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
The Paradox of Work and Home Segmentation
Separating work from home life is seen as a way of achieving psychological detachment from work that allows workers to restore the energy they deplete from work and maintain high levels of well-being, particularly through minimising conflict between work and nonwork domains. My research, with colleagues across three universities, found support for this causal chain […]
Archiving Richard III
In November 2023 I began a two-year project to bring together the digital records generated by the University relating to the discovery and identification of King Richard III, 2012-2015. The project aims to collect these records from across the institution and ensure their long-term preservation as part of the University Archive. The project was funded […]
War of the Worlds Letters
A digital library collection from the University of Michigan, The Richard Wilson – Orson Welles Papers preserves 1,349 letters sent to the New York City office of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air after the original CBS Radio Network broadcast of War of the Worlds on Sunday, October 30, 1938. It was transcribed by volunteers and […]
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 […]
The Muslim Terror Within: Tajikistan’s Islamophobic Legislation
Michael Dhanoya PhD Candidate in Criminology Tajikistan has become the latest country to place prohibitions on Muslims. … Previously, various nations around the globe have made headlines for curtailing the right to freedom of religious expression for their minority Muslim populations. What makes the edicts passed in Tajikistan on the 19th of June, 2024 all […]
Political Cartooning in Côte d’Ivoire: Interview with Lassane Zohoré
JI: What first drew you to cartooning? LZ: I’ve been cartooning since I was little, before I started school. I remember entertaining myself by drawing on the living room door, I would draw everywhere! With my friends I would take part in cartooning competitions, we would challenge each other. Sometimes we would go looking for […]
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. […]
Good luck, Victoria! It won’t be the samian without you.
please click here to go to the blog post on the Arch-I-Scan news website.
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 […]
Hello world!
Welcome to staffblogs.le.ac.uk Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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 […]
Hello world!
Welcome to staffblogs.le.ac.uk Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A legal war is no less lethal.
The question of the legality of the war in Iraq was, quite deliberately, beyond the scope of Chilcot Enquiry and the report published yesterday makes no direct comment about legality. Never the less, for many the question of the legality of the war is crucial. The initial response to the report is that it indirectly […]
New Year, New Career, New Outlook
January is rubbish. It’s cold, wet and dark and your holiday is over. You are back, revising hard for your exams and assignment deadlines are coming in thick and fast, so how do you motivate yourself to get back on the job/internship search. Ten members of the Career Development Service Team tell you how; “Plan […]
Being Disturbingly Informative. By Shane McCorristine
Last year I visited a fine old building nestled incongruously close to the skyscrapers and busy financial offices of Market Street in downtown Philadelphia. The building houses the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the oldest private medical organisation in the United States (founded in 1787). Today, Philadelphia’s heyday as the centre of medical and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Food Stories – the afterlife of a research project
It’s obviously been quite a while since this blog was updated, but that doesn’t mean we have forgotten about Consuming Authenticities! In fact, plenty of exciting developments have been quietly happening behind the scenes, which I will write more about over the coming weeks and months: we have been continuing to publicise and distribute our […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies: book launch
On July 4th 2018, the eminent scholar of empire, Professor Philippa Levine (University of Texas, Austin), launched my edited volume, A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, at the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association, held at ANU, Canberra. This volume is one of the key outcomes of my ‘Carceral Archipelago’ project. […]
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 […]