Heather Tilley Email and Phone Number

Role includes managing student caseload with responsibility for supporting students with a range of complex physical and sensory disabilities and developing expertise in recommending reasonable adjustments to Student Support Officers and academics. Leading on departmental and university-wide inclusive practice initiatives that met institutional strategic aims via project work to improve disabled student experience across QMUL.

Responsibilities included teaching, research and administration. Teaching: delivering lectures and seminars on modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level; module convenor; course designer (including assessments) and module convenor for a third-year undergraduate module Victorian Literature and Disability; supervising dissertation projects; acting as a first-year assessor on a PhD progression panel. Research: researching and writing articles on Victorian literature and disability; presenting research at various conferences and symposia. Administration: Disability Officer, SED, QMUL: role included providing pastoral support to students with disabilities and Specific Learning Differences; organising training for colleagues; participation on the School’s Teaching and Learning Committee and EDI Committee; the Online-Education Group.

Responsibilities included research, teaching and administration. Research: publications including monograph Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing published by Cambridge University Press. Curating exhibition on mental health and art therapy, Mr A Moves in Mysterious Ways: Selected Artists from the Adamson Collection, Peltz Gallery (2017). Events programme included collaborations with the Bethlem Museum of the Mind and South London and Maudsley NHS Trust Arts. Fundraising for and organising conference and symposia including ‘Curating the Medical Humanities’ (supported by a £5000 grant from the Wellcome Trust) and ‘Victorian Psychology Now’ (£3000 grant from the Wellcome Trust). I was also a Steering group member for the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities: role included convening reading group, organising networking events and producing and editing website. Teaching: providing doctoral training through delivery of research methods seminars for the PhD – interdisciplinary arts and humanities programme. MA Victorian Studies – delivering research methods seminars; supervision of intern programme at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind; dissertation supervision; design of Summer project on Curating the Victorians. Administration: Member of Birkbeck’s Academic Advisory Board for the College’s HR Excellence in Research Award: role included attending steering group meetings; advising on draft documentation including College-wide research action plan. Member and Acting Director of the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck (2016): role included chairing steering group meetings; liaising with external curators and artists; developing policy and procedure; fundraising for exhibitions.

Grant award: £186,434.Responsibilities included: research, administration and teaching. Researching and writing publications on aspects of nineteenth-century literary culture and disability, particularly the history of blindness. Curating and fundraising for the exhibitions Touching the Book: Embossed Literature for Blind People in the Nineteenth Century, Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, 2013 (awarded £8200 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Sharing Heritage Strand) and How We Read: A Sensory History of Books for Blind People, selected for the 2014 Being Human Festival (awarded £3000 from the School of Advanced Study, AHRC and British Academy). Invited to curate a display Facing Blindness: Visual Impairment in the Nineteenth Century, National Portrait Gallery, London in 2013-14. Organiser of The Victorian Tactile Imagination, international, interdisciplinary conference, Birkbeck (2013). Awarded the maximum conference grant by the British Association for Victorian Studies (£400). Editor of special issue on ‘The Victorian Tactile Imagination’ for the open access journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 19 (2014) . Also a Committee member for international interdisciplinary conference, Blind Creations, Royal Holloway, June 2015 Teaching: Provided doctoral training on the PhD interdisciplinary arts and humanities programme; teaching and assessment responsibilities on the MA Victorian Studies programme; dissertation supervision. Experience of external fundraising; delivering successful outreach programmes to different communities including students, academics and disability communities. Accessible and inclusive exhibition design (including descriptive tours and lectures; working with RNIB on production of tactile reproductions of Victorian embossed writing scripts).