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Appointment
- Associate Professor (Teaching)
- Education and Practice Development
- Vice-Provost (Education and Student Experience)
Biography
- PhD Ancient History (UCL) 1994-8
- Postdoctoral study at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (2000-03)
- Postdoctoral Researcher on the Leverhulme/ESRC-funded Evidence, Inference and Enquiry project at UCL (2003-7)
- also part-time in the predecessor to UCL's Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching -- CALT (2003-7)
- Teaching Fellow (now Senior Teaching Fellow) in CALT 2007-present
Recent key areas:
- IOE-facing role for CALT
- Organiser UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015 and 2016
- Organiser Provost's Teaching Awards 2015 and 2016
- BEAMS-facing role for CALT 2011-2015
- external reviewer for a range of grant-funded projects, journals and organisations
Research Summary
My primary research focus is in adult learning and teaching and higher education. I generally draw heavily on my past research in history, history of religion, anthropology and literature and I'm interested primarily in communities (values and functioning, and how these are not as distinct as is often assumed). This puts me at the qualitative end of the spectrum with a persistent preference for ethnographic and narrative-based approaches. Where I tend to look for insight is in the interaction of people with institutional culture, operations and strategy.
In recent years, this is coalesced into an interest in interdisciplinarity and threshold concepts, and I am currently developing ideas implied in the Cultural Theory (misleadingly called 'Cultural Theory of Risk' by Wikipedia), as originally developed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas.
In practice then, I am particularly interested in teaching 'cultures', by which I mean the overall effect of curriculum design, and how teaching and institutions can embody, cultivate and silently enforce different values and practices.
Teaching Summary
I have been teaching since 1995 and have led over 30 credit-bearing modules and a range of non-credit bearing courses in that time. That has included Birkbeck, City Lit, Bristol University and Exeter University but the vast majority has been at UCL, across the departments of Greek and Latin, History and CALT, with eclectic roles in Anthropology, and the BASc.
In recent years my main teaching has been:
- UCL Arena courses
- Investigating Research, a module for MRes students across BEAMS and SLMS
- Part of the teaching team for BASc Approaches to Knowledge module
Academic Background
2013 | ATQ04 - Recognised by the HEA as a Senior Fellow | University College London | |
1999 | Doctor of Philosophy | University College London | |
1993 | Master of Arts | University College London | |
1991 | Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | University of Reading |