Kristin Ewins

About Kristin Ewins

I am Associate Professor and, since 2013, Director of the Centre for Academic Development. In recent years, my research and development work has focused particularly on leadership in higher education. Together with Eva Svedmark and Anna Hultgren, I have written the report Att leda högre utbildning. En kartläggning av ledarskap av utbildning i akademin [Leading Higher Education: A Survey of Educational Leadership], based on a national survey funded as part of the Swedish Council for Higher Education’s initiative to strengthen academic development. The report has been important for how we at Örebro University continue to develop our work with academic leadership, academic development, and support for everyone working with education at the university.

An important part of my role is to strengthen collegial arenas for dialogue, learning, and shared responsibility. I was involved in establishing the Academic Development Leadership Forum (HPCF) in 2020, and I greatly value the work carried out there to advance academic development issues across the higher education sector. I also see collaboration with the student union as a central part of the work of the Centre for Academic Development. Students’ perspectives are crucial to the development of education.

I have worked with PhD supervisor training for many years, and encounters with colleagues from different disciplinary cultures are among the most enriching aspects of my work. PhD supervision brings to the fore many of the questions that I also engage with in other parts of my role: academic responsibility, collegiality, judgement, and quality.

My research interests concern how collegiality, deliberative processes, and academic hospitality can contribute to higher education grounded in democratic values and committed to public good. Since 2021, I have been co-project leader, together with Molly Sutphen, of the international research project Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE), funded by the Research Council of Norway from 2021 to 2027. The project explores how academic hospitality can support collaboration in interdisciplinary educational environments and how universities can prepare students to work with complex societal challenges. AHIE builds on questions that were also central to the earlier project Formation and Competence Building of University Academic Developers, in which I participated as both researcher and practitioner from 2015 to 2020.

My earlier research career was in English literature and cultural studies. I completed my doctorate in English at the University of Oxford in 2009 with a thesis on British women writers of the 1930s and the relationship between authorship and political engagement. I have taught at the University of Salford, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and various colleges at the University of Oxford. For many years, I was involved in research environments and journals within cultural materialism and periodical studies, including as an editor of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Chair of the Raymond Williams Society, and co-founder of the European Society for Periodical Research and the Journal of European Periodical Studies. This background continues to shape my interest in language, Bildung, democracy, and the core values and social responsibility of higher education.