IMC 2025: Sessions

Rhetoric about the value of Medieval Studies in impact and engaged research can sometimes lean too heavily on the concept of ‘learning lessons from the past’ rather than recognising the intrinsic value of the discipline. These sessions move beyond the view of the past as a resource for use in the present, but instead regard the medieval arts and humanities as a multi-faceted human-centred epistemology uniquely placed to engage with the human condition. Bringing together medievalists and impact professionals, these sessions place Medieval Studies front and centre in the so-called 'impact agenda'. In the first session, Kit Heyam offers a case study on their work with the Royal Armouries museum, reflecting on how to build sustainable, equitable and impactful working relationships, and sharing preliminary findings from a new project aiming to infer the factors that determine the success or failure of collaborations between academics and the cultural heritage sector. Alix Brodie-Wray puts forward the case for a body of work that explicitly addresses the impact of arts and humanities research and a greater understanding of the systems of meaning that are used to assess impact. Finally, Emmie Price-Goodfellow offers a perspective from the world of media, where history documentaries and podcasts tend to be dominated by a few subjects: Ancient Egypt, the Romans, the Tudors, and the world wars. This talk explores how medieval topics can be presented in a way that is relevant and appealing to a diverse, non-specialist audience in a way that challenges and counters stereotypical notions of what medieval history entails, and what the Middle Ages looked like.