Interviews on wonder, curiosity and creativity
Jack Kirby is Group Head of Collections Services for the Science Museum Group. He has worked with diverse communities in London and Birmingham and curated collections of national significance. Jack has responsibility for caring for, digitising and managing the Science Museum Group's internationally outstanding collection. Based in Manchester, UK, he leads teams across five museums and two collections facilities, from County Durham to Wiltshire.
Will Houstoun has a PhD in the history of magical education, supervised by Dame Marina Warner, and is a winner of both The European Magic Championships and The Magic Circle Close-up Magician of the Year. He holds a Literary Fellowship with The Academy of Magical Arts in Los Angeles, and is an Honorary Research Associate at Imperial College’s Department of Surgery and Cancer as well as Magician in Residence at The Imperial College/Royal College of Music Centre for Performance Science. The current editor of The Magic Circular, The Magic Circle’s 113-year-old journal, Will writes extensively on magic for trade and popular publications. Consultancy credits include Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the BBC's Wolf Hall, The Royal Opera House’s Katya Kabanova and The Almeida's The Twilight Zone. Will spends more time picking up cards than he would like to admit.
Ian Keable has been a full-time professional magician for over 30 years, specialising in Comedy Magic. More recently he has branched out into talks both on magic but also subjects such as 18th Century hoaxes, satirical prints and cartoons. He has written three self-published books aimed at magicians including Stand-Up: A Professional Guide to Comedy Magic and Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters and Literature. He is presently writing The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in the Eighteenth Century, due to be published by The Westbourne Press in autumn 2020.
Scott studied history at the University of Cambridge and is the host of an iTunes Top-100 daily history podcast. He is an award-winning history teacher who was nominated for the UK's national Teaching Awards and short-listed for the BBC/Historical Association History Teacher of the Year award. Author of "366 days". He currently lives in Romania with his wife and two children.
A PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory on the molecular theory of polymer flow was jointly supported by the textile company Courtaulds, with whom he had worked as an undergraduate. This experience set a course of finding deep science problems arising out of industrial collaboration that has lasted ever since. In 2018 he took up a new chair in natural philosophy at the University of York.
Words on Wonder 