Stepping into the Institute of Advanced Study felt like crossing a threshold—not into a new university, but into a new way of seeing my own. For six years, Durham has been the backdrop to my academic life, familiar lecture halls, well-trodden paths, and research routines that felt almost second nature.
Yet, through the IAS project, those certainties began to shift. Collaborating with two professorial colleagues, Prof Catherine Manathunga and Prof Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela, in an environment designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, I found myself looking at Durham not as a home I knew, but as a landscape full of questions, possibilities, and unexpected perspectives. It was as if the ordinary had become extraordinary, and the institution I thought I understood revealed itself anew.
Dr Craig Stewart from Computing Science and I had been collaborating for some time on our project aiming to surface doctoral knowledge from EThOS, the huge digital collection of 637,000 doctoral theses dating back to 1650. We have had a series of funded projects from ESRC Impact Acceleration, and thanks to Craig we had harnessed student project work and we had worked more and more closely with the British Library and the Bodleian Library. I had also had a period of research leave when I spent time at Oxford University as a research fellow and made connections for the project there too. All these connections and pieces of the jigsaw all started to coalesce and make more sense during the IAS project. Craig and I invited two very impressive professors from Australia, Catherine Manathunga, and from Barcelona, Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela, who themselves became different pieces of the jigsaw and made the picture make sense. Selected for two very different knowledge, experience and skill sets, they both came with fresh and expert perspectives that I could never have anticipated. Not only that, but we also immediately gelled as a group. Whenever we got together, we couldn’t stop talking and often ended up all talking at the same time! It really was the start of a beautiful intellectual friendship (to quote the film Casablanca!).
The environment which the IAS provided was essential and absolutely integral to this. For a start we shared an office in Garden Stairs in Castle and this was somewhere I had never been before in my six years at Durham. I hadn’t spent much time in Castle but the office there became my base for the whole of the Michaelmas term. We spent a lot of time having lunches and dinners in Castle in the Great Hall which was great for our collaboration but terrible for my waistline! Our shared office in Garden Stairs did turn out to be a bit haunted as well which was a bonus. Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela was based in Castle and threw herself 100% into the social, intellectual and cultural life of the college. She was welcomed with open arms by Principal Wendy Powers and Vice Principal Ellen Crabtree. Catherine Manathunga was similarly welcomed and engaged at St Cuth’s where Catherine and her husband Chris became part of the life of the college.
Everything that the IAS had put in place, all the events and social and cultural activities and the college environments were part of the intellectual experience and took me on a trip round parts of Durham I had not known. One of the most memorable of these, in addition to Castle, was the work we started in the Durham Historical Archive. As Catherine Manathunga is an historian, we met with Durham Library and Archive staff and got to know Senior Archivist Dr Jonathan Bush which was very important. Catherine Manathunga led our exploration into the historical past of Durham and its doctoral research as a background to our work in the digital archive of Durham’s theses. We all spent some time looking at the colonial pasts of research at Durham and explored the university’s historical relationships with Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone and Codrington College in Barbados. I had never done archival work before, and I found it fascinating and I felt like I had developed a new academic identity.
Another highlight of our term was the trip we all took to the British Library and to the Bodleian and Oxford. As well as getting behind the scenes at the museums it also cemented the relationship with the Department of Education at Oxford and it meant that the whole team got to meet up. In parallel with the IAS project Craig and I had been working on an ESRC Responsive Call bid and during the IAS project and the trip to Oxford this has come on in leaps and bounds and we are almost ready to submit. Both our IAS fellows will be part of that bid which is for just under £1million and we have also added Dr Jonathan Bush from Durham Archives to that too. Thanks to the focus and acceleration provided by the IAS environment, we are nearly ready to go with that.
Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at IAS and have seen Durham in a different light and these changed perspectives have given me new insights into my own work and the work of others at Durham and far beyond. It was a very memorable and important term for me and I’d like to thank Alex Easton and Linda Crowe and all at IAS for all their hard work and commitment to the Institute. It passed too quickly, as you said it would!
Professor Catherine Montgomery (School of Education, Durham University)
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