Lectureships at Newcastle Politics Department: Information & Applications
Newcastle Politics Department currently have 4 lectureships advertised and a chair/reader to be advertised shortly. In this blog post those who are on the interview panels for the lectureship posts give some information to anyone thinking of applying to try give everyone an inside track.
The posts are:
- Two posts in the Politics of Gender – Professor/Reader and Lecturer
- Lecturer in Comparative Politics or Political Behaviour
- Lecturer in the Politics of Security or the Politics of Conflict
- Lecturer in Political Philosophy
If your work crosses across two of these specialisms – for example you work on gender and on conflict – then please apply for all the relevant posts.
When you apply
Please do apply if you meet the criteria for the post. The department is very open about methodological and theoretical approaches, as well as welcoming regional specialisms and interdisciplinary work. Moreover, we want to become more diverse in our makeup.
Your CV is a key document for those doing the shortlisting. Make sure you make it easy to read and that you flag all of your successes – publications, grants, teaching evaluations, awards, etc.
The other key document is the cover-letter which should be concise highlighting your key strengths. This gives you the opportunity to lay out your research achievements in more detail but also to let us know your plans for the future. Do include any work you have done which engages with groups outside of academia and discuss what impacts your work has had or activities you would like to pursue to generate this impact. It also gives you the chance to tell us more detail about the teaching/supervision experience you have and mention any administrative or service roles you have done. We are looking for colleagues, and the cover-letter gives you the chance to let us know who you are.
There is also a box to be completed during the online application process which asks you to account for how you meet the person specification, however the selection panels will be paying close attention to the CV and cover-letters which you should ensure show how you meet the specifications anyway. So it is quite ok to put “please see CV and cover-letter” in this section.
What you should know about the department and the university
Newcastle Politics is a vibrant friendly department with 43 gifted academics engaging with Politics from almost every angle. We are a research active department with research clusters in International Politics, Governance and Political Organisations and Political Philosophy, as well as very active groups of researchers working on gender and politics and engaging with quantitative approaches. We cover a wide range of regional specialisms too with scholars focusing on African, Chinese, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Russian Politics. As mentioned above we are theoretically and methodologically pluralistic and are happy to both build on areas of strength and branch out. Teaching is also central to the department, as we attempt to impart our enthusiasm for our research work to our students. We are a department that is growing not only in size but also in diversity and we would like more of this. You will be a good fit if you are keen to develop your academic career in a collaborative environment that values and supports its staff to achieve excellence in research, teaching and impact.
We currently offer undergraduate degrees in Politics, Politics and Economics, Politics and History, Politics and Sociology, and Government and European Studies. Politics is also one of the most popular subjects for students on the Combined Studies programmes. We will be launching two new programmes in International Relations and Politics & International Relations from 2020-21. We also offer eight postgraduate taught programmes.
The university is well financed and this means that there is a confidence about the future and support available to develop new initiatives. Funds have been allocated for us to grow in order to enable us to improve staff student ratios and developmentally improve the department’s performance.
Living in Newcastle
Newcastle is a great place to live. A mid-sized city that provides for an excellent quality of life, including affordable housing, high quality schools, and a thriving arts and culture scene.
The city offers loads; a good number of theatres, galleries, comedy clubs, a world class concert hall just over the river as well as good restaurants, pubs and clubs. It is a beautiful city with much of the centre comprising streets of Georgian sandstone buildings. The long sandy beaches of the coast are easily reached from the city centre via the metro, indeed some people in the department choose to live at the coast (it is approx. a 30min commute to the department). Others live either in the centre or in the hippyish suburbs of the city such as Heaton or Gosforth which have their own highstreets with cafes and shops. Newcastle is a really green city with large open spaces, these include the town moor which abuts the city centre and is larger than Hampstead Heath and Jesmond Dene, a beautiful wooded park which sits between Jesmond, Gosforth and Heaton. The scenic countryside of Northumberland and County Durham is also very accessible.
The city is well connected by rail and road and has an international airport with daily direct flights to major hubs, and it’s conveniently reached by the metro.
It is also a very reasonable city to live in, out of the 20 largest cities in the UK, housing in Newcastle is the third cheapest with an average price of £129.6K.
Feel free to get in touch
If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of these posts, we will be very happy to discuss them informally with you. Contact details for each post are included in the advertisements or you can contact Prof. Derek Bell (Head of Politics) derek.bell@ncl.ac.uk (tel. +44 (0)191 2087465). There is also some more information on the University’s website.
