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Introducing our 2024 festival theme... Landmarks!

Read on for more information about the 2024 Being Human Festival theme.

An illustration depicting the idea of 'Landmarks' - with two people playing with building blocks that represent landmark buildings.

Landmarks

Our festival theme in 2024 is ‘Landmarks’! Our 10th anniversary is a landmark year, and we will be looking back on landmark events in our festival history, while imagining landmarks we might yet create. We welcome researchers to use this as their starting point to inspire activities for the 2024 Being Human Festival (7–⁠16 November). 

Your research might suggest milestone historical events or political watersheds from which we can learn. It might celebrate beacons that artists have created, or chart how discoveries have guided us. There may be landmark texts, books, films and pieces of music that have had lasting impact. In our Anthropocene age it may especially lead us to think about place, and the marks we have made upon the land. A landmark may be a natural sight of beauty or wonder that brings people together. It may be a human-made boundary, or a monument that divides us. There may be local landmarks that have shaped our cultures, communities and places. And there may be landmarks lost to history. A landmark may make us question the consequences of how we have marked the land – or how the land has marked us.  

We invite researchers to join us in thinking about landmarks, physical or metaphorical (or both), and how they shape our world. ​​​​

2024 landmark anniversaries

2024 landmark anniversaries

  • 10th anniversary of Being Human Festival! 

  • 10th anniversary of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance 

  • 15th anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration 

  • 20th anniversary of the launch of Facebook 

  • 25th anniversary of the Euro 

  • 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide 

  • 30th anniversary of the Channel Tunnel opening 

  • 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration 

  • 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre 

  • 35th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall 

  • 45th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming Britain’s first female PM 

  • 50th anniversary of ABBA’s Eurovision Song Contest victory 

  • 55th anniversary of first moon landing 

  • 70th anniversary of Roger Bannister running a mile in under four minutes 

  • 75th anniversary of creation of NATO 

  • 75th anniversary of creation of East Germany 

  • 75th anniversary of the publication of 1984, by George Orwell 

  • 75th anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir 

  • 80th anniversary of D-Day 

  • 85th anniversary of the start of WWII 

  • 95th anniversary of Wall Street Crash of 1929 

  • 95th anniversary of St Valentine’s Day Massacre 

  • 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin 

  • 100th anniversary of the birth of Truman Capote 

  • 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin 

  • 100th anniversary of the publication of A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster 

  • 100th anniversary of the publication of When We Were Very Young, by A. A. Milne 

  • 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin 

  • 100th anniversary of the death of Gabriel Fauré 

  • 110th anniversary of the start of WWI 

  • 150th anniversary of the birth of Amy Lowell 

  • 150th anniversary of the birth of Gertrude Stein 

  • 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris 

  • 165th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ 

  • 170th anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade 

  • 170th anniversary): Florence Nightengale and a team of Nurses arrived in the Crimea on 4 November 

  • 200th anniversary of the National Gallery 

  • 250th anniversary of first US Continental Congress 

  • 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich 

  • 400th anniversary of the first folio of Shakespeare’s works appearing 

  • 460th Shakespeare’s birthday 

  • 500th anniversary of the death of Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama 

  • 700th anniversary: Mansa Musa, the most prominent ruler of Mali, Africa made a pilgrimage to Mecca 

  • 1,945th anniversary of Mount Vesuvius eruption

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