Made by John Felix, this film tells the story of the War Widows’ Quilt, a moving, important new memorial to the lives of Britain’s war widows. 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 captures the lives of war’s forgotten women past and present through oral history, participatory arts, public events, and archival research. The British public commonly imagine war widows to be elderly women who lost their husbands as a result of active combat in the Second World War, surrounded and supported by family, friends, the armed forces, and the state. While this applies to some women, it by no means describes the majority of Britain’s 18,950 war widows.
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I have been awarded one of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellows grants. Centred around War Widows’ Stories and starting in September 2018, the Fellowship will allow me to substantially develop the project through further research on the history of war and by continuing my work with the war widows’ community and museums in an effort to raise public awareness of the lives of war’s forgotten women past and present.
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I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected for one of the British Academy’s Rising Star Engagement Awards (BARSEA). These awards are granted to “some of the most promising and talented academics in the UK” and “are designed to encourage wider engagement with the humanities and social sciences within and beyond academia”. With an application endorsed by […]
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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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I’m really pleased to say that I’ve been awarded my first external grant since my PhD. It’s not exactly news anymore by now, but last semester was so busy that I just couldn’t find the time to record things as they were happening. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking […]
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Get the popcorn, and dim the lights … Ok, maybe not. But if you had 5 minutes to watch my BBC Arts film on deviant Victorian widows (and why they could be so dangerous!), I’d be very honoured and humbled. I had great fun making it, and am much more pleased with the result than I thought I […]
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I’m really pleased that my article about feminist history and mother-daughter relationships is out now in Feminist Theory and available to read for free as an “online first” publication. Below you can find the full reference for the print version of this piece, and the page on which you can access the full-text article.
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In this post I reflect the ways in which we normalise and internalise potentially harmful levels of stress in academia, and how many of us are led to believe that if we’re not stressed we’re not doing our job right.
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In this post I’m revisiting the questions which are inevitably produced by any academic (or indeed professional) who blogs about issues which cross the shaky boundaries between private and public identities, if there are indeed such distinct entities at all.
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This blog is about academia and me. It’s about academia and you. It’s about sharing my experiences of my profession, and about sharing knowledge and skills which are too often taken for granted. It’s about those academic voices which are either not heard at all, or are not heard enough. It’s about challenging dominant ideas of what academics should look like. It’s about redefining what it takes to be an academic and how academics are expected to present themselves, their lives, and their work. It’s about making ourselves and our profession simultaneously vulnerable and stronger, so that we can help change what makes us feel inadequate, ashamed, or unprofessional. So that we can help make academia more inclusive.
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Reflections on anxiety, on its relationship with academia, and why we need to learn to value ourselves.
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