Dear blog,

I haven’t written since Friday 8th December, which was my final day at the Royal Institution. Unfortunately the place has been in the press recently and not for good reasons. Due to continuing financial problems they are considering – as one among many options – to look into selling the Albermarle Street building (see the Chairman’s statement: http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000006895). This would be such a loss. It was a wonderful place to work for three months, such a vibrant atmosphere with each day bringing new visitors to see the building, have tours of it and the museum downstairs, as well as lectures and schools events. The building was being used to its capacity and it is the building, its historical objects, and its heritage that really brings something special to the event taking place. I’m glad to see that the danger of this has brought out our best scientific writers and thinkers in support of the RI and I really hope that something can be done.

I’ve not written this blog since then because I had lots of lovely holiday, all owed to me because I’d been unable to take many of my 27 days earlier in the year, a week before Christmas, Christmas to New Year, and then a week off in January too. At the end of the first week of the new semester it’s incredible how far away these seem. My timetable this semester is really very hard, a new MA module (which is very exciting too), plus I’m teaching Victorian Literature and one of my special options Monstrous Bodies to second year undergrads. I have nine new lectures to write mainly due to one of our nineteenth-century team leaving when redundancies where threatened.

I have papers to give too, a staff research seminar on February 13th, a paper at Sheffield Uni’s research seminar on 4th March, a paper to give at the excellent-looking conference ‘Medical Matters’ being organised by Mary Fairclough and Joanna Wharton at the University of York (http://www.york.ac.uk/eighteenth-century-studies/events/conferencemedicalmatters2013/). This is on top of a number of research projects that are at various stages of completion, with some in the very early stages of being thought through.

Good news has come in the form of the copy editor also wanting me to respond within a matter of days with copy editing queries on my new book, Creating Romanticism, which should be out with Palgrave Macmillan in July. My Lancet article is out today I think, which is brilliant and I’m very proud of that.

Anyway, it’s going to be a tough few weeks and I’m already struggling. I shall do my best not to moan on this blog but I’d like folk to know just how much work academics are routinely doing and how impossible this is to fit into anything like 9-5 hours for five days of the week.

Best,

Sharon