Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Matt Harrington who studied English at Lampeter from 1991-94. There are many great undergraduate reminisces here, beginning with a recollection of the circumstances around our graduation in July 1994. Matt worked in a bookshop post-Lampeter and then as a junior copywriter, and he talks about how this enabled him to write with economy, and how that played out in his student da...

My guest this week is James Grindrod who was in Lampeter from 1993-96 where he studied Single Honours History. James talks about the impact of what he did on his life and career, and how learning is not just something that stops when you finish your full time education. We discuss different lenses of looking at the past, including how we might have once thought that things were ‘getting better’, b...

This week’s episode is a Christmas special as I am joined by someone else who has made Christmas their research project in recent years. Lucinda Murphy and I had never met before we recorded this interview in London in October 2023, and there are many parallels and synergies which make this a really compelling discussion around the ‘meaning’ of Christmas. Lucinda began her doctorate at Durham on C...

My guest this week is Henry Jeppesen, a freelance literary translator, who studied Single Honours Swedish at Lampeter from 1993-97. We learn about Henry’s Scandinavian background, find out why he fell in love with Lampeter and what happened on his Year Abroad. In his time at university, Henry sat on the Ents Committee and remembers seeing Zodiac Mindwarp and Doctor and the Medics perform – though...

My guest this week is John Wills, Professor of American Media and Culture, who has been at the University of Kent since 2005. We discover that John owns various consoles and machines from the 1970s onwards and we find out where his academic interests, e.g. in video games, have come from. John talks about how the things he is interested in emanate from his teenage years, as with cataloguing films,...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Katie Marquis. Katie runs Dance Warehouse, a dance school in Canterbury where she was once a pupil. We find out how Katie has realized the three dreams she set herself as a child, and how she is very focused and determined as a person and we talk about the inevitability of the route she has taken. Katie is originally from Canterbu...

My guest this week is Chris Solomon, a Physicist who worked at the University of Kent from 1995 until 2020. He specialized in the area of facial recognition and subsequently started a company called Vision Metric which has been his main focus. We talk about the interdisciplinary nature of research, and what he learned from studying Physics, and how it didn’t directly affect the way he lived his li...

My guest this week is Gary Bunt, Professor of Islamic Studies at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Gary and I made a reverse academic journey as he was an undergraduate student at Kent before moving to Lampeter in later years, whereas I started at Lampeter and moved to Kent. The first half of our conversation relates to a less known aspect of Gary’s life in which he had a radio career in BB...

It was a huge privilege for my latest Nostalgia Interview to meet Anne Pőnisch and Vicky Tomlinson, daughters of John Roland Lloyd Thomas who was Principal of Saint David’s (University) College for nearly a quarter of a century from 1953 until the mid-1970s. Anne and Vicky remember the days of living behind the College Chapel with its spiders, attics and cellars in an age when students wore academ...

My guest this week is Kate Heffner who is doing a PhD on women in science fiction fandom in the History Department at the University of Kent. Kate talks about the untraditional nature of her research and reflects on the women who wrote on the ways science and literature could coalesce as well as about the importance of the early printing process. Born and raised in Long Beach, California, Kate the...

In a special edition of my podcast this week, Craig Braddick has interviewed me to talk about growing up in the 1980s with Radio 1 and then with Radio 2 into the 90s and beyond, and how being a contestant on Blockbusters guided me towards my own broadcasting career. I talk about the significance of 1981 – the year I started listening to Radio 1 – and Bucks Fizz winning Eurovision and how, during m...

My guest this week is Terry Lindvall, the C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University. Terry talks about his seminary background, looking at religion and popular culture, and we find out about Terry’s academic history and his work in history, theology and communications. We discuss how both of us have been influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work...

My guest this week is Chris Cotter who lectures for the Open University and has a rich background in podcasts. He co-founded the Religious Studies Project podcast in 2012, and we talk about our thoughts on podcasts and why academics want to discuss their research. Chris comes from near Belfast, where his father is a Church of Ireland minister, and moved to Edinburgh in 2004 initially to do a degre...

