The latest issue of the Leadership Bulletin, designed to give an overview of key developments at Kent, is now available.

The latest issue (12 December 2018) includes a congratulations from our Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Karen Cox, to everyone involved in the University’s win, for the second year running, of the Outstanding Support for Students Award. The win this year was for the OPERA (Opportunity, Productivity, Engagement, Reducing barriers, Achievements) Project.

There is also an update on Executive Group and Extended Executive Group (Executive Group plus Deans) meetings, including progress reports on KentVision and on the Medway strategy.

The “Long Read’ focuses on the review of the University’s organisational structure, led by our Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer, Denise Everitt.

The Bulletin is distributed fortnightly to all members of the Senior Leadership Forum to cascade to staff in schools and professional service departments. If you haven’t received your copy yet, you can read the bulletin online.

Dr Jeremy Scott, Senior Lecturer in the department of English Language & Linguistics, and Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, have recently published chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English presents new scholarly essays on the short story in English as a phenomenon of world literature, and explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This collection of innovative essays by new and established scholars explores these and other questions, addressing stories from around the world, and considering their relationship to place, identity, history and genre.

“This paper investigates the expressive and methodological possibilities inherent in writing ‘short’ through close analysis of the narrative structure and prose style of a sample of what can be classified variously as ‘postmodern’, experimental and anti-realist short stories,” Jeremy Scott writes in regards to his chapter ‘Experimental Short Stories’. “The paper’s thesis is that the experimental short story genre can be defined and delineated in a principled manner with reference to concepts drawn from stylistics, and that such definition has useful implications and lessons for both creative practice in general.”

Paul March-Russell’s chapter, ‘Impressionism and the Short Story’, looks at the complicated history and multiple meanings of Impressionism in philosophy, aesthetics and the visual arts before focusing on short story writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Professor Amalia Arvaniti, of the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is the recipient of a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2019-2021) for her project ‘Politics and Linguistic Variation in a Post-Diglossic Speech Community.’

Amalia will work on a monograph documenting changes in the Greek sound system as it evolved after the official abolition of diglossia in 1976, and recent developments – under the influence of moral panic due to the financial crisis in Greece – which have led to a revival of features from the diglossic era. Amalia will use social media to canvass views on these changes, will analyse speech samples and conduct perceptual sociolinguistic experiments to assess the role that these revived features have on the social evaluation of speakers and of diglossia-related registers of Greek.

In order to permit members of the Estates Department to participate in their Christmas lunch, the following areas will be closed, or operating a reduced service from 11.30 on Friday 14 December:

• Estates Customer Services will be closed from 11.30 and will re-open again at 08.00 on Monday 17 December. Anyone with enquiries about emergency defects should contact Campus Security on extension 3300. Authorised intranet users can still report non-essential defects via the Estates intranet service or email estatescustomerservices@kent.ac.uk
• The Estates Department reception will be closed from 11.30 and will re-open at 08.30 on Monday 17 December.

• The main Switchboard will be closed from 11.30 and will re-open again at 08.30 on Monday 17 December. If you would like any diverts set up on your landline or mobile devices, please email telexchange@kent.ac.uk before Friday.

• Postal Services will not be delivering or collecting mail after 11.30. Timings will be brought forward for the departments that normally have their first or only delivery/collection after this time. The Post Room will be closed between 11.30 and 15.00 and the Postal Counter for personal mail will not be open on this day. If mail volumes are not excessive, outgoing items collected before 11.30 should still be processed on the same day. Urgent items of business mail may be hand delivered to the Post Room between 15.00-15.30, where they will be processed in order of priority.

All other areas of the Estates Department will be operating as usual. In particular, the Design & Print Centre and the Security & Transport Centre will remain open.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This holiday season, Kent Sport are providing a variety of events and activities to help get you in the festive spirit.

Friday 14 December – Save the date! You are invited to join us for free mince pies and mulled wine at the Pavilion Café Bar, so join in the festive fun! You can also enjoy some amazing live music with Christmas classics. The Blue Wave Trio will be singing at this event. The seasoned group will be singing songs from the American songbook with a sprinkling of Christmas spirit. Free event, open to all staff and students. 12pm to 2pm. 

Wednesday 12 December – Christmas fitness and dance classes, including Santa’s Spin, Jingle Bell Zumba and Silent Night Relaxation. Free for Gold and Silver members, usual Bronze member fee. For details see the poster. The current fitness and dance class timetable (through to 14 December) and the vacation fitness and dance class timetable (17 December to 11 January) are available here. For our other timetabled sport and fitness activities through to the end of this term see Active Kent.

Festive wellbeing – Worried about all the festive indulgences? Check out our membership options.

Christmas closure – Kent Sport will be closed on Friday 21 December through to Tuesday 1 January. All facilities will re-open on Wednesday 2 January. Look out for our next issue of Active Kent in the New Year with all the details of what’s on at Kent Sport for term 2.

Our brand new Staff Guide webpages are launched today (Wednesday 12 December).

The new Guide signposts you to essential staff information, in easy-to-search categories, such as:

• Getting Started
• Employment and Benefits
• Professional and Personal Development
• Day-to-Day Support
• Teaching and Research
• Safety and Wellbeing
• On Campus

You will also see an A-Z section that lists some of the things we find difficult to locate at times – including University policies and regulations, and forms, as well as a How do I? of common staff queries, from claiming expenses to booking a meeting.

