What are you reading?

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

September 13, 2012

Geoffrey Alderman, professor of politics and contemporary history, University of Buckingham, is reading Julia Bush's Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2007). "Celebration of the suffragettes at the 2012 Olympics obscured (deliberately?) the fact that many women in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain were not interested in having thrust upon them the right to vote, and that the anti-suffrage movement had, perhaps, as many supporters as the Pankhursts. Bush paints a brilliant picture of the 'antis', whose passionate defence of their view of the place of women has been largely erased from public memory."

Barry Hymer, professor of psychology in education, University of Cumbria, is reading Jo Warin's Stories of Self: Tracking Children's Identity and Wellbeing Through the School Years (Trentham Books, 2010). "A beautifully sensitive, perceptive and insightful synthesis of the author's longitudinal study of five children whom she came to know between the ages of three and 17. It speaks to the emergent concept of identity capital, to a critique of infant determinism, to the status of social and emotional goals in education, and to the fruits of well-executed qualitative research."

Emma L.E. Rees, senior lecturer in English, University of Chester, is reading Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography (Virago, 2012). "Wolf applies her characteristically energetic mind to a controversial subject, investigating women's sexuality and cognition. It's a brave eye-opener of a book, which entertainingly synthesises autobiography, culture and neuroscience. It is The Beauty Myth for the 21st century."

Claire Warden, lecturer in drama at the University of Lincoln, is reading Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (Penguin, 2000). "This Modernist classic amuses and exasperates in equal measure. The empty selfishness of the central characters proves as irritating as Waugh intended and the masterful interruptions to the narrative (the deaths and the war) ensure that this book does not celebrate the witty 'Bright Young Things' as much as scrutinise their hollowness and the society that bores them."

Roger Brown, professor of higher education policy, Liverpool Hope University, has been reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012). "It is a fascinating history of a city in which the animosity between the Jews, Christians and Muslims has been exceeded only by that between the various Christian denominations. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the present state of the Middle East."

You've reached your article limit

Register to continue

Registration is free and only takes a moment. Once registered you can read a total of 6 articles each month, plus:

  • Sign up for the editor's highlights
  • Receive World University Rankings news first
  • Get job alerts, shortlist jobs and save job searches
  • Participate in reader discussions and post comments
Register

Have your say

Log in or register to post comments

Featured Jobs

Lecturer in Business and Management

De Montfort University

Reader in International Development

University Of Wolverhampton

School and College Engagement Officer

University Of Chichester

Pro Vice-Chancellor

Cranfield University

Professor of Business and Management

De Montfort University
See all jobs

Most Commented

Doctoral study can seem like a 24-7 endeavour, but don't ignore these other opportunities, advise Robert MacIntosh and Kevin O'Gorman

Matthew Brazier illustration (9 February 2017)

How do you defeat Nazis and liars? Focus on the people in earshot, says eminent Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt

Improvement, performance, rankings, success

Phil Baty sets out why the World University Rankings are here to stay – and why that's a good thing

Warwick vice-chancellor Stuart Croft on why his university reluctantly joined the ‘flawed’ teaching excellence framework

people dressed in game of thrones costume

Old Germanic languages are back in vogue, but what value are they to a modern-day graduate? Alice Durrans writes
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/what-are-you-reading/421101.article?sectioncode=26&storycode=421101
www.timeshighereducation.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-09
74367
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:AERFBQ3TJQT2QVDLOFOJU67NBAEKXUPK
<urn:uuid:263440c8-be6a-48b1-9508-4a6744b5e036>
2017-02-24T04:08:17Z
151.101.32.228
sha1:RR5RXENXKWIPCPH74UBTX4ZP63AFHCXH
<urn:uuid:aaea6f41-882c-4366-8b8d-d3c38c5ed49d>
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/what-are-you-reading/421101.article?sectioncode=26&storycode=421101
response
<urn:uuid:ce8e3daa-05ba-41f2-812e-7aee9b28cd72>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-09
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf