Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is a playwright Lance Woodman, who has written for Radio 4 and is a theatre tour guide for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Lance was born in Hereford but moved quite a bit while young and now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has undertaken research into his family tree (Lance’s great uncle was my maternal grandfather), including most recently the 1921 census. He talks about how...

My guest this week is Vera da Silva Sinha who works as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York, looking at time, number and space in indigenous minority language communities of Brazil. We begin by talking about Vera’s experience of lockdown and of Christmases spent growing up in Brazil. Vera is from a small village in the south of Brazil where her father was a lorry driver....

It was a great pleasure to meet award-winning journalist Jo Phillips for my latest Nostalgia Interview. Jo is a political commentator and has worked as a political editor and broadcaster and was press secretary and policy adviser to Paddy Ashdown and has stood for Parliament. She also worked for Bob Geldof for 10 years. Jo is a sailor and gardener and she explains why she sees herself primarily as...

My guest this week is Craig Braddick, a horse racing commentator based in the US where he has been living since 2001. Originally from Cambridge, England, Craig works mainly at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arizona, where the new film Jockey (Clint Bentley, 2021) was filmed. We find out why Craig made the journey and about how he has worked in around 18 different states largely doing media work. Race c...

My guest this week is Malcolm Dixon, Head of Quality Assurance at the University of Kent who has just published his first novel, The Little House on Everywhere Street . We learn writing fiction is more indicative of who Malcolm is than his day job, and he tells me why good writing is an exercise in misdirection. Malcolm has written short stories in the past, and his novel is about a house with doo...

My guest this week is Suzanne Owen, Reader at Leeds Trinity University, who used to be our External Examiner for Religious Studies at Kent. Suzanne talks about how she is always excited to see what other institutions are doing and we learn about how walking is a counterpoint to her day.  We learn about Suzanne’s creative writing work and whether she can ever publish it. We talk about the different...

My guest this week is Jennifer Uzzell, who is studying for a PhD in Durham, has done a Masters degree at Lampeter, and used to teach full time in a secondary school. Jennifer’s original background is in theology and biblical studies, when she did her undergraduate degree at Durham. We learn about how her interest in Hinduism developed and how Jennifer is a Senior ‘A’ level examiner. Her latest res...

The tables were turned on me for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast – as I am the guest. Pamela Petro, who did such a fantastic interview with me earlier in 2021, asks me about my background (and we talk about why I don’t sound Welsh), why I used to emulate great radio presenters and newsreaders and why I ended up in academia if I always wanted to be on the radio. I talk about my career path...

It was a huge pleasure to meet Alison Robertson for this week’s Nostalgia Interview. Alison’s research is in the area of subcultures – specifically BDSM and kink as religious practice. Alison refers to how this is a notoriously sensitive area – and about how hard it can be to get people to talk to her.  Alison discuss the insider vs. outsider question and we learn that Alison is fascinated by area...

My guest this week is Declan Kavanagh, Senior Lecturer in 18th Century Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent. Declan’s specialism is in the area of poetry and political pamphlets from the period and how they address questions of masculinity, nationhood, gender, sexuality and disability.  We talk about surviving lockdown and how it impacted on Declan personally, and about how h...

My guest this week is Kazuyo Matsuda, who is an architect, working in the UK for the last 20 years and practices the Japanese martial art of Kendo which she has been teaching for over two decades. Kazuyo talks about how Kendo, which originated in Japan in the 13th Century, was first seen in the UK at the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge built in 1885. Kazuyo has been in the UK since 1993 and befo...

My guest this week is Penny Sartori, a medical researcher and teacher in the field of near-death experiences who did a PhD in NDEs at Lampeter. Penny used to work in the Intensive Therapy Unit in Morriston Hospital in Swansea where she was upset about the death of her patients and which led her to want to research more about death.  Something that Penny discovered is that the neurophysiological as...

