War Widows’ Stories Launches Live on Woman’s Hour

On 11 November 2016, Mary Moreland and I launched the Heritage Lottery Funded project War Widows’ Stories live on Woman’s Hour. We were given eight star-struck minutes with BBC Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, and you can listen to the result below via BBC iPlayer. It’s needless to say I was so excited about being able […]

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16/03/2016 “Writing for Survival: Publishing & Precarity in the Lives of Early-Career Researchers” (Liverpool)

I’ve been invited to deliver this paper at the The University Press Redux Conference in Liverpool. You can find the full programme here, and the abstract for my paper below.  The processes, practices, and politics of publishing have a substantial influence on the careers and the lives of early-career researchers. A book – be it under contract […]

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Surviving in Silence: Child Sexual Abuse Survivors in Academia

I remember being a young teenager and hesitatingly explaining from my school desk why – uncharacteristically – I hadn’t produced any homework. It was my favourite lesson on a subject that held such fascination for me that it would later become the focus of my academic work. All I could say was that my family had had […]

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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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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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A Beautiful Mind

An anonymous contributors reflects on their experiences of schizophrenia during their PhD and their nevertheless successful journey to a permanent academic job.

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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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Supporting Student Wellbeing in Higher Education: Why & How

This post reflects on the issues surrounding supporting students’ wellbeing, especially academic workload, the unequal division of emotional labour, and the lack of appropriate training for those involved in pastoral care. It also offers five main strategies that can help support your students’ wellbeing and provide good pastoral care.

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Academia & Addiction

An anonymous PhD student discusses how Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the pressures of academia have led them to become addicted to painkillers. Are academics prone to socially acceptable addictions?

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