Welcome to the University of Leicester academic and staff blog site.
From Royal Society Fellows to early-career researchers, corporate services to academic related – all members of staff are engaged in creating new knowledge, whether in the sciences, social sciences, business, the arts or wherever their interests lie. This wealth of research expertise means Leicester has a unique and critical role to play in helping to overcome major challenges faced by society.
This site aims to provide a platform for University of Leicester staff – whether early-career, established or somewhere in between; whether researching and rehearsing ideas, networking with peers, or an early form of publication. As you would expect from Leicester, it’s inclusive and accessible so we look forward to your comments.
Latest posts from the staff blogs
Research skills training – Spring 2025
A new term begins and so too does our research skills training program. Topics include literature searching, managing research data, using Endnote and Zotero and much more. See the full program below. The majority of sessions are online. All times are UK local times. If you have any questions, please get in touch: librarians@leicester.ac.uk Session […]
The American Women Making History and Culture, 1963-1982 (“American Women”) collection on the internet archive includes Pacifica Radio Archives’ holdings from the five Pacifica radio stations (KPFA- Berkeley, CA; KPFK- Los Angeles, CA; WBAI- New York, NY; WPFW- Washington, DC; and KPFT- Houston, TX). They mainly relate to second wave feminism from 1960s-1980s and have fascinating interviews […]
Announcing 2025 Summer Internships for Leicester Undergraduates
Applications are open for the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE2025) scheme for 2nd, 3rd and 4th year Leicester undergraduates. The SURE programme provides paid opportunities for capable undergraduates to get a flavour of what it is like to work at the cutting-edge of research in the School of Physics and Astronomy and Institute for Space. […]
Social Security and the Gig Economy – Lessons from the French Intermittents du Spectable scheme.
A radical redesign of the UK benefits system for gig economy workers could draw inspiration from a French scheme that covers art industry workers writes Guillaume Wilemme and Piotr Denderski of the University of Leicester School of Business and Helene Benghalem of Lausanne University. From independent contracting and self-employment to on-call and temporary contracts, non-standard […]
Session 1: Reference intervals for African Buffalo
This blog discusses the teaching of data analysis with R. It was inspired by a short course that I first ran in the autumn of 2018. The notes for that course can be found on my github page. If you have not already done so then you might start by reading my introduction to […]
Discovery of Ancient Super-eruptions Suggests the Yellowstone Hotspot May Be Waning
Explosive super-eruptions (those involving more than 450 km3 of magma) are among the most extreme events to affect the Earth’s surface. Thankfully, humans have not experienced such an event in recorded history (the last massive volcanic explosion was 26,500 years ago). The only clues to help us better understand super-eruptions and their impacts are therefore […]
Student Perceptions of ‘useful’ Digital Technology
“Now, what I want is, Facts….Facts alone are wanted in life” (Mr Gradgrind) A recent Australian study by Henderson, Selwyn and Aston (2015) found that students use digital technologies to support the logistical aspects of their learning : time-saving; finding out about and fulfilling course requirements; mobile and remote access; researching information; getting organised. Where students […]
Finding Helena
May 3rd is the Feast of the Finding of the True Cross. Here Sara Haslam, our volume editor for Evelyn Waugh’s novel about St Helena, reflects on the time she has spent with the woman Waugh credits with the discovery. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, was in her seventies when she travelled to […]
Virtual Vauxhall Gardens
Introduction Virtual Vauxhall Gardens is a multidisciplinary project to create a multi-sensory, user-controlled, VR reconstruction of the experience of Vauxhall Gardens in 1752. Vauxhall Gardens was re-launched in 1732 as the first and most significant of the true Pleasure Gardens of Georgian London. Commercial pleasure gardens, an English invention, were privately-run sites of […]
MA Museum Studies Placement Week 7-8
My time now at the University of Leicester Archives and Special Collections has ended, and I am proud of what I have achieved. Through a lot of hard work, I was able to catalogue the Rose Griffiths Collection in its entirety. All 371 items have been looked at, cataloged, and repackaged. I was also able […]
International Women’s Day – The Gender Pay Gap at the University of Leicester
Today March 8th 2017 marks International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day is a global day of celebration that marks the struggle for gender equality. It provides a forum for celebrating the role of women and their achievements, identifies challenges for the future and campaigns for change. We know that one of the greatest challenges […]
Quality Improvement in Colonoscopy: A view from Sweden
I am Annica, a PhD student from Sweden. Last autumn, I participated as a student in the module “Quality and Quality Improvement in Healthcare” taught by the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Leicester. During my time in Leicester, the SAPPHIRE research group most kindly invited me to their meetings – and at […]
Automated concept / keyword generation for journal articles in repositories
I was checking out a research paper in the ACM Digital Library: SibylFS: formal specification and oracle-based testing for POSIX and real-world file systems and spotted something interesting: a “Concepts in this article” drop-down “Powered by IBM Watson” For more on Watson, see IBM Watson: Beyond Jeopardy! Q&A I’ve been thinking what calls to action a user […]
Universities Week and Adult Learners’ Week 2014
Putting some of the Richard III projects to one side for a moment, I thought I would write about the events of the next two weeks that I have been working on with colleagues. Firstly, Universities Week 2014 is 9-15 June. Universities Week is run by Universities UK to highlight the research that takes place […]
Tehmina Kazi reading and Muslim LGBT activism
As the final event of the Queering Islam events series for 2015-2016, Tehmina Kazi, the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, visited us at the University of Leicester to do a reading of her story ‘The Tulip Asylum’, a story about homosexuality in contemporary Iran. Below you can find an excerpt of her reading and […]
A history of computing in 5 minutes… and 38 seconds
I thought that I would share this excellent short video which covers the history of computing in less than six minutes – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9LK6EtxzgM. As a communications device it is very impressive – this style of using drawing is something I’ve seen before within Jisc projects (I think the University of Leeds produced one) and […]
Congratulations to Mindhacks
www.mindhacks.com has won the British Psychological Society’s Public Engagement and Media Award. Whilst this site aims to increase engagement with academic research by ordinary members of the public, it is also a useful and interesting resource for psychologists in training too.
