The Roey Grad Podcast

In this extended episode, our guest this week make no apology for spending his study hours watching television – often Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. Ben Keightley’s PhD subject is the representation of women during what’s known as the second Golden Age of Television. He’s challenging the conventional view of that period, which is often characterised by series featuring male anti-heroe...

Ian Kinane is Reader in Literature and Popular Culture and Director of the Centre for Society, Culture, and Social Change at the University of Roehampton, London. His books include  Bisexuality and Popular Culture  (2026),  On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff’s Fiction  (2024),  Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence  (2021),  Isn’t it Ironic?: Irony in Contemporary Popular Cultur...

It’s another takeover episode, in which Ian Kinane (do listen to his interview earlier in the feed) hosts a (different) panel of Roehampton staff and lecturers to talk about reading for pleasure. They talk about reading in different languages, on different formats, one’s library as autobiographical archive, poetry, translations, and their intersections, from the humorous to the literary.    These...

Ian Kinane, hosts a panel with faculty and grad students on the topic of reading for pleasure. They talk about the difficulty of balancing types of reading, the impact of the reading format, the importance of recommendations and community, the cross-pollination of reading with creation, and much more...    National Year of Reading .     In order of mention:  The National Community of Researchers i...

Are you a postgraduate researcher exploring the impact of AI in your field? Join us at the Artificial Intelligence in Research and Practice: Interdisciplinary PGR Conference 2026 - a space designed for research students to present, collaborate, and spark meaningful academic conversations.   🌍 Open to PGRs from all institutions and disciplines   🎤 Present your work or attend as a participant   💬...

Charles, Will and Aaliyah talk to Bridget Steenkamp, Pentecostal minister, community organiser, and, relevantly for the pod, DTh student in Roehampton’s School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Bridget’s research is an interdisciplinary endeavour, combining theology and early years education. It starts from Friedrich Fröbel’s conception of spirituality as ‘life unity’: connection to oneself...

A longer version of Charles, Aaliyah, and Will conversation with  Benoît André , PhD student in Roehampton’s School of Arts. Benoît is a composer and sound-designer, researching flooding in Gloucestershire and West London, through the medium of sound. Specifically, electro-acoustic composition - less music than sonic art.  This episode is a chance to feature, in full, Benoît’s piece  Skein #7 , on...

Dr Ian Kinane is the editor of the  International Journal of James Bond Studies  and an expert on all things 007. He is also a Reader in Literature and Popular Culture here at Roehampton. In this week’s show, he talks about his roots in Dublin, his tips on how to manage an academic career, and, of course, his take on Bond - or, more precisely, on the complicated relationship between Bond’s creator...

This week, we revisit the conversation Charles and Will had with Sandra, Charlie and James from the University of Roehampton’s Library team. This longer edit includes considerations on privacy and data protection, which turns out to be a theme dear to both James and Will.     We also discuss whether every library remembers their first shushing, the intricacies of the inter-library loan system, and...

The wait is officially over, with the registration for the Roehampton Research & Innovation Summit now open!     This year’s programme brings together an inspiring mix of internal and external experts, each week will be giving you a snapshot of who will be presenting on the day.     You’ll also find two dedicated sessions crafted especially for researchers at pivotal career moments: one on car...

As an expert in the field, Dr Lisa Sainsbury says that “children’s literature is far more complex than a lot of people give it credit for”. In this week’s podcast, Dr Sainsbury talks about her passion for her subject and her roles in the university – as Research Programme Leader for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of English Literature. She offers some advice to post-g...

This week features a longer version of Will’s conversation with Dr Joshua Sadler, who recently defended his  Techne -funded thesis,  “41 Minutes West: A Passage Towards the ‘Non-Man’, Through Learning Disability, Impossible Epistemes, and Unreal Ontologies”.     Sitting at the intersection of performance studies, critical disability studies, and epistemology, Josh’s work argue that people with sev...

Our guest this week make no apology for spending his study hours watching television – often  Sex and the  City and  Desperate Housewives.  Ben Keightley’s PhD subject is the representation of women during what’sknown as the second Golden Age of Television. He’s challenging the conventional view of that period, which is often characterised by series featuring male anti-heroes – think  Breaking Bad...

