UCL DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY
Professor Sir Roderick Floud
The Dean, School of Advanced Study
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
5 October 2007
Dear Professor Floud
Report on University of London Research Fellowship
I was very honoured to be selected for one of the first University of London Research Fellowships
at the School of Advanced Study in spring this year.
I indicated in my application that my intention was to write a book arising from a research project
supported by funding from the ESRC, a project that had been seriously delayed as a result of
serious family health problems and a heavy administrative load at work.
At the time that I applied, an edited book on which I had been working for the past couple of
years had just been accepted for publication by Rutgers University Press. I expected to be able to
return to work on my own book within a month or two, but this was over-optimistic. I spent most of
summer 2006 working on revisions to the book, ghost-writing one entire chapter and revising the
translations of some other chapters, checking and integrating the bibliography and copy-editing
the entire manuscript. The rest of the summer was spent in revising one of two journal articles
that I wanted to get out in time for submission to the RAE. This work continued alongside the
process of responding to the Rutgers copy-editor’s queries and teaching during the autumn term.
I mention this because it meant that I was not ready to return to work on my own book at the start
of my fellowship. I detail below the work that I did therefore accomplish from January to April
2007.
1) I revised an article accepted for publication in World Development. This is now available
online and will appear in print this month. I also made a presentation based on this paper to
the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco in April.
2) I proof-read the final proof of our edited book, Decoding Gender: Law and Practice in
Contemporary Mexico. The book was published in August.
3) We were simultaneously negotiating publication of a Spanish-language version of Decoding
Gender with El Colegio de México, Mexico’s leading social science publisher. We wished to
make this a Mexican version rather than just a translation. I therefore revised the entire
bibliography, ensuring that all publications available in both Spanish and English that had
been cited in the English version in the Rutgers publication were replaced by the Spanish
UCL DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY
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www.geog.ucl.ac.uk
version. I copy-read the entire manuscript to ensure that all references affected by the
revisions to the bibliography were corrected. I replaced the English translations of quotations
from primary material in Spanish with the original for all chapters for which I had the material
available, and drew up a detailed list of queries and changes needed for the authors of all
other chapters. I updated all the legal citations in one chapter. I worked with the translator to
ensure that her versions of my own chapter, the introduction and the chapter that I had ghostwritten were correct. I also worked with the other editors to respond to some minor requests
for revision from the referees employed by El Colegio de México. Publication has now been
agreed and translation is nearing completion.
4) I had been invited to contribute to the second edition of the Arnold Companion to
Development Studies but had been unable to contemplate doing so until my RAE articles and
Decoding Gender were completed. Although the deadline had been October 2006, the editors
were still keen to include my article in the new edition. I therefore revised some global
statistics on household headship for the tables accompanying this article and revised the text.
The revision was submitted in March and is now in press.
5) I worked with Maribel Blasco, the co-author of an article on gender and property in urban
Mexico, on translating the article into Spanish and submitting it for publication to the Revista
Mexicana de Sociología in March. We are still awaiting a decision on publication.
6) After completing the work detailed above I returned to my book on housing and home in urban
Mexico. I spent the latter part of my fellowship analysing a large quantity of transcribed group
and individual interviews before using the results to advance work on one of the chapters
discussing the findings of our research. I discussed this material at the Dean’s Seminar series
in 16 May 2007 and have subsequently made a presentation on the same topic at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.
Although I did not therefore complete the work I had originally hoped to undertake, my fellowship
was, as you will see, very productive and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity it gave me to
make up for the difficulties of the previous four or five years.
I gather that you would like to hear if I have any views about how the Research Fellowship could
be improved. The one thing that occurs is that there is perhaps some ambiguity about the extent
to which the Fellow’s relationship is primarily to the School or to the Institute at which they are
based. Whilst I made a point of attending as many research seminars as I could at the Institute
for the Study of the Americas, I deliberately did not go round ‘knocking on doors’. I know only too
well how pleasure at receiving guests from other institutions/overseas can conflict with teaching
concerns, and the Institutes, by their very nature, do already tend to have rather a lot of guests.
One way of enabling the Fellow to play a somewhat more visible role in the Institute without
adding to the need to ‘entertain’ guests might be for them to be invited to contribute to the
Institute’s regular seminar series. Perhaps the Dean’s Seminar Series is regarded as having first
call on them, but it should not be too difficult to agree a suitable division of labour. For example,
the Fellow could be invited to make a presentation on work in progress in the Dean’s series, but
on any other aspect of their work of relevance to the Institute, in the latter’s series. I hope you find
this suggestion helpful.
Yours sincerely
Ann Varley