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 […]

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Making Meaning: Author, Reader, Text

This is the second lecture in our second-year theory core module, and it introduces students to theories on the relationships between authors, readers, texts, and their meaning. Below you can find the the handout for this lecture. Prezi to follow!

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Fail Better: Surviving the Slings & Arrows of Academic Fortune

Academia often seems filled to brimming with misanthropy merchants, doom prognosticators and naysayers. It is true, however, that we do have to deal with an unusually high degree of scrutiny, evaluation and appraisal in our professional lives. This can take a toll on even the most Polyanna-ish of characters. It is a tough gig, and […]

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The Research Excellence Framework (REF)

Unless you’ve been asleep in the library for the past few years, you’ll almost certainly have heard about the REF (Research Excellence Framework); but you might be less aware of exactly what it is, how it affects you as a researcher, and what you need to do to prepare. In this post I’ll highlight the […]

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Me, Myself & Social Media: Some Reflections

In 2012 I was finally persuaded – by myself rather than anyone else – to join the world of social media beyond Facebook in the form of tweeting and blogging, mainly to explore its uses for academics, in particular postgraduate students (see @Nadine_Muller and The New Academic). It seems appropriate, therefore, to spend a few […]

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Publishing Articles & Book Chapters

So far, we’ve looked at how to communicate a topic verbally, in front of conference audiences and students. What I’d like to consider in this post is how to begin publishing your research in writing, be it as a book chapter in an edited collection or as an article in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s important […]

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[Publication] Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminism, & Neo-Victorian Fiction

The plot of Sarah Waters’ third novel, Fingersmith (2002), is based on a complex web of matrilineal narratives, which eventually are uncovered as fictions. This essay will analyse these matrilineal fictions in terms of their influences on the novel’s protagonists Sue and Maud, as well as considering the novel’s matrilinealism first as a feminist metaphor for third-wave feminism and secondly as a metafictional device commenting on neo-Victorian fiction’s relationship to the past. Finally, it will highlight the genre’s similarities to third- wave feminism in terms of their shared concern for and treatment of the relationship between past and present.

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