The Centre’s Tiffany Watt-Smith has been picked as one of this year’s BBC New Generation Thinkers.

The New Generation Thinkers scheme is a nationwide search for early-careers researchers who are passionate about communicating to the public. The scheme allows scholars the chance to develop their own Radio 3 programmes based on their research, and to appear regularly on air.

Tiffany Watt-Smith researches the cultural history of our compulsion to imitate each other’s expressions and gestures. She is particularly interested in the history of human emotions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

She says: “I’m delighted to have been selected to take part in this AHRC-BBC initiative, and it’s a great privilege to be part of QMUL’s tradition of engaging with the wider public. To me, ‘impact’ isn’t a one-way conversation. It’s not just about sending ideas out into the world. Engaging with other perspectives and ways of thinking can also spark off new ideas, enlivening my own research too.”

In June, the New Generation Thinkers will make their debut appearance on Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking and make regular contributions throughout 2014.

They will deliver talks at Radio 3’s annual Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage, Gateshead, in November 2014.

The NGTs will also have an opportunity to develop their ideas for television, including working with BBC Arts to make short taster films to be shown on BBC Arts Online.

This year, the New Generation Thinkers have been announced at the Hay Festival. The BBC has a three-year partnership with Hay Festival. There will be unprecedented BBC coverage on TV, radio and online, making the Festival more accessible than ever before.

You can hear Tiffany’s Radio 3 broadcast on shellshock and neurosis in the aftermath of the First World War here .