Hello! I’m Lucie, and I’ll be taking over from Marianne as the SGSAH blogger for the next 6 months. I’m so excited to take on this post, although Marianne is certainly a tough act to follow. She has done an amazing job, sharing honest, funny and enlightening posts on what it is like to be an arts and humanities PhD student (all the while designing a range of SGSAH swan tattoos). The one thing I can promise is a continued dog presence, as I too have a PhD puppy. In fact my dog and Marianne’s dog are pals, but that is a story for another day.

I’ll start by telling you a little about myself, and then what I have planned for this space during my time as SGSAH blogger. I am in the final year of my PhD at the University of Glasgow, researching  women’s fashion in the First World War period. Specifically, I am seeking to show how the changes in fashion between 1914-1918 can be used to explore women’s experiences of war, and look at methods to communicate this information in a museum setting. I am currently co-organising a conference called ‘War Through Other Stuff’ which takes place at the end of this month, and I am also undertaking an internship at the Museum of Edinburgh, where I have been working on the costume collection since 2014.

Before I found myself in academia, I was a design student and worked in the fashion and textile design industry for a couple of years. I still make things from time-to-time, and I currently attend pottery evening classes (I call them PhD therapy) to keep that part of my brain in action. Everything I have done in my professional/academic career to date centres around objects, and the power of objects to tell stories. So you can certainly expect a fair amount of visually led, material culture and museum oriented posts over the next few months!

This blog will continue to celebrate the brilliant arts & humanities research going on across Scotland, and offer insight into the PhD experience. I’m also planning to add a new kind of post to the SGSAH blogging schedule; in the last week of every month I’ll be writing a round-up of blog posts, call for papers, podcasts and events relevant to our readers. If you’ve been working on any of the above and would like to be included, please get in touch via email. Guests posts will still be featured on a weekly basis, and I’ve added some guidelines for submissions here. I would particularly like to include some research-led or visually-led posts on the blog, so if you have an idea for either of these I’d love to hear it. See the guidelines for more information!

To finish, I’d like to say thank you to SGSAH for trusting me with this little corner of the internet for the next 6 months!

I’ll be back next week with a proper post. Thanks for reading!