Pea Arts About

I recently embarked on a personal project I've been meaning to undertake for a while now, and that is to reboot my archived lectures from years of teaching fellowships here and fixed-term lectureships there and distribute them online. Back in 2017 I started this with screencasts of my conference papers uploaded to YouTube and intended to do the same with lectures.  A number of reasons led to avoidance. One is that only the older ones that (I feel from experience) are less robust have full notes while the stronger, more recent ones have scant notes, because that's where I had got with knowledge and retention at the time. I also got really into audio and wanted to have a go at making the podcast , which I've been doing for three years now. Another reason was simply that it dredges up memories, many of them painful, from my times at different universities in different cities. There were tough experiences everywhere I taught, but also incredible friendships, communities and ac...

I’m settling well in my fixed-term post of Teaching Fellow in Film and Visual Culture. The teaching load is heavy, the days will be manic, and I’m raring to get cracking. We’re covering some great material with which I am very comfortable, and am becoming happily reacquainted with Deleuze’s Cinema texts. The PhD has done something to my brain, reading Deleuze gives me such joy now – what a difference from the frustrated grappling during the MA. Hopefully I can help my second year undergraduates get a decent grasp of him. With only four full-time staff (including brand new short-term me), teaching for the department this semester, we are stretched, but shaping up to be a crack team. There will be little time for our own research endeavours. The commissioning editor for my monograph is happy for me to push my deadline back and make producing the manuscript my summer project. I have major revisions to do on an article that came back from peer review due in March. Considering I threw...

Just a personal note on the passing of 2012. As most of my friends know, the first ten months of this year were not kind. The challenges were many and pervaded every area of my life. Without getting into specifics, there were times when I did not know how, or if, things could improve. With unrelenting support from a lot of people, I kept at it, kept working, kept trying, kept taking and acting on generous advice, kept taking comfort from reminders of the strong support network that has formed around me for the past number of years, and - as some of the members of that network promised - things got better. My thanks to them is to return that support in kind. Postgraduate study is a glorious yet arduous path to take in life, particularly if you expect it to provide a career for you. Hard work, determination, grit, being adaptable, and a bit of luck finding the right 'fit' (for you and employer), among other things, are how you might  get a foot in the door. I find not keeping c...