Being Human Festival expands internationally

We’re delighted to announce that the first ever United States-wide Being Human Festival will take place in April 2024, led by the National Humanities Center in the US in partnership with the UK’s Being Human Festival. This special new collaboration recognises the success of Being Human’s model for bringing humanities research alive and out into local communities across countries, and across the world. 

The 2024 US Being Human Festival will take place this Spring in eight locations, from 15 to 29 April. 

This latest international expansion is a testament to the festival’s success in advancing public engagement in the humanities since its inception in the UK in 2014, and of the ever-increasing importance of public humanities work. Being Human Festival presents a unique model that enables and facilitates the engagement of humanities research and researchers with communities around the UK and the world.  

We’re delighted to be embarking on this new partnership with the National Humanities Center, which is a celebration of our shared understanding and values around breaking down barriers to humanities research, and to bringing it to life in creative, fun and innovative ways. 

Professor Sarah Churchwell, Director of the UK Being Human Festival said: 

“We’re so excited about this new partnership with the National Humanities Center and we’re thrilled that the spirit of our festival is capturing people’s imagination around the globe. We know that ideas and research in the humanities are not bound by borders or contained by nations, and we understand the urgent need to connect scholarly work and research in the humanities to the lives, needs and perspectives of communities and publics across the world.” 

2024 US Events 

A zine fest in upstate New York. A pop-up museum with puppets in Minneapolis. A writer’s workshop on wheels in Oklahoma. These are just a few of the events in a line-up of public events as part of the National Humanities Center’s first annual Being Human Festival. 

Inspired by our UK edition, the inaugural US version of the festival will include events in eight locations across the country. Each of these events will be community-focused and highlight the ways that the humanities add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us. 

The creation of the US iteration is the latest international expansion of Being Human Festival. Since 2017, the University of Melbourne in Australia have led events and international Hub programmes, and Princeton University served as a Hub for events in the US in 2018 and 2019. Previous festival events have taken place in France, Italy, Romania and Singapore.  

“The success of the UK’s Being Human Festival speaks to the enduring value of the humanities for everyone. We hope that we will be able to build from this year’s inaugural effort and help raise awareness of the vital, compelling work that humanities scholars are doing in even more communities across the US in years to come,” said National Humanities Center President and Director Robert D. Newman. 

Find out more about the full programme of US events.  

International partnerships 

If you are based outside of the UK, share our values and are interested in collaborating with us, please get in touch at beinghuman@sas.ac.uk.  

Being Human Festival was founded in 2014 and is led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.