FEATURE
FELLOW IN FOCUS Dr Alison Wood’s career encompassed music, medicine, English, divinity and history, before she brought them all together to lead Homerton’s unique Changemakers programme. She tells us why she loves seeing how different disciplines collide, and how Changemakers works to inspire students.
Dr Alison Wood You’ve had an extraordinarily wideranging career! How does it all fit together? I find it hard to fit myself into a 150-word bio. My career has had many turns that look unconventional, but in hindsight there have been two consistent threads. I’ve always been inter-disciplinary, thinking about how different disciplines work together, where the edges are, and how they can collide. And I’ve always been interested in institution-building: how we build better structures to enable even better thinking and action.
and organise, and they wanted someone who wasn’t necessarily from a medical background, but who could think creatively and build organisational structure. We built a network of 100+ researchers from across the University, won a second round of operating costs, and won several large research grants as a result of that crossdisciplinary cooperation. It was superbly interesting, and I learned so much about how institutional power operates, and how different disciplines can speak to each other.
What brought you to the UK? What was your starting point?
Alison explained the Changemakers programme to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales on his visit last November
I studied English and History at the University of Adelaide, before working as a musician for ten years, teaching piano and singing, and playing professionally, while also undertaking further studies in music. Then, while I was writing my Research MA in English on libretti, I also worked in medicine, co-ordinating a multi-disciplinary Healthy Aging Research Cluster at the University of Adelaide. I could talk, write
I had a yearning to come to the UK to study. King’s College London was offering its first programmes in literature and medicine, and I was initially planning to write on 19th century Jewish texts, a plan which fell apart when my supervisor asked “how’s your Yiddish?” Instead, I looked into TRR Stebbing, an English evangelical Christian who read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, converted to Darwinism, and became one
22_0301 H2A Homertonian Newsletter(5119) 2022/08/10 17:44:31
David Johnson
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HOMERTONIAN