Michael J Curtis Job Tips
I was a 1970s undergraduate, at a time when there was much change in world of archaeology, and I found myself leaving university and venturing into that scary world of business. As it happened, what materialised was an interesting, and varied, journey and one which took me in and out of both the public and […]
Dancing With Strangers: Body and Otherness in the Experience of Citizenship – by Rita Marcalo
This post is authored by Rita Marcalo, dancer, choreographer and Artistic Director of Instant Dissidence, as a response to the Workshop ‘Arts and Citizenship’ held at the Department of Media and Communication in June 2015. Since 2013 I have been developing a performance series entitled Dancing With Strangers. The first instance in the series took the European […]
Hello world!
Welcome to staffblogs.le.ac.uk Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Daring Deeds of Valour
Daring Deeds of Valour By Dr Rachel Bates, University of Leicester The 29 January 2016 marks the 160th anniversary of the Victoria Cross, a key legacy of the Crimean War (1854-56). Over the past four years, I have been looking at how the Crimean War shaped British understanding of war, violence and nationhood. The creation […]
Mars Sample Return is Underway with Mars2020 Launch
With the successful launch of Mars2020 from Cape Canaveral today the first stage in a long and complex sample return plan is finally underway. Mars Sample Return has been envisaged for many decades but it is only since around 2008 that a feasible architecture has been developed. Mars Sample Return has the ultimate aim of […]
Holocaust Memorial Day, Holocaust denial and museums
What were you doing twenty years ago today? You probably don’t remember exactly, and neither do I, not exactly, but it is quite likely that by now on a Sunday in 1999 I would have been out in the cold and snow giving guided tours of the Concentration Camp Memorial Site that I was […]
The Characteristics of a Leader: Early America and Ancient Rome
Leadership is in the moment. Building the momentum and trust of a followership depends on everything else going on in the lives of followers. It is influenced by the culture around them. The leader’s characteristics must fit local expectations of leaders, but exceptional leaders rewrite these expectations. I’m moving to Boston next month and […]
Luigi Ghirri and the Photography of Place
Our book on Luigi Ghirri has just been published: M. Spunta and J. Benci (eds), Luigi Ghirri and the Photography of Place. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017) https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/79823?rskey=lwTAcx&result=1 Many thanks to all the contributors and to all those who supported our research project. Please share this with interested colleagues.
Memorial Page
Mark Pluciennik died on 7 May at the age of 62, following a battle with a progressive neurological condition. Mark joined the School of Archaeology and Ancient History in 2003 and was the second Director of Distance Learning in Archaeology and Ancient History at Leicester, retiring in 2011. He subsequently held the title of University […]
Supporting student learning in 2020-21: avoiding a common misstep
One if the many important questions to have arisen during the current pandemic, is how we can effectively induct and orient students into new ways and, indeed, new modes of learning. Although this is to be very much welcomed, some of us would also want to caution against and unfortunate move people sometimes make when […]
Creating an effective e-learning resource: some helpful tips for a challenging process
One of my initial tasks when I started on the ‘Learning Outcomes Project’ was to develop an online resource that aimed to improve students use of their learning outcomes. My brief was as general as that, however, I knew that we wanted a resource that students would find useful as a learning support and would help them to […]
Prize-winning poster!
We are delighted to announce that our project has just won the poster prize at the Society for Legal Scholars conference in York, which was attended by our project leader, Dr. Dawn Watkins. The poster, “Adventures with Lex… The Story So Far”, gives an overview of our project, a summary of the data collection, and […]
Juno Mission unveils the depth and structure of planet’s shrinking red spot and colourful bands
Dr. Leigh Fletcher, Participating Scientist for the NASA’s Juno mission, reports on latest discoveries revealing the 3D structure of Jupiter’s deep atmosphere, in an article recently published on TheConversation. Further information can be found in press releases from JPL and from Leicester. Nasa’s Juno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed its five-year prime mission to […]