Dark Thoughts: Why Mental Illness Is on the Rise in Academia

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  I’m Senior Lecturer in English Literature & Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and a BBC New Generation Thinker. I specialise in literary and cultural histories of women, gender, and feminism in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present day, women’s writing, and widowhood. I also provide support, training, and development for postgraduate and early-career researchers.

Research

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  The War Widows’ Quilt: A Short Film

  Made from armed forces shirts by over ninety war widows and their family members, this beautiful and moving piece of art tells many individual stories of love, loss, and grief while also shining a light on the ongoing history of war widowhood in the UK.

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  War Widows’ Stories: Listen to the Voices of War’s Forgotten Women

  War Widows’ Stories captures the lives of war’s forgotten women past and present through oral history, participatory arts, public events, and archival research.

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  AHRC Leadership Fellows Award for War Widows’ Stories

  I’m thrilled to be able to announce that I have been awarded one of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellows grants.

Guides to Academia

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  3 Things You Should Do Before Your Academic Job Interview

  Researching your prospective employer is key to any good job application and interview. I’ve collated three key tips that will give you the edge over those who simply stick to departmental websites.

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  Someone’s Doing My PhD!

  This post is a brief reflection on how to deal with the fact that you might not be the only one working on “your” topic.

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  Academic Juggling: PhD vs CV

  Some of the most common questions with which PhD researchers are concerned focus on how they should set their priorities during their doctoral studies. What else, and how much of it, should you do next to researching and writing your thesis? As so often, I can’t answer this for all PhD students in all disciplines, but I wanted to try and give you an overview of some useful starting points if you’re hoping to prepare yourself for the academic job market during your doctoral studies rather than after, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. So some of...

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  We Regret to Inform You: On Interview Feedback

  Interview feedback is difficult to approach, both giving and receiving. As someone who has more often been on the receiving end, I’ve found directly helpful feedback to be the exception rather than the rule. So, this post is about how to interpret feedback which might not tell you as much as you want. For me, there are three phases to thinking about the interview after the event.   1.  Be honest with yourself When you come out of the interview, after you’ve taken a few deep breaths / had a shower / got home and had a stiff...

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  The Twilight Zone: After the PhD, Before the Academic Job

  You’re close to submitting your PhD, to passing your viva voce examination with flying colours, and to be awarded your doctorate. At various stages in these final months of your existence as a PhD student certain scary thoughts – of the practical kind – enter your mind repeatedly and persistently. When will my university email account be closed? Should I be emailing academic colleagues from my embarrassingly named non-institutional email account? How will I keep researching and writing without physical or online access to my university library and its resources? How will I stand a chance on the...

Musings

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  [Commentary] Thoughts, Fears, & Brexit

  I was invited to write this piece for the Times Higher Education blog, where it was originally published on 26 June 2016 under the title “‘I’m scared’: German academic in the UK on the Brexit vote”. You can read the original post here, and it is reproduced word for word, without alterations, below.  I am an immigrant. Moving to the UK was a dream of mine ever since I can remember. England was, after all, home to bands like The Clash and The Vibrators, and this was as good a reason as any for a teenager to determine that her...

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  How Do I Look? When Fear Interferes

  This week I got to be in my first ever film: a four-minute epic about Victorian widows, made for BBC Arts as part of the AHRC/ BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers scheme …

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  AHRC/ BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers

  I had been meaning to apply for the AHRC/ BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers initiative for a couple of years now, and last December I finally decided to take the time and fill in the application form. I proposed a programme on the history of widows in Britain, and explained the wider relevance of my research on this topic. The final section required applicants to write a review of a recent play, film, or book unrelated to their research that could be read on air. I offered a discussion of Maxine Peake’s play “Beryl” (2014), something which relates to...

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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 in my life that I’ve had to take sick leave for more than a day, and this, alongside my line manager’s kind encouragement to not come back until I was definitely better and pain-free, got me thinking. How many days had I spent...

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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 supervisory relationships are, and what makes for a good supervisor. That’s not what this post is, however. Rather, it’s something of a precursor, prompted by a slideshow I found this morning that presents the findings of a study on what Phd students really...