CONFIDENTIAL
Staff Review and Development (Academic)
This form has been developed in consultation with academic representatives.
For more information on the Annual Review Scheme, including downloadable forms, please
visit the Learning and Development Centre website at:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ldc/annualreview
Departments may wish to add material to this form in order to incorporate relevant additional
local review requirements.
Name: Felicia Gottmann
Position: Research Fellow
Reviewer’s name: Maxine Berg
Date of previous review: 10 June 2011
Date of review: 6 March 2012
Once your reviewer (who will be a senior member of your department) has contacted you to
arrange a meeting, you should complete Part 1 of this form. If your reviewer has highlighted
any issues that they wish to discuss then you may find it helpful to bear these in mind when
completing the form.
You should pass a copy of the completed form to your reviewer at least a week before your
meeting, along with an up-to-date CV, highlight changes/additions from your previous CV
(ideally use the University’s standard format, see the document ‘CV Guidelines’ at:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/humanresources/newpolicies/academic_promotions).
You may wish to include an additional summary of various activities that would not normally
feature on your CV, e.g. academic visits, grants applied for (even if not awarded – you can
access this information from RSS) administrative duties, new collaborations that have not yet
resulted in publications, etc. This is your opportunity to inform your head of department (via
your reviewer) about all aspects of your work over the past year.
The factual information provided by your CV and the more subjective comments you can give
on this form will provide the basis for your subsequent discussion.
Just as you have the opportunity to highlight any issues that you would particularly like to
discuss, you should expect to hear briefly from your reviewer at least three working days in
advance of the meeting about any issues that they would like to raise.
At the end of your meeting you and your reviewer should write and agree a short summary of
your discussion and list any matters that may need further attention. These might include
preferences and requests for the coming year and should be recorded on Part 2.
Include any identified development needs in Part 2. It will be your personal record and can be
retained to inform the following year’s review.
The form will be passed to your head of department and retained in your confidential file.
Page 1 of 6
PART 1
You should complete this section and pass the whole form to your reviewer at least
seven days before your meeting, along with an up-to-date CV. This information,
along with your responses to the questions that follow, will allow for an informed and
wide-ranging review discussion.
TAKING STOCK
Summarise your plans and aspirations as expressed in your previous review.
If this is your first review, please summarise your main areas of activity over the year.
From the last review:
Archival Research
 I will be spending a week at the Company Archives in Lorient, France, having
already been to those in Aix-en-Provence.
Conferences
 I will be attending the 13th International Congress of Eighteenth-Century
Studies in Graz, Austria, in July to give a revised version of the paper I
presented in Belfast as part of a panel on the Indian Ocean. My attendance is
largely funded by a grant I obtained from the conference organisers.
Publications
 I will be working on three, hopefully four, publications
1) A version of the papers presented at Graz and Belfast will be published by
SVEC as part of an edited collection on India-Europe relations in the
Eighteenth Century. Deadline for submissions is in December
2) I am to write a review of the first volume and accompanying Atlas of
Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes, to be published in French Studies.
Deadline for this is September.
3) My paper on the beginnings of the debate on commercial society in
France, entitled ‘Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the transformation of
Mandeville's Fable’ has been accepted for publication in History of
European Ideas, pending revisions. These I may effect in my own time
and have not been set a deadline.
4) I would like to turn my thesis into a book. There are significant synergies
with paper 1) which I can hopefully exploit, but this will be quite a lot of
work which I will have to do in my free time and over the holidays. The
provisional title is ‘Voltaire’s political economy’ or ‘Voltaire and political
economy’.
Preparation and Teaching
 I will need to do a significant amount of reading and preparation for the
module we are teaching next term.
 Teaching itself will take up a good deal of my time in some weeks of the
following terms.
Other
 I will need to write the literature review. This should overlap with the other
publications I am working on, but I will still need to set quite some time aside
for this.
How did what you accomplished last year compare to these plans and
aspirations?
What went well, and what went less well?
Archival Research
 The archives in Lorient are not hugely relevant to our project, but I spent a
very fruitful week in Paris in November, where there is much more material
yet to be explored.
Conferences
 The ISECS congress in Graz was a fantastic experience. I got some very
positive feedback on my paper, went to some really inspiring sessions, and
met many great scholars working in similar fields.
 The Comparing Companies Conference we organised last autumn was, I
think, a great success and certainly very useful for our project.
Publications
 I have finalised and sent off the article based on the papers presented in
Belfast and Graz in December. Entitled, ‘Intellectual History as Global History:
Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde and the problem of Enlightened commerce’, it
is supposed to be published as part of a collection entitled ‘New Global
Connections: India and Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century’. I have not
yet heard back from the editors.
 I have written and sent off the Raynal review in September. The Raynal
edition I got in return for this has proved very valuable.
 I used some of my holiday time this summer to finish off the Voltaire and
Mandeville paper. It is now pending publication in History of European Ideas.
 I have had no time at all to spend on my thesis. I now think it is something I
will not be able to do during the duration of this project.
Teaching
 I have been the co-ordinator for our module, so have stayed very involved
with it even when my own teaching finished.
 I did indeed spent most of the autumn term preparing and delivering the
teaching, as much of it was on topics I had never touched on before.
