Our exhibits will take you back to an ancient Roman laundry, through the Great Plague of 1665-6, across the fashion of 1800s ballrooms, around an iconic Birmingham bus route and into the soundscape and lights of Antarctica’s Aurora Australis.
Learn to make your own comic, navigate gender inequality in sport, and sample the evocative tastes of UK-Chinese food. Our digital exhibits will explore the clothing of Muslim men at Jummah (Friday prayers), as well as a VR reimagining of a baroque chapel.
Antarctic echoes: make your own ‘more-than-human’ story
Against a unique sensory landscape of sounds and the Aurora Australis, under the guidance of the researchers, craft your own 'more-than-human' story via a story cube, using different methods and materials. Add your story to a growing display – or take it home with you for future inspiration.
Professor Elleke Boehmer, Dr Katherine Collins, Dr Joanna Wheeler – British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant
Fashioning fancy dress through the ages
Explore the making and wearing of fancy dress and its growing relationship with fashion, and reconsider its wider cultural significance to class, gender, and race throughout the centuries.
Try on period dress, collage your own mini garments with fabric and print materials; and learn more about the power of clothing as a means of self-presentation and identity.
Dr Laura Beltrán-Rubio, Dr Meg Kobza, Tatjana LeBoff – SHAPE Involve and Engage
Materials of pandemic care across time
How have societies, medical professionals and individuals responded to pandemics in the past – and what can be learned to inform future responses?
This multi-activity exhibit investigates the role of care in shared memory via the material cultures that have cemented past airborne pandemics in public consciousness: plague in the early modern era, tuberculosis in the Victorian period, and COVID-19.
Dr Joan Fitzpatrick, Jade French, Dr Claire O'Callaghan, Professor Justin Waring – Conference Scheme
More than medals: gendered environments of sports injury uncovered
Why do women experience some sports injuries more than men? And what can we do about it?.
This exhibit presents the gendered environmental challenges shaping women’s injury experiences in elite sport. Via several interactive stations, challenge your understanding of the social, cultural and physical conditions of sport that lead to injury, and reflect on how these have a wider impact on us all.
Dr Stephanie Coen, Lucy Follett, Steve McCaig, Dr Joanne Parsons, Dr Victoria Downie – Innovation Fellowship
Number 11: know your place
Take a whistlestop tour of the extraordinary yet unrecognised landscape of Birmingham, as seen from its iconic circular Number 11 bus.
Twenty-three individual sites along its route each tell a different part of the city’s narrative and demonstrate the infrastructure of its landscape, linking nature, culture, history, ecology, geology, politics and industry. Be inspired and share your own story.
Dr Alex Albans and Professor Kathryn Moore – SHAPE Involve and Engage
The other Pompeii: religion and archaeology in the nineteenth century
This exhibit reconstructs a capsule archaeological excavation that took place in 1887, just beyond the walls of ancient Pompeii, on land owned by the Catholic Shrine.
Engage in hands-on activities to learn about the excavation and interpretation of this Roman building (identified at the time as a ‘fullonica’, or ‘laundry’), unearth buried replicas of the Roman finds, and make copies of the Roman coins that were among the discoveries.
Dr Jessica Hughes – British Academy /Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship
Power grids: reimagining energy infrastructure in comics
Via the medium of comics, learn about community energy alternatives to costly – and environmentally damaging – fossil-fuel infrastructures.
Explore the wider social benefits of community energy and discover how you can have a more active role in making and using green infrastructure. Share your own story and experience of thriving or failing infrastructure by creating your own short comic and contribute brand new speculative green energy ideas.
Dominic Davies, Kremena Dimitrova and Reed Puc – British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant
The taste of memory
Go on an immersive journey of food, migration and memory which connects generations within British-Chinese communities.
Beginning with London’s first Chinatown in Limehouse, the exhibition highlights the often-underrepresented voices of those who have shaped culinary experiences in the UK. Through historical narratives and objectives displays, explore themes of aspiration, adaptation, affiliation and assimilation.
Dr Rui Su – SHAPE Involve and Engage
Virtuality and the baroque
This interactive exhibit offers a new perspective on cultural continuity, presenting the artistic and architectural techniques of the Baroque period (c.1600–1750) with contemporary digital practices, via a collection of works developed during artist Thomas McLucas’ 2024 Giles Worsley Rome Fellowship.
Thomas McLucas (British School at Rome, a British International Research Institute)
Jummah aesthetics: British Muslim men and their sartorial choices
This digital exhibition features 25 photographs of British Muslim men, depicting what they wear for Jummah (Friday prayers).
Taken at Spitalfields and Whitechapel mosques, which cater to Muslims of varying backgrounds, these photographs were selected to challenge perceptions of Muslim men and shift the focus away from British Muslim women and their sartorial choices.
Dr Fatima Rajina, with photographer Rehan Jamil – British Academy Small Research Grant