The new Guide has been developed following a key recommendation from the Simplifying Kent Internal Project Phase One that we need to find a better way of signposting colleagues to key information.

A team, led by Wendy Raeside and Etienne Donzelot in Corporate Communications, have therefore spent much of the past year developing an alternative to our Campus Online webpages. They have been working closely with colleagues in other key Kent teams, such as WebDev in IS and HR, to ensure the new pages contain everything you need to know about working at Kent.

A major feature is the new Search function which, in the first instance, is limited to information contained with the Staff Guide pages, and should help you find the key information you’re looking for.

There are also prominent links to key services for staff, including Campus News (linking to news on the former Campus Online pages), Online Directory, Your Emails and Staff Connect.

Lower down the home page, you will see highlights of latest staff interest stories, again with links to latest News Centre/Campus News stories.

The Staff Guide is very much a work in progress and we will be continuing to make amends and updates on a regular basis

Please take a look and, if you find anything that isn’t clear or needs updating, let us know by emailing Communications@kent.ac.uk

We hope you enjoy using the new Staff Guide!

Etienne Donzelot and Wendy Raeside, Corporate Communications

2019 is Gulbenkan’s 50th Birthday! and all staff are invited to a very special open day on Fri 18 Jan.

Meet our team and see behind the scenes in our backstage tour (and be one of the first to sit in our brand new theatre seats)

• Find out what is coming up this year in theatre & cinema and the bOing! International Family Festival

• Learn about staff discounts

• Unleash your own creativity and join a creative workshop

• Try some new dishes from our kitchen, and coffee from Kent suppliers we have invited along

• Discover the brilliant, Arts Council funded work we do with children and young people across Kent

• Find out how you can hire our spaces, volunteer, or become more involved with your arts centre here on campus

It’s very informal and you can drop in anytime between 11am and 2pm. Please RSVP to boxoffice@kent.ac.uk so we have an idea of numbers.

Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance in the School of Arts and Dean of the Graduate School, has featured in the podcast Search: Stories from the Eastern West from the  Culture.pl website.

Culture.pl is produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, a national cultural institution promoting Poland and Polish culture worldwide.

Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) was a Polish theatre director who developed a form of intensive training for actors to master the body, movement and voice.

In the podcast, Paul explains Grotowski’s life, work, and his important influence on the world of the performing arts. In particular, he describes the purpose of Grotowski’s training techniques to remove psychological and physical blocks: ‘Sometimes he’d use physical tests in the actor training – like jumps and leaps ­that were incredibly sophisticated and demanding physically – to get people over their fear of the challenges he was throwing at them.’

To listen to the full podcast, please see the page here.

Dr Oliver Double, Reader in Drama within the School of Arts and Head of the Performance and Theatre Research Cluster, has just released the latest episode of the podcast series ‘A History of Comedy in Several Objects’.

In the podcast series, Olly examines objects from Kent’s British Stand-Up Comedy Archive alongside Project Archivist Elspeth Millar.

In the latest instalment, the item from the archive is ‘Peter Grahame’s Diary’ from 1986. Peter founded the comedy club Downstairs at the King’s Head with Huw Thomas in 1981.

‘I think it has a good claim to be Britain’s oldest comedy club,’ explains Olly, ‘the Comedy Store opened in 1979 but that’s been in three different venues, but Downstairs at the King’s Head – as the name would suggest – has always been downstairs at the King’s Head.’

The diary contains details of the club’s bookings. In the course examining the object, Olly and Elspeth also discuss the wider context of the comedians and comedy scene of the 1980s, and interview Peter himself to hear about his unique outlook on the industry and how it is changing.

The podcast is free to download and is available here.

From 2 January 2019 you will be able to request annual leave and record sickness absence through Staff Connect.  For managers, there will be a new calendar view showing staff leave and attendance.

This is part of the roll out of further enhancements to Staff Connect. The aim of this system is to streamline our HR processes and extend employee and manager self-service, providing a one-stop-shop for as many HR activities as possible.

The HR and Payroll software functions introduced in 2017 gave you online access to your payslips and HR e-records.  The second phase of Staff Connect in 2018 has seen the introduction of further functionality, and you can now book online for training provided by the corporate Learning & Organisational Development Team as well as record your appraisal (RPD).

With the roll out of this new module, requests for annual leave will be automatically forwarded to line managers to authorise. If your line-manager does not usually authorise your annual leave, they can delegate this responsibility to another member of their team. User guides for both managers and staff regarding delegation set up and management are available on the Staff Connect Delegation page.

As well as booking annual leave, sickness absence will be reported and recorded via Staff Connect. You will be able to securely upload any doctors’ notes or medical certificates into the system which will reduce the amount of sensitive personal data that is currently recorded on paper and sent via internal mail.

For colleagues in European centres, local arrangements will continue as usual.

If you have any questions about Staff Connect and the launch of this new module, there is guidance, including a frequently asked questions section, on the Staff Connect website. Thanks go to all staff who have taken part in user testing sessions and given feedback which has informed the FAQs.

To find out more about using Staff Connect request annual leave or record sickness absence, please come to one of the demo and drop-in sessions available for all staff and line managers. Please go to the HR webpages to find out more. Online user guides and videos will also be available before January.

This is the latest update in the Staff Connect Phase 2 project. The new staff recruitment system, replacing i-Grasp, will go live in late January. If you have any questions about the project, please contact staffconnect@kent.ac.uk