When I began to write for this blog, I had just started my first permanent academic job and the advice given came from that limited perspective. Academic advice is a…
Written by Caroline Magennis
Caroline Magennis is a Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Salford. She teaches courses on Modernism, Fiction, Irish literature and Literary Theory. Her research focuses on contemporary Northern Irish literature and culture and is kept updated at https://salford.academia.edu/CarolineMagennis
Academic ‘Resolutions’
It’s no secret that I love this time of year. For those of us who have taken jobs away from our families, it is a great joy to be able…
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Since I graduated with my PhD in 2008, the landscape of Higher Education in the UK seems to have been continually shifting. As a academic job hunter you try your…
Everything I did wrong…
…while hunting for an academic job. For five years I was employed in a variety of (most welcome) short term contracts, and I interviewed the length and breadth of the…
The Next Big Thing
Whether you are actively hunting a job, or thinking about advancement in your current one, research planning can be a tricky skill to master. There are so many factors to…
Money Money Money
WARNING: contains mild misery. In academia, we are often comfortable with talking about class in the abstract without fully getting to grips with the ways in which income disparity influences…
Cruel Summer
‘You get the summer off, right? Go on loads of holidays, yeah?’ I imagine you’ve been asked this once or twice, and you’ve rolled your eyes so hard you pulled…
The Problem of ‘Fitting In’
You know that feeling, right? That you don’t ‘fit’ in an academic situation, whether it is a job interview, a conference or a seminar about how you have to have…
Getting your Writing Back
If your writing flows constantly and effortlessly, this is not the post for you. I am deeply, unattractively envious of you sitting down at your laptop and playing it like…
If you build it, they will come
You should organise an event. Yes, you. It doesn’t matter if it is a massive conference or a reading group or a seminar. For what it’s worth, I think doing…