Humanities and Arts news

Why the stunning rhinoceros hornbills are the farmers of the rainforest and a powerful avian symbol of regeneration

- by Aeon Video

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The discovery of organisms that have been alive for many thousands of years requires a revolution in how we understand life

- by Karen G Lloyd

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Two women – one aged 35, the other 102 – become friends. This is what the road trip they can’t take would look like

- by Aeon Video

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I am banned from working now, but as I look back on my long, challenging career in Afghanistan I feel hope for the future

- by Najla & Asad Nariman

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What is a German museum doing with a Kikuyu artefact it doesn’t know anything about? A journey to Kenya for some answers

- by Aeon Video

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Coursing through Catholicism is a radical tradition of environmental justice that will help combat the climate crisis

- by Mike Mariani

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Despite centuries of trying, the term ‘religion’ has proven impossible to define. Then why does it remain so necessary?

- by Kwame Anthony Appiah

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What does it mean to ‘be’? This excerpt provides a brief intro to Heidegger’s philosophy, via jazz, cooking and carpentry

- by Aeon Video

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We once denied the suffering of animals in pain. As AIs grow more complex, we run the danger of making the same mistake

- by Conor Purcell

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Travel the roads of the Roman Empire – a bold project mapping 300,000 km of a vast, ancient network is brought to life

- by Aeon Video

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No, the museum isn’t ceding Indian treasures to India, but it will lend some Roman and Egyptian artifacts to a Mumbai museum.

Legal experts say it goes against a stipulation put in place after Congress renamed the center in the wake of JFK’s assassination in 1963.

Vegas's first stand-alone museum is set to open in Symphony Park in 2029.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The exhibition will open September 3, 2026, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

The five winners will receive their unrestricted grant over the course of two years.

Increased immigration enforcement has not only inspired activism, but art.

The artist reveals mock courtrooms as bizarre theater-courtroom-classroom amalgamations.

Mathaf's director, Zeina Arida, described the project as "a new chapter" in the museum’s history.

Excavations for a new subway line linking the city center and the suburbs have turned up a half-million artifacts.

My reflections on 12 months of finding human connection and choosing presence in a digital world. Hello, I'm Katy, the editor of Creative Boom, and both personally and professionally, I've had a f...

The founders of the global brand agency explain how emotional intelligence and restless reinvention keep them creatively relevant. Led by founders Simon Dixon and Aporva Baxi, DixonBaxi is one of...

Manchester's motion design community is going big this February, and there's never been a better time to get involved. In an industry increasingly dominated by isolated freelancers working from ho...

We talk to an illustrator who has used her passion for travel to shape an incredible portfolio of eye-popping artworks. Originally from Shanghai and now based in Liverpool, Yufei Yang is the artis...

We asked a selection of artists and their representatives to cast their minds ahead and visualise what's in store for the next 12 months. Their insight might surprise you. Every year since... ever!....

While everyone was obsessing over spectacular failures, the rebrands that will actually matter slipped by almost unnoticed. 2025's been a bit of a weird year, hasn't it? For instance, I've spent t...

Ayo Fagbemi and Aaron Skipper discuss brave strategy, playful design and building culture-shaping brands with intention, clarity and heart. In under two years, Explorers Club has grown from a fres...

Agency wins, leadership moves, launches and a few signs of where the creative industry is heading next. As the year winds down, December's Booms & Shakes feels less like a wrap-up and more lik...

When exhaustion takes over and motivation disappears, how do you find your way back? The Creative Boom community share their best advice. Welcome to the latest in our agony aunt series, Dear Boom....

The Valencia-based illustrator has gathered his rock posters from around the world into a tactile, newspaper-format publication, making a case for print at a time when most music promotion lives on...

Viral Infection is an installation by Johannes Kiel. It uses machine nests to produce the PLA bioplastic they are made of and also calculates their production needs, while a ‘virus machine’ attempts to infect further hosts in order to multiply. →

CD – Gruenrekorder

A thought process deeply rooted in reality and then codified into abstract models, guided the career of Pietro Grossi who passed away in 2002. A composer, theoretician, pioneer of music informatics and founder of the Studio di →

Spector Books, ISBN 978-3959056878, English, 170 pages, 2024, UK

Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture is a very special and important place for critical media, with its interconnections to the Forensic Architecture research group and a →

Marine biophony, which are sounds produced by living organisms in the sea (as opposed to antropophony which are sounds produced by humans), is attracting more attention, possibly due to improved technologies to investigate its impressive richness. Stijn Demeulenaere, has recorded →

