Programme Team

Find out more about the team behind UCL's exciting new BA Creative Arts and Humanities programme launching in September 2023 at UCL East.

Dr Tim Beasley-Murray

Tim Beasley-Murray is Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture and leads the team that has put together this programme. He works on literature and ideas in a range of languages (English, French, German, Czech, Slovak and Russian). He has just finished a book on literary and academic games, and on how they can get serious, that will come out with Manchester University Press next year.

Tim has written some pretty heavy things (a book on two early 20^th Century German and Russian philosophers and critics, for example) and some rather lighter things (a psychoanalytic reading of the children’s book, The Tiger who Came to Tea, for example). And he has tried to bring these combinations – of the light and the heavy, the ludic and the serious - to the design of the BA Creative Arts and Humanities programme. On the BA CAH, you’ll find out for yourself how play and games can be a way to get creative on your first-year module, The Creative Laboratory.

Dr Matthew Sperling

Matthew Sperling is Lecturer in Literature in English from 1900 to the Present Day, and is a practicing novelist as well as an academic. So alongside critical books and articles on (for instance) how writers think about dictionaries and the history of words in their creative works, or how the material and social history of publishing affects the meaning of literary texts, he has also written two novels, Astroturf and Viral, which use narrative form to explore contemporary phenomena as diverse as weightlifting, synthetic testosterone, online subcultures, social media marketing, start-up culture, and much else. The former is being adapted for TV by Ray Pictures, and Matthew is now at work on a third novel and another book which will combine memoir and literary criticism.

Professor Gregory Thompson

Gregory Thompson is an award winning theatre director creating productions that combine ensemble performances with innovative stagings and actor-audience relationships.

He’s directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Young Vic amongst others in the UK and his own company AandBC has performed Shakespeare all over world. Recent work includes directing THE WINTER’S TALE in Urdu in Karachi, Pakistan and HAMLET in Nepali in Kathmandu, Nepal.

At UCL he worked for a while matching scientists with performing artists to enhance, extend and disrupt academic activities to yield deeper or more surprising research outcomes; and now applies the principle and practises of ensemble theatre together with ethnography and Lean Startup to enable students to create innovative enterprises where the way they do things is as important as what they do.

Programme Team

Dr Tim Beasley-Murray

Dr Matthew Sperling

Professor Gregory Thompson

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