School of Advanced Study The Humanities Now - Literature and the Public Good Professor Rick Rylance (Director of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study) Chair: Professor Sir Adrian Smith Dinah Birch (Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Liverpool; Chair of the last REF Panel for English; Booker Prize judge; Chair of the Advisory Council for the Institute of English Studies. Distinguished scholar especially of Victorian literature) Jacqueline Norton (Chief Commissioning Editor for Literature of Oxford University Press) Literature and the Public Good is Professor Rick Rylance's new book from Oxford University Press. Reading literature fosters personal development, positive social engagement and contributes to the runaway success of Britain's creative economy, he argues. The book emerges from his 6-year experience of leading the Arts and Humanities Research Council. To celebrate its launch, OUP and the School of Advanced Study host a discussion on 'The Humanities Now'. Leading figures from the humanities, policy and publishing sectors will ponder why the humanities, so strong in Britain in reality, are perceived to be in retreat. Professor Rick Rylance is Director of the Institute of English Studies in SAS. He was previously CEO of the AHRC and Chair of Research Councils UK. Before that he was Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter and Dean of Arts at Anglia Polytechnic University. His research interests include the history of psychology and reading and the brain. He is currently writing the Oxford English Literary History volume covering the period 1930--1970.