Can you tell me a bit about your PhD topic?

Yes. It was in English literature but when friends look at it now or I tell them about it, they all say that I should say it was in cultural history. It's about writing on the working classes of London in the late nineteenth century and particularly a writer called Edwin Pew who no one's ever heard of so whenever I gave papers at conferences you have to spend half of your time explaining who it is but I expect a lot of people experience that. And he brings a very positive outlook to his writing about the working classes of London at a time when other writers were writing about them in very dark negative terms. It wasn't just literary because having done cultural studies on the social science side, I was encouraged to think of all texts as texts so it drew heavily on the sociology of the period and other cultural sort of commentary and things like that.