Last year the University launched a new integrated HR and Payroll system – Staff Connect. This introduced a new HR and Payroll system, management reports and the foundations of employee self-service.

The next phase of work on Staff Connect is now getting underway. It will see the phased introduction over the next year or so of further functionality to the system, enabling an automated, streamlined, single point of entry for many of our HR functions.

The aim of the second phase of Staff Connect is to streamline our HR processes and provide employees and managers with a one-stop-shop for most of your HR-related activity.

By the end of the second phase of development to Staff Connect you will be able to view and book onto training courses provided by Learning & Organisational Development (L&OD) and request annual leave via the system.

If you line manage others, Staff Connect will be where you go to authorise training and leave requests, record some forms of absence and you will have the option to log Appraisals/RPDs.  If you are a recruiting manager, Phase 2 will also see the replacement of the current i-grasp recruitment system.

The first of the new functionality to launch will be Training Administration – in September 2018.  This new element to Staff Connect will replace the existing system used by L&OD for training course administration, registration and evaluation of courses managed and delivered centrally by them.

If you are a regular user of the courses run by L&OD, either as a manager or as a member of staff, or are just interested in seeing how the new Staff Connect solution will work, user testing/training sessions, of about two hours in length, are being organised for each day of the week commencing 13 August.  To indicate that you would be interested in attending one of these sessions please contact Su Westerman (Staff Connect Communications and Engagement Manager).

If you have any questions or queries regarding any element of the project please also contact Su Westerman.  Alternatively, you can find out more at the Staff Connect Information website.

Congratulations to Alison Mansell, Student Conduct and Complaints Manager, and James Redmond, School and Business Manager, SSPSSR, who have both been made Fellows of the Association of University Administrators.

They join a growing list of AUA Fellows at Kent, which also includes: Wayne Campbell, Director of Student Services; Chloé Gallien, Master of Keynes College; Melissa Mulhall, Head of Administration, Social Sciences; Linda Lough, Head of Administration, Sciences; and Helena Torres, Centre Administration Manager, Brussels.

The AUA is the professional association for University professional services staff, with over 4,000 members drawn from all levels of University administration and management. AUA Fellowships are awarded based on criteria including continuing professional development, professional knowledge and capability.

Kent has 65 AUA members drawn from schools, faculties, Student Services, Information Services and Academic Division. Kent is joint 6th nationally in terms of its membership numbers. Earlier this summer, Kent Business School hosted the second AUA South Regional Symposium attended by 57 AUA members and non-members representing 13 Universities.

Our VC and President, Professor Karen Cox addressing the AUA South Regional Symposium 

A re-launch of the AUA@Kent network is planned for the autumn term as part of our aspirations to develop a wider range of local activities and events and raise the profile of the AUA across the University

Watch this space for more details!

The latest episode of podcast series on ‘Nostalgia’, hosted by Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, has just released.

In this week’s interview, Chris interviews Dr Laura Bailey, Lecturer in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, who talks about growing up in Newcastle and how the university culture has changed over the decades.

Laura places her earliest memory from when she was two and a half years old and she talks about her penchant for undertaking creative activities as a child, how she especially enjoyed the process of writing itself and about the peer pressure at secondary school in terms of learning about the latest songs. Laura reveals where she stands on the ‘Do you prefer Blur or Oasis?’ question before discussing her experience of watching The Princess Bride when growing up.

Laura went to university as a mature student and she ruminates on the role that fate and luck played in whether or not she was able to carry out a PhD. She recalls the role her inspirational teachers played in her life (and what happened when two of them, coincidentally, appeared at the till in Waterstones where she was working at the same time). An instructive conversation then unfolds regarding why several female academics added ‘Dr’ to their Twitter account name a few years ago, and the interview concludes with Laura talking about whether she has fulfilled the dreams she had when she was young and which decisions she wishes she had made.

The podcast is available here:

https://audioboom.com/posts/6917826-laura-bailey

The latest issue, featuring a new-look design, has been posted to Kent alumni and will be distributed to graduates at the Congregations ceremonies this July.