12″ – InFiné

Almost two decades separate us from Cosmos, the last complete work by Fernando Corona, alias Murcof. Corona is a virtuoso of melodic minimalism who has been able to reinterpret the ambient language, giving it a more contemplative →

ensemblepark.com, journal, No. 1, Early Fall 2024, English, 92 pages, USA

With the resurgence of digital literature, possibly fostered by the paradigmatic omnipresence of language models used by AI, there are several new publications to →

Part automated system, part moving image, Nathalie Gebert’s Anthofluid is a sculptural device that generates an ephemeral pictorial proposition at regular intervals. Using medical tubing, the assembly of transparent wafers that form its surface is gradually filled with a purplish →

CD – Karlrecords

Grapefruit was born in 1964 as a self-production by Yoko Ono – just 500 copies were printed by Wunternaum Press. Destined to become one of the most influential texts in the contemporary art circuit of that time, →

Mimesis International, book, ISBN 978-8869774836, English, 320 pages, 2024, Italy

These two authors are a kind of dream team for the topic of visual art and videogames. De Mutiis is digital curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur and co-curator →

The popularity of meditation and mindfulness apps doesn’t seem to be related to a new era of Aquarius or a sudden deep awareness of our bodies, but instead a cry for help to survive the overload of tasks and information. →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

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Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

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The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

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Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

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Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

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With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.

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A New York scholar’s study of our long history of acclaiming the fool and ignoring the facts is timely and terrifically witty

This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.

The central premise of the book is simply stated: “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, New York, and the author of a handful of masterly studies of the terrain where political and intellectual sensibilities collide, is an acute observer of the vagaries of human behaviour and thought in general, and of our tendency to self-delusion in particular.

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Whatever their GCSE results, students should be told the whole story: understanding languages and cultures is a huge advantage in the workplace

I reflect on GCSE results day with a sense of pride tinged with sadness. Proud because this year’s cohort achieved fantastic results, given the challenges they have faced since the pandemic, but sad because for many it will be the last time they study humanities (languages, history and religious and classical studies) subjects.

I won’t hide my bias: I studied Spanish, history and philosophy and ethics at A-level, and Latin and religious studies at GCSE, so I’m a strong advocate for the humanities. Yet, they’re steadily becoming an unpopular choice, with only 38% of students taking at least one humanities course in the 2021/22 cohort compared to just under 60% from 2003/4 to 2015/16.

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Not only will literary criticism wither, but we risk losing the campus novel entirely

Ah, A-level results week, and how weirdly enjoyable it is when you’re not doing them yourself, have no children of your own in the game, and nieces and nephews who aren’t yet old enough. Out for a walk with my headphones, I listen delightedly as a triumphant candidate appears on the BBC’s World at One: Evie from Southend, who sounds as pleased as punch. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile in his voice. She doesn’t miss a beat. It’s all sorted. In the autumn, she’ll go to Durham University to read... English literature.

This stops me in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying. Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarship is missing in action. I’ve just read a “major” new study of the poet WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its gargantuan size – you could more easily slip a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course into your handbag than this book – announces it as a relic even before publication. No, Stem subjects are where it’s at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circuit of the park to fade.

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Government needs to promote the study of all disciplines to improve workforce skills, says Prof Jonathan Michie

Molly Morgan Jones, the director of policy at the British Academy, is right to warn that Michael Gove’s legacy is undermining workforce skills (A-level students choosing narrower range of subjects after Gove changes, 14 August). To contribute at work, and in society more generally, requires capabilities such as critical thinking, imagination and communication alongside technical skills. Humanities and social science are therefore vital, along with science and engineering.

Countless examples illustrate this. One is Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others broke the enemy codes, developing in the process the world’s first digital programmable computer, Colossus. Surely a time to stick to maths and engineering? No, Bletchley recruited from all academic disciplines, with entrance exams including crosswords. (Full disclosure: my father, Donald Michie, was one, diverted to Bletchley from Balliol College, Oxford, where he’d received an open entrance scholarship to study classics.)

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Academics warn loss of higher education arts and humanities courses will harm understanding of racism and imperial history

Cuts to arts and humanities subjects within higher education will have damaging implications for our understanding of race and colonialism, academics have warned.

Petitions have been launched to save anthropology at Kent University, where the subject has come under threat of closure, while Oxford Brookes confirmed the closure of its music programme earlier this year.

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