E-Musings: Social Media, Learning & Assessment

Several of the modules my department offers its undergraduate students have, as part of their assessment strategy, an online participation element, either via blogs, or – and this is what this post is concerned with – discussion boards within our virtual learning environment. Rather naively perhaps, I assumed that students would appreciate this “innovative” mode […]

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Giving Conference Presentations

No matter if as part of a seminar or a postgraduate conference at your own university, as part of your job interview, or as a requirement for your annual progress review as a doctoral student, at some point in your academic life you will – for better or worse, some might say – be asked […]

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Peer Reviewing & Book Reviews

Up until now we’ve taken a closer look at presenting, teaching, writing and editing, and, staying within the realm of publishing, in this post we turn to two final aspects of this area: the challenges of acting as a peer reviewer and of writing book reviews. It is likely that you will have a chance […]

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About My Blog & Me

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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[Publication] Dead Husbands & Deviant Women

Over the past decade, the detective widow has become a well-established character in the little-explored subgenre of neo–Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily series, the author argues, the detective widow investigates the gendered characteristics and complexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting the artistic crimes associated with historical fiction’s imitations and adaptations of the past.

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Academic Job Applications

It is notoriously difficult to advise people on how to get shortlisted for an academic job. In the end, someone can satisfy all of the relevant criteria but not get shortlisted simply because someone else satisfies them to a greater degree. The reality is that not all ‘minimally qualified’ candidates can be interviewed; this is […]

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