My guest this week is Rachel Gefferie who works at the University of Kent as Diversity Mark Officer and is also doing an Anthropology PhD. Rachel, who is originally from Suriname and later moved to the Netherlands, talks about why calendar and anniversary dates and photographs are so important. She can relive the original feelings she had when she looks back at pictures. Rachel tells us why she se...

My guest this week is radio enthusiast Noel Tyrrel, founder of the David Hamilton’s Hot Shots fan site and someone who has an encyclopaedic knowledge and collection of vintage radio shows. Noel grew up with radio, and we learn why the person who awakened his interest was David Hamilton. We talk about why Junior Choice was so special and whether the sort of radio presenting that Ed Stewart and Davi...

My guest this week is Babiche Deysel, Executive Headteacher at Petham Primary School in Kent. Originally from the Netherlands, Babiche lived and worked for many years in Zimbabwe and Botswana. In Zimbabwe she studied the economic impact of projects run by a women's group and she discusses the way in which one doesn’t always realize how bad things are in a country which, as she points out, is very...

My guest this week is Pamela Petro, American author, artist and teacher based in Massachusetts. Pamela has just published a memoir called The Long Field in which we learn about her passion for Wales as an American, based around the concept of hiraeth. Pamela did an MA in The Word and the Visual Imagination at Lampeter and she talks about how she never got over her ‘Welsh thing’. In the last 35 yea...

My guest this week is Jasjit Singh, Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds where his research includes how people learn about religion and engage with their religious heritage. He is originally from Bradford and did a degree in Computer Science and Accounting at Manchester. We learn how Jasjit found that there weren’t many HE institutions...

My guest this week is Gregory Shushan, a researcher in the area of Near Death Experiences who is currently based in Portugal. Gregory went to Lampeter to do a PhD in 2004 on a cross cultural study of afterlife beliefs under the supervision of Paul Badham. We talk extensively about Near Death Experiences and how Gregory was interested in looking at the impact of NDEs on culture. Gregory was born in...

My guest this week is Jan Moriarty, Student Success Manager at the University of Kent, a wonderful project designed to support students to achieve better degrees. We learn how Jan became involved in the project and how her initial concern that it was not going to be possible to solve EDI issues in two years were balanced by the consideration that morally it is something that has to be done. It rev...

My guest this week is Fr. Peter Malone, priest and film critic, based in Australia, who was a foundational figure back when I did my own PhD in the late 1990s. Peter talks about his interest in Christ-figure films, including through the work of Clint Eastwood, and he draws on the distinction between redeemer figures and saviour figures and we find out about his work on anti-Christ figures. He spea...

My guest this week is Professor Bettina Schmidt, Professor in Study of Religions and Anthropology of Religion at University of Wales Trinity Saint David and President of the British Association for the Study of Religion. Bettina is also Director of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre in Lampeter. Bettina is currently looking in her research at questions of spirituality, health a...

My guest this week is Professor David Cheetham, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham where he has been based since 1999. David and I were both Theology students at Lampeter, with David studying for his PhD at the time that I was an undergraduate, and David talks about how Lampeter influenced him – and how there was more going on than his academic achievements. We tal...

It was such a pleasure for my latest Nostalgia Interview to catch up with Stacey Rand. Stacey has been at Kent for around a decade where she is a senior researcher in PSSRU, a research unit focusing on social care and community based services. Stacey is also a priest in the Church of England. Stacey’s first degree was in natural sciences and she ended up specializing in neuroscience, and has also...

My guest this week is Jonathan Trigg, who studied Archaeology at Lampeter from 1995-98 and has been at Liverpool for the last 22 years. We talk about the advantages of living and studying on a small campus like Lampeter. Jonathan, who was brought up in Essex, talks about how and why he decided to apply to university and being a late developer. We talk about our relationship with the past and his w...

My guest this week is Charles Musselwhite, Professor in Psychology at Aberystwyth. Charles is a specialist in gerontology with a particular focus on how people engage with place in terms of age. He first went to Lampeter to study Archaeology and Charles talks about how that experience underpinned what he thinks now. We learn that he prefers a bottom up approach to his research, asking how someone...