Included in this edition:

• Why we struggle to get a good night’s sleep as we get older
• A timeline of the Templeman Library
• Alumni guest feature by Malini Pittet – the Anti-Poaching Dogs of the Chyulu Hills
• Behind the scenes with Lee Ballard, Senior Grounds Person
• From the archive: Tommy Cooper’s fez
• University and community news, and more!

Canterbury: You can currently pick up a copy from Rutherford Annexe (more locations coming soon)
Medway: Copies of the magazine can be found dotted around the receptions in Kent buildings

Alternatively, if you’d like to be sent a copy in the internal mail, please email your name and location to Chris Wenham: c.wenham-455@kent.ac.uk

Work has already started on the winter 2018 issue of the magazine, but if you’ve got ideas for it, please contact the Editorial Board via c.wenham-455@kent.ac.uk

Or join us at the official launch on Thursday 12 July in Darwin Conference Suite 3, 15.30-17.00: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-launch-kent-magazine-summer-2018-tickets-47670179791

Dr Simon Elliott, alumnus and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies, has made a number of media appearances drawing upon his expertise from his recent book Septimius Severus in Scotland: The Northern Campaigns of the First Hammer of the Scots (Greenhill Books, 2018).

Simon features in the latest issue of Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology, dated July/August 2018, contributing an article entitled ‘The First “Hammer of the Scots”. Minerva is a bi-monthly magazine with a broad focus on all aspects of the ancient world.

In the article, Simon asks ‘how did Severus come to be in this far-flung place at the north-west edge of the Roman Empire – and what happened after he arrived?’ The article describes how Septimius Severus set about the brutal annihilation of the Caledonian people with his 50,000 strong Roman Army.

The issue of Minerva is out now, and stocked in newsagents across the UK. It is also available via subscription here: http://minervamagazine.co.uk

Simon also featured in The Independent newspaper last week, interviewed about the discovery of a Roman ‘hand of God’ near Hadrian’s Wall.

The hand is made of bronze is associated with the God Jupiter, beloved by the Roman military, and is believe to have been deposited as part of a religious ritual to mark the completion of a military fort where a temple to Jupiter was built.

The decision to build a temple within a fort took place after the Severus campaign in Scotland. ‘It was almost certainly one of the most brutal military campaigns ever fought on British soil. It’s likely that future archaeological investigations over the coming years will reveal the full horror of this long-forgotten conflict,’ explains Simon in the article.

To read the full article, please see The Independent page here.

The editors of Skepsi, a postgraduate-run journal within the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL) are calling for articles on the themes of ‘Wandering’ and ‘Home’ for publication in a future issue to be published during 2019.

The issue will build upon the success of the journal’s eleventh interdisciplinary conference, which investigated the ambiguous relationship between the two concepts, the terms presenting both a binary opposition as well as being closely connected.

Articles are welcomed from all disciplines within the Humanities as well as Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Sociology, Politics, Architecture and Visual Arts. Papers coming from an inter-, trans- or multidisciplinary background are particularly welcomed.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following and their interrelations:

• Wandering in European Romanticism and Modernism.
• Wandering women in European literature and film.
• The figure of the flâneur and the flâneuse in modern and contemporary literature.
• The connection between migration and ‘feeling at home’; the concept of home viewed from the perspective of a displayed person.
• Home as a social or private spatial dimension, a psychological experience of safety, stability and emotional experience, a practice and/or an active state of being in the world.
• ‘Feeling at home’, or ‘not at home’ as a distinctive emotional experience influenced by the social, political and economic context and by the architectural configuration of domestic environment.
• Feeling at home in our mind; mind-wandering; the boundaries between wandering creatively and getting lost in speculations.
• The internet and virtual wandering as a means of transforming the way we inhabit the non-virtual realm of the home.

Articles must be in English, between 5,000 and 8,000 words long, and accompanied by an abstract of about 250 words and brief biographical details of the author, both of which may, if desired be included in one file with the article. If quotations from works originally published in a language other than English are included, please observe the following conventions:

• If the works have a published translation into English, the quotations may be either solely from the published translation or from the original language version followed by the published translation.
• If the works do not have a published translation into English, the quotations must be from the original language version followed by a translation by the author of the article.

Submissions should be sent as Word files to skepsi@kent.ac.uk.

The closing date for submissions is 31 August 2017.

For the original detailed fro conference papers, please see the page here.