of a social historian
Since I was young, probably before I even knew there was such a thing as An Historian, I wanted to be a writer. Novels, film scripts and songs were all more obvious fantasies than scholarly tomes, but it’s the same impulse to carve thoughts into words that drives me in my academic writing today.
I still feel I’m finding my feet as a writer, so my blogging makes no attempt to offer writing advice beyond the undergraduate essay. If you do want academic writing advice there’s plenty out there – including one of my personal favourite blogs, Education Professor Pat Thomson’s patter. What you’ll find here are personal reflections and musings on topics ranging from blogging to writing academic articles and books, to publishing as well as history as drama or documentary.
I’m sat in a coffee shop, reading for a book review I’m writing, and earlier this afternoon I overheard someone in a group at the next table. I hadn’t been trying to listen to their conversation. If anything, I’d been trying not to be grumpy about their loudly discussing poverty and gender politics while I …
Continue reading "Conversation and the Art of Depressed Academia"
There's a lot of advice out there on what to do and not do when writing a monograph. The main sub-genre is thesis-to-book advice, but there's plenty more besides on finding an authorial voice appropriate for the format, how to go about revising such a long piece of text, etc. Yet there's nothing out there (that …
I was born at the height of the Miners' Strike in the summer of 1984. I've often wondered what my parents were thinking of - bringing a child into a world at a time of such strife and division, with the fear of nuclear apocalypse looming so large. As I slowly realised the pictures on …
