CASA at the Bloomsbury Festival

CASA returned to the Bloomsbury Festival over the weekend, joining a host of speakers, dancers, singers and makers from UCL and the local community in celebrating the complex character of the place that UCL has called its home for over 150 years.

Martin Zaltz Austwick chaired a session on "Reimagining Bloomsbury's Streets", featuring CASA PhD student Stephan Hugel talking about their work mapping Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's Gothic London (inspired by the graphic novel "From Hell"). Artist Robert Shepherd talked about his beautiful book of Bloomsbury palimpsests, and Susan Trangmar presented her photoessay on trees in Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury.

The UCL Ideas Salon offered a wonderful opportunity for visitors to the festival to quiz UCL academics about their research, and start some discussions of their own. Martin Zaltz Austwick chaired separate sessions with particle physicist Jon Butterworth and statistician Sofia Olhede in discussions which raised such thorny questions as "What has CERN done that's actually useful?" and "What problems should we just rely on gut instinct to solve?", as visitors doodled on the Salon's drawable tablecloths. The rain came down, but people kept coming!

Many thanks to Michael Eades and the staff at the School for Advanced Study, and to Lizzy Baddeley and Kimberley Freeman at the UCL Public Engagement Unit, for inviting us and for all their hard work in organising and publicising the sessions.