In April 2026 we held an internal Springer Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Festival. Across a series of keynote presentations, town halls, panel discussions, lightning talks, quizzes, and social events, we celebrated our rich HSS research output in book and journal article form, and our heritage, highlighting the impact and value of what we publish. This series of blog posts is developed from a group of initial lightning talks that were delivered by Springer Nature colleagues during the festival. They build on individual experience to tell compelling stories about what we publish and why we value our work with academic communities in the varied disciplines that comprise the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
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Think about the last time you walked through a museum. You move from object to object — each one carefully placed, lit, labelled, and quietly observed.
What you are really looking at, though, are things that once existed in very different worlds. They were handled, used, valued, or ignored in ways that are often almost invisible in a modern display case.
Different disciplines approach objects differently.
The sciences tend to treat objects as specimens, analysing composition, structure, or material properties.
Object lessons
In the humanities, objects are something more.
They are carriers of meaning. They embody identity, belief, intention, ideology, and culture — and because of this, they must be interpreted, not just analysed.
This is the foundation of material culture studies; an area of the humanities concerned with understanding societies through the objects they create and use. It brings together two complementary approaches.
The first is object‑centred study, which focuses on the thing itself — its materials, design, and production. Scholars ask questions such as: What is it made of? How was it produced? What skills or technologies were required?
The second is object‑driven study, which looks outward to the world the object once inhabited. Here the questions shift to: Who used this? In what setting? What meanings did it carry? How did it relate to power, identity, religion, or everyday practice?
Together, these approaches — and the questions they prompt — help explain why, even in a digital age, tangible objects remain so compelling.
Objects after all offer a sensory connection to human lives lived often long before our own.
Museums, however, also reveal a challenge. Objects displayed behind glass have been removed from the contexts in which they once had specific functions.
A medieval altarpiece in the V&A originally belonged to a particular liturgical and social setting. A Roman amphora in the British Museum was once a mundane, mass‑produced container. When isolated, much of this original significance is lost.
This is where the humanities — historians, archaeologists, classicists, anthropologists, and others — play a crucial role.
Their work is a form of historical reconstruction, grounded in historical empathy: an effort to understand how people in the past experienced their world, and how objects shaped, reflected, or communicated their values.
Money talks
To show how this works in practice, I want to turn to one type of object: ancient coins.
Ancient numismatics — the study of ancient coinage — illustrates how humanities scholars connect material objects with historical context. Although small, coins are exceptionally rich sources of evidence and historical meaning. This is why I am personally drawn to them.
Here are four reasons why ancient coins matter.
- First, coins functioned as mass media in antiquity. Produced in large quantities and circulated widely, coins provide valuable evidence for economic networks, political authority, and patterns of mobility.
- Second, their imagery is highly intentional. For example, in the Roman Republican period, that is before the arrival of emperors, coinage often promoted aristocratic families through symbolic or historical references (see bottom right photo in below figure). In the imperial period, imagery shifted to centre on the emperor and the imperial cult, reinforcing authority across vast territories (see top right photo in below figure).
- Third, coins support interdisciplinary analysis. Scientific analysis reveals minting practices, access to resources, and episodes of economic strain, while stylistic and epigraphic study uncovers ideological messaging and cultural exchange.
- Finally, coins preserve otherwise lost evidence. Some rulers — and entire regions — are known only through their coinage. For instance, parts the Indo‑Greek world, dating from around 200 BC to the early 1st century AD, are known primarily via coinage.
As you can see, through close analysis and contextual reconstruction, coins become vivid historical sources.
To conclude, objects in museums are not silent relics. When approached through the humanities, they become active witnesses to human experience. Whether monumental or miniature, objects gain meaning when reconnected with the social and cultural worlds that produced them.
In this way, the humanities bring the past back to life — not as distant facts, but as a human story of how people lived, what they valued, and how they understood their world.