English Literature Graduate, PGCE Candidate English teacher at London - Beth

I was the supervisor for Beth Johnstone’s undergraduate dissertation at the University of Glasgow, in which she wrote on the complex relationships between people and physical books. She came to the project with a well-articulated sense of what she wanted to achieve and an impressive willingness to acquire skills in new areas. Despite lacking previous formal training, she conducted a rigorous piece of quantitative research as part of the project, as well as surveying a wide range of theoretical and critical texts cutting across disciplinary fields including book history, film theory, architecture, sociology and philosophy. Her approach was academically well-informed, but also extremely creative and original. The dissertation was awarded an A3 (equivalent to about 75 on the English marking scale); one of the markers described her project as ‘an excellent dissertation which uses quantifiable data to explore the association between book selection, age and nostalgia’; the other characterised it as ‘a novel, sophisticated and useful piece of criticism’, writing that it was ‘especially laudable in its innovative accounting for the ways in which the book as object transcends straightforwardly economic value systems to do different kinds of work both for individuals and for the culture more broadly.’