Research interests

My current research interests primarily lie in the areas of higher education policy, research evaluation and judgements around the social usefulness of university research (particularly in humanities), university ‘third mission’, and the construction of student and academic identities. The latter is increasingly being pursued through the investigation of experiences of early career researchers and academics, in a bid to determine the factors that influence academic paths, challenges, and opportunities, in a professional landscape faced with unprecedented levels of competitiveness and diversification.

My doctoral research was focused on citizenship education policy and democratisation-through-education in post-authoritarian countries, and I still maintain strong interests in the areas of citizenship education, education policy, and the relationship between academic and democratic practice.

I employ qualitative methodologies, and have a particular fondness for discourse analysis.

Research supervision

I would be happy to support research projects in any of the following areas:

• higher education
• academic identities and practice
• university ‘third’ mission
• education policy
• citizenship education
• democratisation and education

External impact and engagement

I support impact and public engagement activities across the College of Humanities, and have since 2016 acted as the University of Exeter co-ordinator of the AHRC/BA funded, SAS-curated Being Human festival, an annual nationwide celebration of humanities research.

In my previous post at the University of Oxford, I co-developed a training resource for academic researchers in impact and knowledge exchange, available at http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/impact-and-knowledge-exchange

Contribution to discipline

I am a co-convenor for the Higher Education SIG of the British Educational Research Association.

Biography

I completed a DPhil in Education in 2015 at the University of Oxford. Following a year of research and teaching appointments at the Oxford Department of Education, I took up my post at Exeter in 2016.