Calling all Beatles fans - join a unique public engagement event exploring how sound, sight, touch, and even smell can trigger memories of the world’s most famous band.
As part of the Wolverhampton Literature Festival, staff and doctoral students from University of Wolverhampton’s School of English Literature and Psychology will lead interactive experiments that build on ground-breaking memory research by University experts. The event will investigate how multi-sensory cues influence recall and wellbeing, using the cultural phenomenon of the Beatles as a case study.
The research team, led by Dr Tom Mercer (Psychology) and PhD student Megan Powell (English Literature), is particularly keen to hear from local residents who attended Beatles concerts in the West Midlands, though the event is open to adults of all ages. For those interested in participating in this research, the event will take place on Sunday 8 February at SPACE between 1-3pm.
For more information and to register please visit the Wolverhampton Literature Festival website. “There are places I remember, all my life, though some have changed,” sang John Lennon in In My Life (1965).
Memory may be fallible, but it remains a powerful force shaping identity and decision-making. This event invites the public to share and explore their Beatles memories through multi-sensory tests designed to retrieve and measure recall.
Professor Sebastian Groes, Director of the University’s Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research (CTTR), said: “This project continues our pioneering work on memory and sensory experience.
“We want to understand how growing up in a specific socio-cultural context influences the way people perceive a supposedly ‘universal’ cultural phenomenon like the Beatles. Alongside advancing research, we hope to offer wellbeing benefits, particularly for older generations.”
This initiative builds on CTTR’s acclaimed Novel Memories project and previous Being Human Festival events such as Snidge Scrumpin’: Mapping Smell and Memory in the Black Country, which inspired the book Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave, 2021). The new experiment draws on doctoral research by Megan Powell (Beatles and the avant-garde) and Beth Young (autobiographical fictional memories), bridging psychology and literature to spark intergenerational conversations and deepen understanding of memory from the Swinging Sixties to the digital age.
The event underscores the University of Wolverhampton’s commitment to innovative research, community engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
