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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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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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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What Is Literature?

This is the introductory lecture for my Literary & Cultural Theory module. It introduces students to some of the questions theory can raise in relation to literature and its purpose as well as introducing some basic aspects of liberal humanism, and the module structure.

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Neoliberalism, Mental Health, & Academia

One of the hardest things about hearing about a PhD student who was harassed by a lecturer, and who then committed suicide while the lecturer kept his job, was that I wasn’t surprised. It’s not that I didn’t think the story was horrendous – I did. It’s that like most graduate students I am reminded […]

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