Category: Writing
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Inductions and introductions
At long last, the start of term has arrived, and with it has come the inevitable volley of meetings, talks and Q&A sessions that characterizes the start of any new academic enterprise. Thursday was ‘induction day’, when our ever-so-slightly-nervous cohort of new PGR (postgraduate research) students from all disciplines filed into the Alumni Auditorium to meet…
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I made a thing!
Apologies for the lack of a post last week – arriving in Exeter has been something of an adventure (and one that will certainly get its own blog post in due course!). I haven’t been inactive in the blogosphere, though: one of my projects over the past week has been producing a short little piece on…
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What exactly is ‘Anglo-Norman’?
As obvious as it may seem, every PhD project needs constraints: this mantra extends even to the apparently-arcane field of ‘medieval French literature’. At first glance, the alterity of the field, both in its temporal distance from us and in its language, may appear to suffice in this respect: surely ‘it’s medieval, and it’s in…
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Medieval Didactic Literature
Okay, I’ll admit it: for a so-called ‘PhD blog’, my contributions so far have been very much focused on the last of those three little letters (‘D’ stands for ‘digressions’, right?). In an attempt to redress the balance slightly, the next few blog posts will constitute my attempt to put things right. Over the next…
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Academic Diaries: The Student Planner
When I was younger, one privilege I got to enjoy was the ‘back-to-school’ shop. As the years went on and I became more responsible for my choices of study, I became fascinated by the range of options open to me in terms of stationery and filing: would I use plastic wallets this year? Which colour…
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The “So-What?” Question
Whenever I’m writing an essay and I have an idea that I want to include, I like to ask myself a question. I call it the ‘so-what test’, and it consists of asking this question as many times as necessary in order to elucidate why what I’m saying is significant. This text is written in…
Edward Mills 