What Is Alternative Academia? Building Your Own Network

Adrian Powney is Head of Operations for Student Wellbeing, Experience and Academic Writing Services in the College of Arts at the University of Birmingham. In 2022, he founded CALt-Ac, a network for research active professional services staff at the University of Birmingham. He read music at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, gaining a first-class BA (Hons) and later a MMus with distinction at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, specialising in historical musicology. Adrian’s research centres on all aspects of performance practices in French Baroque music. His doctoral thesis examines metre signs and terms of mouvement in the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704). He has published in several journals, written various programme and CD liner notes, and edited for several professional ensembles works by a number of seventeenth-century French composers. He has recently published a critical edition of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Leçons et Repons de Ténèbres with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. 

Tania Cleaves (née Woloshyn) is a research development manager at the University of Nottingham (2023–present). Following her PhD in art history (2008, Nottingham), Tania undertook fixed-term teaching contracts (Nottingham, Richmond American University London, New College Nottingham). She then held postdoctoral fellowships funded by SSHRC (2010–12, McGill) and Wellcome (2012–16, Warwick), during which time she curated small exhibitions, got married, birthed a tiny human and wrote her OA monograph, Soaking Up the Rays (MUP, 2017).
By late 2016, it all became a bit much and she switched careers, joining the University of Birmingham in research support (2016–23). Tania felt able to return to research in 2019 as an alt-ac, whilst also juggling full-time work and caring responsibilities. With recent funding from the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC), Association for Art History and the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund, she is writing her second monograph, Touchy Subjects: Nude Photography and Nudism in Britain, ca.1930–1950.

Liam McLeod is a teaching fellow in academic skills at Leeds Trinity University (LTU), where he undertakes cross-disciplinary work to support students at all levels. As of 2024, he also acts as the Network Lead for LTU’s recently established Professional Services Research Network. A final-year doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, Liam’s primary research interests are in Carolingian and Ottonian Bavaria, with a particular focus on Hugeburc of Heidenheim’s Vita Willibaldi episcopi Eichstetensis. His latest publication, however, (“Subverting the Valiant Crusader” in Bloomsbury’s Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games) explores the intersection of medieval history, video games and lone wolf terrorism. He has spoken at national and international centres on medieval history, historical reception studies and pedagogies of belonging in the Higher Education sector