Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week, in my first face-to-face interview since lockdown, is Justin Lewis-Anthony, Rector of Chingford. Justin talks about how he ended up doing a PhD with me and why the topic of leadership was something that made him angry. He refers to how cinema is the functioning mythological delivery system of the age and how many people expect Church leaders to function like John Wayne. Justin...

My guest this week is John Partridge, Honorary Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Kent. John came to Canterbury from Bavaria in 1977 where he had taught English. We talk about how we once bumped into each other at a Gerry and the Pacemakers gig and about broaching conversations with idols. John tells us about his PhD on performative verbs and we discuss whether new forms of language have...

My guest this week is Gaye Morris who lives in North Carolina and was previously based in in the UK and with whom I collaborated about 15 years ago on a book called Theology and Film . We talk about our rationale in writing it and the relationship between the Christian and the secular world. It was a validation of working on popular culture and there is a fascinating moment when Gaye talks about h...

My guest this week is Michael Gibson who lives in Athens, Georgia, and works as a Senior Editor at Lexington Books. He has written on Paul Schrader and Stanley Kubrick and we learn why film has been a significant part of Michael’s journey and why he is influenced by Schrader’s work on abundant vs. sparse cinema. We talk about Schrader’s contribution to film scholarship, and we learn why Schrader’s...

My guest this week is filmmaker, screenwriter and theologian Craig Detweiler who is based in Los Angeles. Craig grew up in North Carolina and went to film school in California where he has lived since. He has taught Destin Daniel Cretton, the director/screenwriter of Just Mercy (2019) which was the first movie in Hollywood to be made with an inclusion rider. We talk about Destin’s next project whi...

My guest this week is Heidi Campbell, Professor of Communications at Texas A&M University where she has been based for the last 15 years. Originally from Michigan, Heidi trained as a journalist and then morphed into a Religious Studies scholar where she does some pioneering, interdisciplinary work in media, religion and culture. Heidi has just edited an online collection on the coronavirus pan...

It is two years this week since my first Nostalgia Interview was broadcast, and, on the second anniversary, I am putting out my first interview to be recorded via Zoom. My guest is Chris Gordon who runs a podcast called Hellblazerbiz ( https://www.hellblazerbiz.com/ ), in which he interviews people in the movie business. Chris tells us how he got into it and how he was once talked about on the red...

My guest this week is Esther Weller, Chair of the Lampeter Society who was a student in Lampeter in the mid to late 90s. Esther was born in London but then moved to Wales when she was six months old and grew up in the South Wales Valleys. We learn that she wanted to find out about her family background before it is too late and we find out what she found out. Esther talks about her father’s Jewish...

My guest this week is Alex Davis who is an MA Ancient History student at the University of Kent. Alex talks about growing up in Lydd and going to university as a mature student after working in her parents’ family business. She tells us how she went from working in the accounts department to doing a degree in Classics and Ancient History, where her passion for her subject came from and how she wou...

My guest this week is Linda Pike who works at BT HQ as a Project Manager and graduated from Lampeter in French in 1995. Linda reveals why Lampeter was like a pleasure dome, and how it wasn’t a judgemental place and how she embraced the ‘away from home’ experience. We talk about the ‘melting pot’ of people and how she would get paid to socialise by working down the bar. We find out about how she ha...

My guest this week is John Loaring, whose claim to fame is that he invented PPI, and who was at Lampeter from 1964-67 while it made the transition from being an all-male theological college. He recounts how many of his contemporaries thought that having female students was an experiment that would fail and go away, and John recounts how he ended up going to Lampeter in the first place. We learn th...

My guest this week is Onyeka Nubia, author, historian and TV presenter. Onyeka works in the area of diversifying and developing a more inclusive university curriculum and teaching history in a way that means we can reframe British identity. In this very erudite and illuminating interview, Onyeka expresses his concern about how university programmes don’t always teach properly and are insufficientl...

