Exeter College Fellow to appear at Hay Festival in May

Supernumerary Fellow at Exeter College, Professor Charles Foster will appear at the Hay Festival on Wednesday 27 May 2026, speaking alongside writer Cal Flyn and broadcaster Sean Fletcher. 

The event, Awe and Wonder: Where to Go to Feel Inspired, will take place at 10am on the Meadow Stage. It brings together Foster and Flyn to explore why encounters with nature, particularly at its most extreme, provoke such powerful feelings of awe. From mountain summits to remote landscapes, the discussion will consider why inspiration is often found away from the everyday and the familiar. 

Drawing on his recent book The Edges of the World, Professor Foster argues that creativity and insight are most likely to emerge at boundaries, whether geographical, intellectual or cultural. His work examines how experiences at the margins shape human understanding, belief and imagination. Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape similarly explores humanity’s enduring attraction to wild and often inhospitable environments, framing these spaces as sites of both challenge and inspiration. 

Alongside his appearance at the festival, Professor Foster has also contributed a chapter to the forthcoming volume Leaving Plato’s Cave: Towards a Science of the Future, further reflecting his ongoing engagement with philosophical and interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge and perception. 

Professor Foster has been a Supernumerary Fellow at Exeter College since 2022. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law and a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, where his research explores questions of identity, morality, and the relationship between humans and the natural world.