My guest this week is Krysia Waldock, who is doing a PhD at the University of Kent that straddles various disciplinary areas. Krysia is based in the University’s Tizard Centre and has an undergraduate background in languages. A diagnosis of autism led to Krysia doing a Masters in Autism, which in turn resulted in her doing a doctorate, something she never thought she would do, where she is looking...

It was fantastic to catch up with Steve Jacobs, a retired Senior Lecturer in Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton, for my latest Nostalgia Interview. Steve and I were at Lampeter together from 1991-4 where we both received the same degree classification, and Steve recalls the way in which we received our results. Steve worked in Religious Studies at Wolverhampton initiall...

My guest this week is Becky Jefcoate, who like me was at university in Lampeter from 1991-94 where she studied Archaeology and English Literature. We find out how Becky ended up there and why her school teacher had misgivings about doing Archaeology as a single honours subject. We talk about how Lampeter was a place you knew pretty quickly whether you were going to fit in or not and how it attract...

My guest this week is Alexander Ornella, Senior Lecturer in Religion at the University of Hull where he has been since 2011. Alexander talks about his work, and how he has moved into sociology and criminology in addition to religious studies. His PhD, which he undertook in his native Austria, was on Catholic theology and looked at film and modern art. We find out about the traditional Catholic the...

Maggie Webster is my fantastic guest this week, five years to the day since I broadcast my first Nostalgia Interviews podcast episode. Maggie teaches Religious Education at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, and we learn that she did a PhD in Lampeter which explored how people become witches on social media. Maggie discusses her fieldwork in which she interviewed 13 witches who ranged in age from...

My guest this week is journalist, editor and poet Susan Norvill, who like me was in Lampeter in the early 1990s where she read Victorian Studies and English Literature. We find out about Susan’s love of Victorian literature and what drew her to Lampeter, and how the place exerts such a hold over those who went there, and how the people are still there for us. Susan grew up in Weston-super-Mare and...

My guest this week is Mina Radovic, archivist, curator, film historian and founder of the international charitable organization Liberating Cinema . I met Mina at the Spaces of Memory conference he helped to organize at the University of Vienna in March 2023. Mina is also a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London, on German linguistics and film studies, studying the framing of totalitarian...

My guest this week is Anne-Sophie Ouattara who, until March 2023, was the National Portrait Gallery intern at The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury. Anne-Sophie is really interested in nostalgia as a teacher of French literature and language and a curator. She has curated her first exhibition called Rooted in Fabric – an exploration of African and black identities through fabric, a...

My guest this week is Rhiannon Grant, who teaches in Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. We learn about Rhiannon’s work, which includes recently having had an edited book published featuring a range of international academics and lay writers. Rhiannon grew up in Watford, did her first degree in Philosophy and Theology in Nottingham, has an MA from Leeds and a PhD, which she also undertoo...

My guest this week is Dereck Daschke whom I had the great pleasure of interviewing in Salt Lake City when we were both reviewing films at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 for the Journal of Religion and Film. Dereck teaches Religious Studies at Truman State University in Missouri and, like me, works in the area of religion and film. We find out about Dereck’s dissertation in Graduate Sch...

Matt Batten works for the Llandaff Diocese of the Church in Wales as Director of Communications and we first met in the early 2000s when Matt did a Masters in Ecumenical Studies at Trinity College Carmarthen. Based in Cardiff, Matt talks about how going to university was the making of him. We talk about reunions and why Matt is not keen to go back, and the concept of ‘going out’ and how it was not...

My guest this week is Revd. Edward Owen, Vicar in the South Cardiff Ministry area, the most multicultural area of Wales, who like me did his degree in Lampeter in the early 1990s. We learn that Edward’s grandmother’s brother was Richard Burton and he talks about a photo from when he was aged three of him with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor taken in his grandmother’s front room. We find out ho...