My guest this week is Heidi Colthup who works in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Kent. We learn about the unusual criteria she uses to remember how long she has been here and we discover that Heidi has also worked as a freelance journalist and trained as a primary school teacher. Heidi talks about why she felt powerless in that profession apart from when she...

My guest this week is Murray Smith, Professor of Film in the School of Arts at the University of Kent where he has been based since 1992. We talk about the concept of ‘trading places’ in academia and about how love is part of how he ended up at Kent and whether we’d be the same people now if we’d made different choices at 18. Murray grew up in Potters Bar and he talks about what he did in response...

My guest this week is Marion Stuart who studied Divinity at Lampeter in the 1980s and talks about the oddity of being in the same peer group as her lecturers. She reflects on how she took a subject which her parents wouldn’t really have approved of and she remembers the legendary DP Davies. From childhood Marion recalls the bombs that dropped during the Second World War and when the Crystal Palace...

My guest this week is stand up comedian Andy White. We start by talking about his victory on ‘The Weakest Link’ in 2002 and how the prize enabled him to pay for his wedding. Andy tells us about the work he has done for the National Autistic Society and we talk about our apprehension of ‘slightly obscure celebrities’. We learn how he ended up at university - Andy initially went to Aston to study to...

My guests this week are Elizabeth and George Severn. We learn about their respective periods of studying at the University of Kent and about George’s tactical decision to move to a Joint Honours degree programme so that he could go on a Year Abroad. We learn why his years in Spain have been the best of his life and why he felt like a ‘nosy anthropologist’ when he returned there. George talks about...

Alvise Sforza Tarabochia lectures in Italian Studies at the University of Kent. In this fascinating interview we discuss Alvise’s love of heavy metal, his degree in Philosophy from his native Italy and why the prospect of doing a PhD in Philosophy was not the right path for him. We learn that Alvise grew up wanting to be a surgeon and that his mother is a retired academic in the history of medieva...

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is an architect and Reader in the Kent School of Architecture, and we begin this insightful and informative interview by talking about buildings which elude even architects and how some of us are more image based and others function using words. Timothy also discloses why he thinks the Sat Nav is the work of the devil. Timothy talks about growing up just within the boundari...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Lorraine Millard who has been a therapist since around 1984 and works at the University of Kent. We talk about how she has a job which deals with authenticity and how great an honour that is, and we discuss the evolution of student support over the years and the leap that students have to make from school to university. The conver...

Philip Boobbyer, Reader in History and a specialist on Russia, is my guest this week. Philip has been at the University of Kent since 1995, and we begin the interview by discussing the changes he has witnessed over the years. Philip grew up in Oxford to a sports-loving family and whose parents worked for a Christian charity. Philip talks about how faith has changed the way he looks at the world, a...

My guest this week is Revd. Dr. Trystan Hughes, an Anglican vicar in the Church in Wales and a tutor in Applied Theology. We talk about growing up in North Wales and doing all of his schooling through the medium of Welsh, and we discuss the advantages of having a multi-lingual education, as well as the evolution of school education and the eleven-plus. Trystan talks about how he was obsessed with...

My guest this week is Mary Sullivan who undertook a long journey towards doing a degree in History and Religious Studies at the University of Kent, having previously worked as a psychiatric nurse and a social worker. We talk about her previous experience of going to Ruskin College, Oxford which specialized in offering education for working class people, and about how the two sides of her degree bl...

My guest this week is Carla Morris who is International Pathways Manager in the Centre for English & World Languages at the University of Kent where she has been for the last 10 years, and we begin by talking about an embarrassing meeting we once had as Senior Tutors for our respective Schools. Carla grew up in Dublin in the 1960s and went to a Methodist school which was her first multicultura...

My guest this week is Patty Baker, Senior Lecturer in Classical & Archaeological Studies at the University of Kent. Patty, who is originally from Pennsylvania, has been at Kent for 18 years, and she talks about how it feels to go back and we discuss the concept of ‘home’ and the notion of moving on. We discuss what happens when you run into people from your past and the lessons that can be lea...