Old books stacked around an old doorframe

In collaboration with the , this day-long symposium at Imperial, on Wednesday 17 June 2026, will bring together researchers and educators interested in the history of education, specifically interdisciplinary higher education in the UK and beyond.

While interdisciplinary education at ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ has increased in recent years, particularly with the foundation of I-Explore in 2019, more widely, interdisciplinary HE has undergone significant changes.

Lady seated in Lecture TheatreKey interdisciplinary institutions and academic initiatives, including at Keele, Sussex and York, have fallen back into traditional disciplinary boundaries, reflecting convergence in a once diverse tertiary sector. Simultaneously, innovations in higher education are addressing interdisciplinary ‘global challenges’ in new ways. Many countries, such as Scotland with a broad-based pre-Honour curriculum, follow different patterns.

The symposium’s presentations will be organised under 5 topics: Keynote, Science & humanities, Higher Education Institutions, Teaching, and Citizenship & lifelong learning.

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Symposium Schedule

1. ‎Keynote
  • Ed Fidoe (LIS).ÌýCEO of the London Interdisciplinary School and Imperial Mechanical Engineering alumnus.
2. Science and humanities
  • Dr Anna Ponomareva (Imperial). Languages for STEM: the birth of teaching Russian from the body of Electrical Engineering at Imperial.
  • Dr Anna Riera Mora (Imperial).The History of Interdisciplinary Education in Spain: Humanities and Science from the early Twentieth Century to the Present.
  • Dr Stefano Sandrone (Imperial).From Andreas Vesalius to Giuseppe Levi: how neuroscience education has changed and changed the brains over time.
  • Dr Jennifer Wallis and Dr Michael Weatherburn (Imperial).ÌýHumanities education in a STEM university context: Imperial’s story, 1907-date.
3. Higher education institutions
  • Jordon Millward (Imperial).Disciplinary Depth as the Foundation for Interdisciplinary Innovation: Lessons from Agricultural Knowledge Transfer.
  • Wanwei Nie (UCL).Tracing Policy Mobility in a Transnational Campus: Curriculum, Archives, and International Higher Education.
  • Dr KevinÌýTennant (York).Ambitions for Legacy: Business Elites and the University of York.
  • Dr Xiaowei Wu (UCL).ÌýThe Making of the University Campus: The Construction of Spatial Order at Shanghai Baptist College in Modern China.
4. Teaching
  • Maria Apud Bell & Larissa A L E Kunstel-Tabet (Imperial).A brief history of IDE (Innovation Design Engineering programme).
  • Victoria Chung (Oxford).ÌýReception, Teaching, and the Consolidation of the Periodic System in Oxford Chemistry, 1880-1915.
  • Professor Peter Miskell and Mads E. Wedell-Wedellsborg (Reading).ÌýManagement Debates: An Interdisciplinary Approach to First-Year Undergraduate Education and Assessment.
  • Dr Mike Tennant and Dr Maria Vinograd (Imperial).Concept Maps as Interdisciplinary Boundary Objects.
5. Citizenship and lifelong learning
  • Dr Igor Baranov (Imperial).ÌýFrom Crotonville to Learning Ecosystems: A History of Corporate Universities and the Challenges of Lifelong Learning.
  • Professor Mark Freeman (UCL).Ìý‘Helping the rootless to root’: interdisciplinarity and university adult education in mid-twentieth-century England.
  • Xiaoyu Wang (UCL).ÌýMaking citizenship education as an interdisciplinary project in Modern Britain: Bernard Crick and the Crick Report of 1998.
  • Professor Tom Woodin (UCL).ÌýInterdisciplinarity and the co-operative movement – multilateralism in practice?
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