The ‘feel’ for a person that comes from encountering them in their home is difficult to replicate in depth online. The pandemic has forced many changes in the way we work, although the implications will take time to become fully apparent. The most prominent change, of course, is the acceleration […]

Nearing retirement doesn’t have to mean you’re ‘out of the game’. But for those who wish to continue playing, it takes determination, stamina and strategy when the odds are stacked against you. Likening aspects of careers to a game can be a useful analogy, prompting numerous insights about “goals”, “players”, […]

Is the concept of the academic role model primed for an update? The grand achievements of those who came before are often held up as inspiration for current members of the academy, but a more nuanced view might be required. Are role models inspirational or a sign of an impoverished […]

I am sure I am not alone in being asked quite often what it is that sociologists do. One way of answering this question is to refer to the work of particular sociologists, and I find myself doing this more often since I started looking systematically at obituaries. These may […]

A successful career can take many forms, and there are always lessons to be learned through studying people’s achievements. For successful academics, obituaries are revealing about what counts as success and how to achieve it. In the obituaries featured weekly in The Times Higher in the five years from January […]

A life expectancy of 75 may seem low for academics, but it is the average age at which death occurred for the people featured in the weekly obituaries column of The Times Higher over the five years from January 2015. Of course, it does not follow that university dons have […]