This week, we revisit, in a longer form, Will’s conversation with  Sanjini Kedia,  a Dance Therapy student in the School of Arts, who has submitted her thesis, for defence in 2026. Sanjini takes an intersectional feminist lens to the study of transmen’s emotional expression in the context of dance/movement therapy in India.    Sanjini’s  research profile   Sanjini’s  latest publication  (out since...

Charles, Aaliyah, and Will talk with  Benoît André , PhD student in Roehampton’s School of Arts. Benoît is a composer and sound-designer, researching flooding in Gloucestershire and West London, through the medium of sound. Specifically, electro-acoustic composition - less music than sonic art.     We discuss this little-known art form, what it brings to an eco-sociological thesis, the impact of f...

This week, we’re revisiting the conversation Aaliyah, Charles and Will had with Kaylianna Christian, a PhD (Prof.) student in the School of Education, which we recorded in July. Apt timing, as this cut features some considerations on Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights 😏    Hailing from Florida, Kaylianna chose Roehampton with great care to study the impact of children’s literature in the moral edu...

When thinking about a PhD, it’s easy to focus on the D(octorate), but some will truly honour the Ph(ilosophy). In this episode, Will sits down with Dr Joshua Sadler, who recently defended his  Techne -funded thesis,  “41 Minutes West: A Passage Towards the ‘Non-Man’, Through Learning Disability, Impossible Epistemes, and Unreal Ontologies”.     Sitting at the intersection of performance studies, c...

This bonus episode features a longer cut of Will's conversation with  Sripadma Ganapathi , a third-year Dance PhD student of Roehampton's School of Arts. A dancer, and teacher, of  Bharatanatyam , an Indian classical dance form, Sripadma shares details of her  interdisciplinary research, which aims to create a dance-based warm-up routine for Bharatanatyam dancers to help reduce the form&#3...

In her PhD in Philosophy, Claire Hamlett explores the idea of animal homes. As a freelance journalist, Claire had been interested to read  Wildlife as Property Owners  (2020) by Karen Bradshaw, which discussed how animal habitats could be protected in law. Claire decided to take the subject further by embarking on a PhD to see how far those ideas could be extended by thinking of animals as living...

A longer cut of Will’s interview with Jian Bakir, a third year Education PhD student. Jian’s thesis explores the experience of primary school teachers in active war zones – in this instance Aleppo, Syria. They discuss the very personal path to Jian’s research, the difficulties of collecting data from a war zone, her likes, dislikes and recommendations when it comes to doctoral life.     Recommenda...

Will interviews  Sanjini Kedia,  a Dance Therapy student in the School of Arts, who has submitted her thesis, for defence in 2026.    Sanjini’s  research profile   Sanjini’s  latest publication  (out since the recording)  Zotero , a free, open-source, multi-platform software for bibilography management  Chapters    00:08 Introduction  02:30 The core research question  03:36 Following on from the M...

A longer version of Charles’ Interview with  Catherine Archer-Richards , who is in the final months of her PhD in History. Catherine’s thesis, “Shakespeare as the ‘girl’s friend’” investigates the way girls in the Victorian era encountered the works of Shakespeare, at home and at school. She situates the influence of these early literary encounters on the evolving conceptions of girlhood, and the ...

Himan Heidari’s PhD research was inspired by reading a nineteenth century account by a Westerner who visited his home town in Iran. That led to his interest in women travel writers of that period and their reports of interactions with those they encountered, including the Kurds. In this show, Himan talks about what he’s learnt from the three writers his work is focussed on and how he reads their s...

A longer version of Will’s interview with Natalie Cairns-Ratter, which  aired earlier this year . Natalie is a musician, music teacher, and mother of an Autistic son, which all led her, first to a Master of Education at the Royal College of Music, then to her doctorate.  Natalie’s research investigates experiences of  flow   - full immersion and intense focus on a task – during music practice, wit...

Today books for children are a lucrative part of the publishing business. Juliet Harrison is studying how they emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century through the work of a number of women writers, including the extraordinarily prolific  Harriet Martineau . In the show, Juliet explains how she came to her thesis through related previous work and talks about how she hopes to build on th...