I grew up in a town that had one cinema. It wasn’t a multiplex — it was a crumbling, single‑screen picture house from the 1930s, with velvet seats that had gone bald in patches and a ceiling that leaked whenever it rained. Every Friday night, my grandfather would take me there, and we’d watch whatever was showing — old Westerns, French films with subtitles I could barely follow, documentaries about artists and musicians I’d never heard of. I didn’t realise it then, but those evenings in the dark were my introduction to the humanities. The films weren’t just entertainment; they were arguments about what it meant to be human, about love and loss and the stories we tell to make sense of both. When the cinema finally closed, sold to developers who turned it into luxury flats, I felt a grief I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t just a building that had been lost. It was a space where stories had been shared across generations — a quiet, unremarkable temple of collective imagination. And I knew, even then, that I wanted to spend my life studying the things that make us human.
When I began my degree in the humanities, I was often asked what I planned to do with it — as if the study of literature, philosophy, history, and art needed to justify itself in economic terms. But I’d already learned, in that old cinema, that the humanities are not a luxury. They are how we understand ourselves, how we challenge power, how we imagine worlds better than the one we’ve inherited. Choosing a dissertation topic, however, was daunting. The humanities are vast — I could write about the ethics of memory in Holocaust literature, the politics of museum curation, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, or the representation of gender in Renaissance painting. I needed a specific, researchable question. I began by exploring what other students had already investigated, and I came across a collection of humanities research topics that helped me see the field’s breadth. Some projects examined how digital archives are reshaping historical research, others analysed the role of storytelling in post‑conflict reconciliation, and a few explored the intersection of literature and environmental ethics. That variety gave me the confidence to settle on a question that felt personal: how do community cinemas function as sites of cultural memory, and what is lost when they disappear?
I spent the next year immersed in that question. I interviewed former cinema owners, archivists, and audience members. I read cultural theory about place and belonging, and I traced the history of cinema as a communal experience. The project was, in many ways, a quiet act of mourning for the cinema of my childhood. But it was also an argument — that the humanities matter, that the stories we tell and the spaces where we gather to hear them are worth preserving, that the study of culture is not a diversion from the serious business of life but its very core. If you’re considering a humanities research topic, I’d encourage you to start with something you love — a film, a book, a painting, a piece of music that has stayed with you. The best research questions don’t emerge from a desire to sound clever; they emerge from a genuine curiosity about the things that make us human.