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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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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I realise that for many of you none of what I write here will be news. Especially in the social sciences and the creative arts, the practices that have in recent years become known as public or community engagement often have long been an integral part of research and other academic activities. However, I feel […]
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If you plan to stay on the academic route after your Ph.D., you will certainly, sooner or later, have to apply for some sort of funding, be it for the organisation of a conference or a funded conference place, funding to explore new teaching methods, or – perhaps most commonly – to carry out your […]
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This post is based largely on my defense of my doctoral thesis in December 2011, though much of what I write here also comes from the mentors whose advice and help I’ve been fortunate enough to have since the very beginning of my Ph.D. (and, indeed, before). If you’d like to hear a more personal […]
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Academia is a wonderful profession, but being a PGR or ECR these days is tough. There are fewer jobs and the structures and demands are changing – great in terms of adding accountability to ‘old school’ models, but also creating a lot of pressure, especially for junior staff. I was an ECR in the mid-2000s […]
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EDITING ESSAY COLLECTIONS Last week we looked at the basics of being at the authorial end of academic publishing via the writing of book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. This week, I’d like us to turn the tables, as it were, and consider some of the essential aspects of taking on the role of (co-)editor […]
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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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Like conference papers, teaching is something that you may well be expected to begin early on in your career as a researcher, most likely from the second year of your Ph.D. onwards, though rarely earlier than this. It is needless to say that there are numerous teaching strategies out there, and that their suitability depends […]
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The prospect of planning an academic event often causes scholars’ faces to contort into shapes expressing mixtures of panic and dread, or – much less often – excitement and joy. Running a conference is largely an administrative and – quite obviously – organisational task rather than an intellectual exercise, and many of the processes involved […]
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[gview file=”http://www.nadinemuller.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-New-Academic-Conference-Costs-List1.pdf” width=”960″ height=”1400″ save=”1″]
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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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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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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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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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Seminar, 02/04/2013 “BSA Pre-Conference Day”, BSA Postgraduate Forum, London
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By Elizabeth Gibney, Times Higher Education (24 May 2012), pp.22-23
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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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