Professor Aylish Wood, Professor in Film, will be giving her Inaugural Professorial Lecture, entitled ‘Making Waves: Taking a software approach to Moanaand what it tells us about digital culture’, on Wednesday 8 May 2019 at 5pm.

The Disney animation Moana‘s release was accompanied by celebrations of animation software and the ingenuity of VFX practitioners. Frequently focussing on the feature’s quite fabulous looking water animation, these commentaries are a valuable starting point for challenging the extent to which simulations in cinema are, as is so often claimed, ‘realistic.’ Given their scale and increasingly detailed textures, it is easy to get caught up in the visual appeal of simulations created with VFX software. Aylish’s purpose in exploring Moana is to step around the power of this visual appeal, and map a route through to the computational and cultural influences that inform and shape simulations.

Aylish’s lecture will take place on Wednesday 8 May 2019 at 5pm in Keynes College Lecture Theatre 1, and will be followed by a drinks reception in Keynes College Atrium at 7pm. Attendance is free, but please book your place here.

CELTA (Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is an internationally recognised qualification, allowing you to teach English to adults in the UK and abroad. The Centre for English and World Languages (CEWL) runs an intensive CELTA training course starting on 17 June 2019.

At the end of the course you will have the chance to meet representatives from local language schools.

Find out more about CELTA and apply.

The Academic Career Map (ACM) will be launched, alongside a revised Academic Promotion Policy, to take effect in September 2019.

ACM is a framework setting out relevant expectations, supporting development and recognising achievements at each academic career stage. The related changes to the Academic Promotion Policy will mean significant changes to the promotion application process for academic staff on Teaching & Research, Teaching & Scholarship and Research contracts.

Academic staff are invited to find out more about ACM at one of several staff information sessions taking place during May and June. The team behind ACM will also be visiting some schools, but if one is not yet scheduled, you could attend one of our open-invitation sessions. Dates for all planned sessions, from 8 May to 21 June, are available now on the ACM webpages

The ACM was developed in partnership with academic and academic-related staff, through the Recognising Excellence in Academia Project, with the aim of providing greater clarity around expectations. The proposed detail was shared with all staff through the University website and several staff engagement and consultation events in November/December 2018. Helpful feedback resulted in the ACM being finalised and approved by relevant committees.

The Academic Promotion Policy has been revised to align with the ACM framework and introduce other changes to address feedback received from staff throughout the project.

To find out more about the ACM framework, and guidance on how it will work, see the ACM webpages

If you have any comments or questions, please email academiccareermap@kent.ac.uk

European Parliamentary elections are taking place on 23 May 2019. To have your say you must register to vote by Tuesday 7 May.

To find out more and register to vote go to:

gov.uk/register-to-vote

Funding is available through the Kent Innovation & Enterprise Industrial Strategy Fund for business-university innovation collaboration. This round of funding is available until, and must be spent by, June 30th 2019, and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

This is support funding whereby a cash contribution from business is match funded from the University – in effect the University contribution is free of charge to the company. Business contribution must be a minimum of £3,000 and a maximum of £40,000.

The aim of the fund is to drive commercial development, economic growth and job creation by enabling UK businesses to undertake innovation projects with the University of Kent. Collaborative development projects are designed to assist the industrial community in areas highlighted in the UK Industrial Strategy.

If you’d like more information or have a collaboration in mind that you would like to explore please contact the Innovation & Enterprise team at enterprise@kent.ac.uk..

Kent Innovation & Enterprise invite staff from Humanities & Social Science faculties to find out about the requirements and opportunities for collaborative working with businesses and organisations, including AHRC and ESRC Knowledge Transfer Partnership funding information. Tom Campbell, Creative Industries Specialist from the Knowledge Transfer Network, will be our guest speaker.

The event will take place on the 13th May, 12:00 – 14:00 in SR2, Sibson. A light lunch will be provided so please register in advance via Eventbrite and let us know of any dietary requirements.

If you’d like to know more about the event please contact Lauren Griffiths-Norbury at L.M.Griffiths-Norbury@kent.ac.uk

As part of our ‘BAG’ week, come to a presentation on Friday the 17^th of May, 11:00 – 12:00, JS1, by Rose Carter of the National Careers Service about supporting older workers. There is a greater number of older people in employment than ever before, but many people over the age of 50 are at risk of leaving the workforce early and not necessarily because they want to.

As the UK workforce ages, employers will increasingly need to rely on the skills and experience of older workers of they are to remain competitive, increase productivity and growth and avoid skills shortages in the future.

With this in mind, the National Careers Service is presenting a session to support the University and all staff with information, advice and guidance on how to retain and recruit older workers.

Designed for all staff and managers. Book your tickets through Eventbrite.

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Professor of Latin American History in the Department of Modern Languages, has been made an official member of the Bolivarian Society.

The Bolivarian Society was set up in Lima in 1927, after the Centennial of the Wars of Independence and brings together intellectuals and people interested in the legacy of liberator Simon Bolívar. Natalia was incorporated into the society in July 2018. At the official ceremony, she was presented with her membership diploma and gave a presentation on Simon Bolívar and the Peruvian Army, which forms a chapter of her forthcoming book on the Army and the creation of the State in Peru.

Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance in the School of Arts and Dean of the Graduate School, will give a keynote address at an international theatre forum and conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, held between Friday 10 and Sunday 12 May 2019.

The conference is titled ‘Out of the Frame’ and will explore street/open space theatre, its funding and role in society. The conference is organised by the Shoshin Theatre Association and the Committee on Theatrical Sciences of the Regional Committee of the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia [Hungarian Academy of Sciences].

Paul will be delivering the keynote address on Saturday 11 May, with a paper titled ‘Space Invaders or Alien Friends? Close Encounters of a Theatrical Kind’.

Paul’s talk will briefly trace key aspects of a theatre history which depicts the movement of certain key experimental theatre directors and groups from cities into the countryside, across Europe and in Asia too. The list is long, but Polish company Gardzienice and Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki stand out. Paul will ask what made these pioneers move to the country, what they sought, and what lessons we might learn from them for theatre-making today. How did other spaces and ‘new natural environments’ change training and acting, group dynamics, understanding of and encounters with an audience? Are such Romantic models still desirable and do artists still have such a choice? Or has choice now become urgent need in this age of mass migration?

The conference is part of the Rural Inclusive Outdoor Theatre Education 2 (RIOTE2) project, co-founded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

More information about the conference can be found here.

In the latest episode of the Nostalgia podcast series, Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, speaks to Srivas Chennu from the School of Computing.

In this insightful interview, Srivas talks about how we are today able to ask questions that the ancient Greeks could not, how his research intersects with Chris’s own work in near-death experiences (NDE) and he talks about how his collaborators are studying what happens in the brain when someone has an NDE. We also discuss how films are often better at conveying these techniques than academic papers.

Srivas reflects on how a decade ago to study consciousness would have been laughed at as it was deemed to be so amorphous, and how and why that has now changed. Srivas also discusses his background, growing up in India, having a Hindu priest for a grandfather, Pink Floyd and the Alan Parsons Project, cultural changes between India and the UK, BBC 6 Music, Monty Python, what would have happened if Srivas had stayed in India (the ‘Sliding Doors’ phenomenon) and how he feels his friends think about him!