Women On Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then

As part of my role as one of this year’s New Generation Thinkers, I’ve recorded an edition of BBC Radio 3’s The Essay! “Women on Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then” will be broadcast on 11 November 2015 at 10.45PM, and you can listen anytime after this by visiting BBC iPlayer. [iframe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10j 900 […]

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From Where You Stand: Stories of Academia

From the day I launched The New Academic in 2012 to the moment I’m writing this post, my website has had 120,000+ visitors, and its number of monthly visitors has reached almost 7,000. It’s not much by some people’s standards, but it’s a whole lot more than I ever thought it would be. Its content […]

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Free Thinking: New Generation Thinkers 2015 Launch at the Hay Festival

I’m very excited to say that I’ve recorded my first ever radio broadcast, and you’ll be able to listen to this edition of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking on Thursday, 28 May 2015 at 10PM. This edition of the programme introduces four of this year’s New Generation Thinkers, including me. [iframe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05w8135 1050 1300]

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[Events] Women Writing Pleasure

3 July 2015, Liverpool John Moores University. I’m pleased to say that I’m co-organising this conference with two of my department’s PhD students: Chloe Holland and Krystina Osborne. Take a look at this post if you’d like to know more about the conference.

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Essay Preparation

This lecture prepares students for the first essay on Literary & Cultural Theory. Next to recapping some basic guidelines (with the help of pet videos), it also tries to explain some of the new challenges students might face when writing an essay which incorporates theory.

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Posthumanism

This is an introductory lecture to posthumanism, and the post contains the Prezi I designed as part of my second-year Literary & Cultural Theory module.

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Making Your Mark: Academia, Social Media, & Employability

I delivered this invited talk as part of an event called The Digital Academic, organised by Jobs.ac.uk and Piirus and held on 23 March 2015 at the University of Warwick. The aim of this session was to introduce ECRs and PhDs to how social media can help your academic profile, skills, and career prospects, but […]

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Keep Calm & Take Time Off: Being Ill at Work

When you’re ill, do you keep calm and carry on, or do you keep calm and take time off? I’ve just come to the end of two weeks sick leave. Shingles seriously knocked me out, even though I noticed it and got anti-viral medication on the very first day the rash appeared. It was the first time […]

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[Publications] Feminisms, Sex and the Body

From Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for chastity as a universal rather than a female virtue in A vindication of the rights of woman (1792), through nineteenth and early-twentieth century writings on the commodification of women in marriage and prostitution and campaigns for rational dress, to fights for women’s reproductive rights and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the female body and female sexuality as sites of oppression and empowerment have long occupied a central place of concern in feminist theory and practice. In the new millennium, as in previous decades, this interest continues to engender productively diverse and conflicting, as well as often conflicted, responses by feminist scholars across disciplines whose work reflects upon and attempts to conceptualise women’s sexual bodies within the cultural and political landscapes of the twenty-first century.

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Being a Good PhD Supervisor: A Fine Art or Plain & Simple?

I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on my relatively quick transition from PhD student to PhD supervisor, mainly to reflect on what is important to me regarding my new responsibilities and based on my own and my peers’ experiences, but also to think more generally about what the common problems in […]

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