Dear blog,

Even though it’s August, I’ve still been really busy. It’s funny because there are still people out there who think that we get three months holiday over the summer. Actually I get 25 days plus the university closure days and bank holidays and they seem to go pretty fast.

I’ve shortlisted for the Davy Letters MHRA research associate now: it was tough. There were lots of applicants many of whom were really very good. One easy way to get rid of a few applicants was to only interview people who had their PhDs since there were so many of them. We also looked at the historical period covered by PhDs in an attempt to get someone who knew as much as possible about Davy’s period. In the end we shortlisted four people and the interviews are next Friday.

I’m reading an MRes for Edge Hill University and the viva is next week. My last student at Salford, Jess Roberts, got her PhD nearly two weeks ago — that was absolutely brilliant. Mainly my time has been taken up with writing the Case for Support for the AHRC Leadership Fellow scheme. It’s incredibly time consuming and I feel quite despondent about my chances of success but nonetheless you have to put everything into it to have any chance at all. Add to all of this the usual admin related to being Research Director in the department. I took five days leave to see friends in the French Alps last week (only three were working days) but I had to spend a full day responding to emails on my return. It’s August! This is madness.

Enough moaning already. I need to get back to work…

Sharon

Dear blog,

So, it’s been a while. I haven’t posted for a year I think. First there was the upheaval of getting the blog moved to Lancaster when I got my post there in September and since then I’ve been too busy and have gotten out of the habit of blogging. But, I’m going to give this thing a go again and see how it turns out.

It’s been a great year: Lancaster is great; the students are just brilliant and I’ve really enjoyed teaching them (even though I was teaching Theory and well out of my comfort zone!); my colleagues are just lovely and very clever indeed; the whole year has been exhilarating and exciting. It’s been hard work too, particularly all the teaching prep, and the admin role I have can be time consuming.

I had a great time at two conference last month: NASSR in Washington, which was brilliant. It was organised by Richard Sha who writes on science and medicine in the Romantic period and perhaps partly because of this there were loads of fantastic papers on these subjects. Then I went to the John Thelwall @ 250 conference in London and learned more about what an amazing man he was. He had a number of medical interests (he wrote an essay on vitality in the 1790s, decades before Abernethy and Lawrence’s spat), he was the friend of a number of important surgeons in London (including Henry Cline), and he spent a great part of his life as a speech therapist and using poetry to teach how to say words correctly. All of this was aligned with his radical politics (he was one of those tried and acquitted in the 1794 Treason Trials). He’s a fascinating figure and it was great to find out more about him.

So now I’m beginning to write a grant application to fund the next stage of the Davy Letters project, which needs to be submitted to OUP at the end of 2017. Monday is the deadline for the MHRA part-time research assistant post (http://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=A1039) and we’ll be interviewing for that on the 29th August for someone to start on 1st October. It’s all very exciting though still leaves little time for research, fingers cross for this grant application which might help with that…

It’s good to be back. More soon,

Sharon