Date: 16 Jul 2014
Start Time: 10:00 am
Location/venue: M-Shed Princes Wharf, Wapping Rd, Bristol , BS1 4RN
There are two main streams of new entrants into academia – student progression through to doctorate and ‘mid-career shifters’ from professional workplace settings. This event pays particular attention to the support and development needs of workplace professionals, for example in Business, Education and Law, dealing with the cultural and organisational shock on entering academia, and the realities of ‘being academic’ in their discipline. Book on this event. More...

The programme for the HEA Social Sciences Conference, Teaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences, is now available. It includes over 50 parallel sessions across the four conference strands. There will also be two keynote speakers at the conference. Professor Mike Sharples from The Open University will talk on the subject of innovating pedagogy: futures for teaching, learning and assessment in higher education. And in her keynote presentation Professor Keri Facer from the University of Bristol will explore current thinking about the challenges and opportunities that may be presented over the next 50 years and explore their implications for the idea of the university.
More information about the keynote presenters and the conference programme are available here. More...

By Kevin Kee. If the value of history, languages, literature and art is increasingly being questioned that’s partly the fault of people like me. We haven’t spoken loudly enough, or often enough, about how we practice and share the humanities.
The way we work and the way we communicate is not as divorced from our times – or from the realities of industry and the economy – as some opinion columnists and think-tank commentators might have you believe. More...

By Michael Hammond. When I meet people and they find out that I am a history professor, often I hear how much they enjoy a particular history story, or that someone in their family has read a book on a certain World War II general or Civil War battle. Sometimes, I learn how much they enjoy watching the History Channel, which leaves me unsure whether they are thinking of the Hitler documentaries, the backwoods reality shows, or the ridealongs with antique hunters. Curious folks—or those who have college-bound kids—often ask, “what does someone *do* with a history degree, anyway?” That question is a tough one, because as most scholars in the humanities know, there is not one clear answer. While it is a simple enough question, it evokes a dramatic answer on the grand scale. More...

By Brad Ferguson. You’re graduating from a liberal arts program – now what? Many graduates have neat trajectories laid out before them: Medical students become doctors, engineering students become engineers, education students become teachers, and business students become business owners.
But what about our liberal arts graduates? What do they become? More...