 All of this was a great experience and made me feel much more part of the
faculty, the co-ordination and the volunteering for the exam vetting in
particular.
Other
 I have spent most of the spring term preparing the literature review / survey
article. This involved some very intense reading as I had only very little time
to spare the previous term. It was a very useful experience that allowed me to
delve into the different fields associated with the Company, its trade and
indeed with our project. It was very good to get group feedback on the first
draft of the article and I will revise it accordingly as soon as I can.
 Working on the survey article has also helped me clarify my thinking on the
monograph that I will be focussing on now.
Were there any factors that inhibited you achieving your goals?
These could be structural problems (at the University or departmental level), lack of
resources, or inter-personal problems.
All in all I think the last two terms were quite successful and I certainly enjoyed them.
I am sometimes struggling to find the right balance between coming in to Warwick
and researching at home and in the library. The former is very important to maintain
proper project cohesion, but I found that in terms of research it is vastly less
productive than the latter. On the other hand, I do feel the need to be physically
present in order to feel engaged with the project and to feel I know what is happening
and what the latest developments are. I do however worry that I have very little time
for efficient researching.
PLANNING AHEAD
What are your plans and aspirations for the future?
Consider research, teaching, and administration. If you have particular requests for
next year’s teaching or administrative duties, please note them here. If you are
planning to take study leave, please mention this here.
Teaching
 We will continue to offer the module next year. I think it will need quite a bit of
restructuring to make it fit better with the other module provision. This
concerns not so much its content and structure as the current seminar set-up:
Hanna and Chris have agreed to change to weekly one-hour seminars, which
will be, I think, a great improvement that will hopefully also have a positive
effect on student attendance. It does mean however, that I will have to offer
quite a few more seminars, something that I will have to work out over the
summer.
 My teaching observation last year did not work out as planned and I hope to
profit from that more next year.
 I will continue to teach a seminar for the Masters module on Consumption
and I have been involved in the new module on the Enlightenment, which will
run for the first time next year. I will do some teaching for that, too, and I very
much look forward to that.
Monograph
 My main focus from now on will be the monograph. I attach a first tentative
outline.
 I will spend most of the term break in the French archives, two weeks in Paris
and two in Aix. This will, I hope, be a real boost and allow me to do more
structured and focussed research for the monograph.
 Whilst the monographs are of course single-authored and independent, I do
hope that our work for them will be to some degree collaborative. I would very
much like to profit from our team set-up and have regular informal meetings to
discuss ideas and progress. As part of that I hugely look forward to the days
in Swaledale, but I also hope that we could have regular informal sessions
that might be a good continuation of the political economy workshops which
we are running at the moment.
Working environment
Do you have any comments about your working environment, including working
relationships that concern you? Is there any way in which the department or
University could better support you?
I think our working together as a team has hugely improved and is going extremely
well. Both the teaching and having a common room have been very important in this.
Having more regular meetings for discussion, such as the political economy reading
groups, were also very important.
I do think it is very important to get together on a regular basis, not only for project
meetings with a proper agenda, but to exchange ideas and discuss. This not only
helps team building and cohesion, but also allows us to profit most from the unique
opportunity of working as a research team. I do hope that we will not lose this
momentum as we embark on the more individual research for the monographs.
Staff development
Is there any training that you think would be useful for you in any aspect of your job?
In order that you and your reviewer are clear on what happens next, it may help you
to specify how the training will be supplied, who will be responsible for organising
this, by when, and what you wish to achieve by taking part.
I think it would be very important for me to develop my contacts in the French and
Indian worlds. Spending more time in France, as in the four weeks over Easter will
help, and I hope to travel to India, too. I also hope to contact a few scholars to get
their opinion and advice on potential sources for the monograph project and perhaps
arrange to meet them whilst in France.
Career development
What are your longer term plans in terms of promotion and career development?
I’ve been thinking about potential research projects for the next stage in my career.
They are as yet very unspecific, but I will try to clarify my thinking over the next one
and a half years to be able to start applying for follow-on jobs then.
PARTICULAR ISSUES TO DISCUSS AT THE REVIEW MEETING
If you wish to highlight any issues that you would particularly like to discuss during
your review (even if already mentioned above), please do so here.


Monograph research and outline.
Future project meetings.
Once they have received this form, your reviewer should let you know at least three
working days before the meeting if there are any issues that they would particularly
like to discuss. A brief email may be the most appropriate way to do this, but they
should also make a note of them here.
PART 2
At the end of your discussion you should complete this section of the form and then
pass the whole form to your reviewer for him/her to agree the outcomes of the
meeting. The whole form should then be passed to your Head of Department (if he or
she is not your reviewer).
This section should be an agreed summary of your discussion and will provide you
and your reviewer with a useful record of your conversation. You may find it useful to
couch this in the context of previous reviews. Include any discussions about future
plans including, if appropriate, teaching preferences, request for study leave etc.
If you are unable to agree on a summary of the discussion, this should be noted by
both parties on the form with the areas of disagreement recorded.
Name:
Department:
Reviewer:
Date:
Agreed summary of discussion
………………………………………………………… Reviewee
………………………………………………………… Reviewer
Comment from Head of Department (or nominated person)
………………………………………………………… Head of Department
/Nominated person