Sarah Dillon is Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She is a scholar of contemporary literature, film and philosophy, with a research focus on the epistemic function and value of stories, on interdisciplinarity, and on the engaged humanities. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018), and many academic articles and book chapters. She is editor of David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011), and co-editor of Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015) and AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (2020). In addition to her academic scholarship, Sarah is an established arts broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, having been selected as a 2013 BBC Radio 3 and AHRC New Generation Thinker. She has an intellectual and practical commitment to demonstrating the value and importance of the humanities across sectors, including in higher education, government, and wider culture and society.
Dr Claire Craig is Provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford and has extensive experience of providing scientific evidence to senior decision-makers in government and business. Originally a geophysicist, she became Director of the UK Government Office for Science, a member of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, and got her grounding in strategy at McKinsey & Co. She developed her interest in the power of stories initially through their roles in public reasoning about strategic futures and alongside the use of computational models of complex systems. Her 2018 pamphlet, How Does Government Listen to Scientists?, led her to become increasingly interested in the reasons behind the absence of systems and mechanisms to bring evidence about stories into public debate and decision-making explicitly, and the consequences of this absence.