impostors and con artists in film and literature - Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, Dr Matthew Sperling, Dr Temenuga Trifonova
Panel on impostors in film and literature
2pm – 2:30pm, Creative Health workshop - Dr Ranjita Dhital
An interactive workshop or talk on Ranjita's creative public health work in Nepal, focusing on the first Creative Health exhibition in Nepal (Kathmandu). This public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies and is part of Ranjita’s AHRC funded study Alcohol Co-design and Community Engagement (ACE) which explores creative research approaches to reduce alcohol harm in Nepal.
2:30pm – 2:40pm BREAK
2:40pm – 3:10pm, PLAY - Dr Kirstin Smith
A short play (or part of a play), performed by 2-3 students, based on Jacques Lacan's thesis focused on a young woman, anonymised as Aimée, who attacked a well-known actress, Huguette Duflos, because of paranoid delusions. Drawing on the visual and dramaturgical conventions of silent film and theatre of the era, the play will explore the relationship between melodrama and psychoanalysis.
3:10pm-4pm, Roundtable - Interdisciplinary Research: A Way Forward - Prof Wendy Sims-Schouten
Participants: Prof Tim Jordan, Dr Rebecca Birch, Dr Ranjita Dhital and Dr Francois Sicard
Arts and Sciences Library Wall (ongoing) - Sara Wingate Gray
Using proximity technology (NFC tags/QR codes), this poster installation will provide an insight into the diverse and varied world of research produced by academics based within the Arts and Sciences Department, providing immediate open access to specific pieces of UASC research to all users. Arts & Sciences Library Wall will function as a one-stop-shop-front showcase for departmental research, bringing together in one physical location a range of UASC academic research and providing a central public point for dissemination of said research. Users point their smart devices at the poster installation and through use of proximity technology receive individual research outputs (e.g. research article text, sound, audio-visual content) downloaded onto their smart device, which can then be further shared by users themselves as they wish.
The Chemical Atlas (ongoing) - Dr Olwenn Martin
The Chemical Atlas (part of a Climate Crisis Grand Challenge small fund project), loosely based on Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas, in collaboration with Andrew Barry and Sahra Gibbon who has just launched her Embodied Inequalities in the Anthropocene tool.
The Chemical Atlas Exhibition – field photos from two (or more) case studies, one about mining in Nigeria, another from Indonesia (fieldwork by PhD students).
Research Poster (ongoing) - Helen Omand and Sarah Ferner (practice-based PhDs)
A reinterpretation of the traditional research poster.
About the Speakers
Dr Temenuga Trifonova
Associate Professor in Creative Arts and Humanities: Moving Image at UCL Arts and Sciences
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in Creative Arts and Humanities: Moving Image and co-Director of ARIEL, UCL Centre for Creative Practice Research. She is the author of the books Precarity in Western European Cinema (forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press in June 2025), Screening the Art World, The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, European Film Theory, The Image in French Philosophy, and the novels Tourist and Rewrite.
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/94394-temenuga-trifonova
Dr Kirstin Smith
Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humanities: Performance Studies at UCL Arts and Sciences
Kirstin Smith joined UCL in 2023 as a Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humanities: Performance Studies. She worked as an actor and dramaturg, and studied literature. This play comes out of a long interest in, and trouble with, psychoanalysis, feminist approaches to psychoanalysis, modernism, and political performance cultures, as well as an interest in early film (I did my undergraduate dissertation on Jacques Lacan in relation to Henry James' short fiction, vision and desire). Kirstin's other research is focused on connections between performance, identity and economy: she co-edited a special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance on casting and identity, published in May 2025, including her article 'Taping into the Void'. Her book Stunts of Late-Nineteenth-Century New York was published in 2019.
Dr Alexandra (Ali) Baybutt
Lecturer (Teaching) in Creative Arts and Humanities: Performance Practice at UCL Arts and Sciences
Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the IAS researching embodying the university differently and co-editing Think Pieces with Dr. Lo Marshall on the topic of 'complaint' within the university, Ali leads the BA1 and 2 performance practice modules on the BA Creative Arts and Humanities. As a somatic movement educator, movement artist and facilitator, her responsibilities are gently carrying those new to performance practices towards playfulness and embodied modes of relating then onto developing their own creative vocabulary. Ali is currently part of choreographer Heni Hale's practice-based PhD research on the Tavistock archives; consulting dramaturg for choreographer Tania Soubry's deep listening walks in Luxembourg; and continuing her pedagogical collaboration with musicians at Barefoot Opera, and with Play As We Are.
Dr Leah Lovett
Senior Reseach Fellow at UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
Leah Lovett is an artist, Senior Research Fellow and lead for impact and engagement at CASA, UCL, focussed on questions of spatial and environmental justice. With a background in social and urban arts practices (PhD, Slade School of Art, 2019), she brings expertise in arts-led methods for bridging knowledge systems and facilitating processes of co-creation. As engagement lead on the Memory Mapper Project, she has delivered participatory projects including City of Women (2022), Newham Youth Map (2021/2025), and ARGH Mateys (Royal Docks, 2021-2023), and her current research is exploring the potential for digital interactive tools to enable children to participate meaningfully in urban planning processes. Leah is an LGBTQ+ community organiser and co-leads initiatives including the Queer Community College (QueerCircle) and UCL Queer Arts Club. As an artist, her work has been shown in the UK and internationally with commissioning partners including The Royal Docks, Wellcome Collection, and UP Projects.
Dr Ranjita Dhital
Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies at UCL Arts and Sciences
Dr Ranjita Dhital is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies in the Arts and Sciences Department (UASc), Director of Research and Graduate Research Tutor at University College London, (UCL), UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (FRSPH), a registered pharmacist and a sculptor.
Her public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies. She is the Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded study Alcohol Co-design and Community Engagement (ACE) which is exploring creative research approaches to reduce alcohol harm in Nepal.
Ranjita has practised as an addiction specialist pharmacist for the NHS, a community pharmacist and worked in public health. She founded and leads the Creative Health Nepal network and the International Arts in Pharmacy group. She is Chair of the Royal Society for Public Health’s (RSPH) Arts Health and Wellbeing Special Interest Group . She is Editorial Board member for the RSPH journal Perspectives in Public Health and Academic Editor for Global Public Health.