Dr Ben Thomas, Reader in the History of Art, has just published a new book on Humphrey Ocean RA for the Royal Academy of Arts.

Over five decades, the painter Humphrey Ocean’s work has filtered into our national culture. This includes his series of portraits entitled ‘A Handbook of Modern Life’ displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013; his portrait of Christopher Le Brun, President of the Royal Academy of Arts; and the cover of Sir Paul McCartney’s 2007 album Memory Almost Full, which featured one of the Chair series.

Ocean’s practice encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, book-making and drawing. Of the last, he has said: ‘Paper is lovely, immediate and personal. I draw as an end in itself.’

In 2019, his exhibition ‘Birds, Cars and Chairs’ is on display at the Royal Academy of Arts. Of these subjects, he says: ‘Birds, cars and chairs are, in that order, ancient, modern and intimate. Without them life would be a lot less bearable.’ These works are reproduced alongside others in the book to provide a fascinating overview of Ocean’s career.

For the volume, Ben contributes an essay that sets out to discover exactly what it is that makes Ocean’s art so appealing and universal.

The book was launched at the Royal Academy of Arts on the 27 November 2019.

For more details, please see the publisher’s page.

The Centre for Professional Practice (CPP) celebrated two professional achievements at the British Association of Dental Nurses National Conference which took place earlier in November.

MSc in Advanced and Specialist Healthcare graduate Jacqui Elsden has been elected as President of British Association of Dental Nurses and during the Conference she presented the Head of CPP Debbie Reed with her BADN Long Service Badge of 20 years.

Jacqui said: ”It was a great honour and a lovely surprise to receive a bouquet of beautiful flowers from Debbie Reed, Head of Centre for Professional Practice,  during my inauguration ceremony as President of BADN, at the Annual National Dental Nursing Conference which was held at Oxford in November 2019. It was particularly notable as Debbie was my educational supervisor for my MSc in Advanced and Specialist Healthcare at the University of Kent during my time of study, from whom I received selfless professional support and guidance”. 

Why study the MSc Professional Practice at the University of Kent?

 The programme offers:

–             Flexible, part-time studies over 3 years, on average 4 to 6 weekends a year at our Medway Campus

–             Work-based studies to enhance your professional knowledge and career progression

–             Accreditation of prior experiential and certificated learning is welcome

–             Kent’s staff may be eligible for staff fee remission

Find out more and apply: www.kent.ac.uk/cpp

The latest accessibility tour of the Canterbury campus took place on 20 November.

The accessibility tour is an initiative resulting from the Disability Staff Network’s aim to better understand the campus experience for disabled members of staff or students.

For the latest tour, Network members met at the student entrance of the registry and walked around the campus viewing main external access routes. · ​

Findings from the tour were that the University is making good provision for disabled students and staff. Much has been done to improve the built environment over the last few years – and since the last external Canterbury tour – and previously reported issues have been actioned.

The full summary of the latest accessibility tour highlights a number of these improvements and areas where further work is required.

If you use the new print copy scan service, you don’t need to read this!

We’ll be retiring some of our older print servers from next week which will mean that any printers that rely on them will stop working.

Check whether it will affect you
To check whether a printer you use will be affected, please follow the steps below.

1. Using your University computer, click Start and type Printers
2. Open Printers & scanners
3. Review the name of your printer to check whether its printer name includes the words Staffprinting, Valient or Printserver2 – for example, a printer named Jimi would show as jimi on staffprinting

There are around 150 printers that still use these older servers (Staffprinting, Valient and Printserver2), which need to be retired for security reasons.

The ‘switch off’ timetable
-Monday 2 December – any printers that haven’t been active for a month will be disabled
-Monday 9 December – the remaining printers will be disabled

If your printer is affected and you want to keep it
Please contact James Thompson explaining why it’s needed, the full name of the printer, its location (building and room), and your contact details.

Your request will be reviewed and a decision made about whether to move the printer onto a new print server, replace it with a new printer or remove it from service, as appropriate.

The Knights Templar and Strood is the theme of the next Drill Hall Dialogue on Tuesday 10 December from 10.00. The talk, in room DA002, will focus on fascinating local detail rather than the spurious international myth, examining the working of this military order through its remarkable and little-visited 13^th century building in Strood.

The presentation will be given by Dr Jeremy Clarke, Education Officer at the Guildhall Museum, Rochester, since 1998. He is responsible for all formal education and learning programmes supported by the museum collection or its listed buildings. Most of this is work with or in local schools, but he also runs courses, lectures and illustrated talks for adults.

Drill Hall Dialogues is a monthly series of talks held at the Drill Hall Library, the learning resource centre for the Universities at Medway collaborative project. A wide variety of topics has been covered including prison libraries, NHS libraries, Dickens and Christmas, Medway regeneration, the Medway Floods of 1953 and Fort Amherst. We have also received talks from academics based on the campus including the Centre for Journalism (UKM) and the Faculty of Education (CCCU).

The talks take place on the first or second Tuesday of the month and usually last no longer than 45 minutes with 15 minutes allotted for any questions and answers.  All staff are welcome to attend.

A number of staff across the University have been approached to attend – at seemingly small or no cost – various conferences and events. Sometimes these look too good to be true – and they frequently are.

Please check and be absolutely certain before you commit to attending anything that may seem suspicious to you. It’s a profitable, ruthless and large industry that’s exploiting our sector and there are now more for-profit providers than scholarly organisations offering these events.

The University has recently reported one particular supplier of these events to the Information Commissioners Office for breaching the legislation and our express instructions around how to handle our data, and we will continue to take an assertive approach to reducing our exposure to these events.

There are a number of characteristics to look out for, including:

• Confusing or similarly named events for well-known industry leaders
• Free or low cost attendance which you might expect to come at a cost if legitimate
• Unusual attendee lists, a lack of familiar or expected speakers, or use of names and images stating attendance of people when this may not happen or seems very unlikely. You may even find your own name there!
• Confusing small print which is difficult to find or non-existent
• Pressurised sales techniques such as frequent calls or emails
• Offers to register you on your behalf
• Lack of appropriate peer review for papers you may submit (ie fast tracked review)
• Invitations that appear to have no relevance to your specialism and expertise or mass, multidisciplinary unfocused agendas.

You can easily block the providers in Outlook using the ‘Junk’ option in any email you may be sent which can block the sender.

Beware also of instances where you may be unwittingly agreeing to a number of ‘client meetings’. Your presence is effectively bait being sold as sales opportunities to companies. If you sign up for one of these, the companies may seek to charge us enormous cancellation fees of up to several thousand pounds.

Kent’s Procurement Team maintains a list of suppliers who we should be wary of using. If you are invited to attend any event that you think may seem suspicious or otherwise not quite legitimate, please do not make any commitments and contact procurement@kent.ac.uk if you require any guidance.

Dr James Newton, Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies, has just released a new entry in his podcast series, Newton Talks.

In the series, James discusses topics (mostly) related to cinema, television, and culture. His guests will be from the world of academia, as well as filmmakers and other artists, and each podcast will take the form of an unscripted discussion.

In this episode James talk to filmmakers Sam Mason Bell and Jackson Batchelor, the creative directors of Trash Arts in Portsmouth. Trash Arts have collectively produced numerous features, shorts, and web series, including Lonely Hearts (2018), Conspiracy X (2018), Trash Arts Killers Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2019), and the forthcoming Millennial Killer, along with many others. James and his guests discuss their filmmaking ethos, how to make feature films with no budget, and how to promote and distribute your movie in the marketplace.

To listen to this instalment, please see the page here.