Rosemary Auchmuty on Demystifying the UK REF and the Appointment Process in Law Schools

Virtual workshop

Fri May 14 2021, 12-13.15 CEST

Rosemary Auchmuty is Professor in the School of Law at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. Through her career, she has held several leading roles that have given her insight into the practices of UK Higher Education. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is now a prominent part in any UK university and, indeed, academic life in general. Rosemary was a member of the national sub-panel for Law in the 2014 REF and she now leads the School’s activities for the 2021 REF submission. Aside from her research activities, Rosemary has also led initiatives in teaching and in quality assurance in her former role as Director of Teaching and Learning. Owing to her roles as an expert peer reviewer in both research and teaching assessments, Rosemary has sat on a number of appointment panels in universities through out the United Kingdom.

Rosemary grew up in Newcastle, a port city in New South Wales, Australia. She began her academic career by training as a historian. She turned to legal studies later in her career, when she moved to the United Kingdom. Rosemary’s research focuses on women, their lives and the law. She is a pioneer in this respect and brought a new approach to legal history. Her piece on Gwyneth Bebb, a woman, who campaigned to open the legal profession to women in the United Kingdom, remains seminal. It adds to her efforts to uncover the lost lives of the first women lawyers and law students. Her edited collection Great Debates in Gender and Law pushes gender into all facets of the law curriculum. More recently, she has begun promoting the case of Feminist Legal History as a way of revealing the place of women and challenging and revising dominant historical narratives that cast them aside. She co-edited Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland with Erika Rackley.  Through this project, Rosemary and Erika brought together around 100 academics to commemorate the centenary of women’s admission in to the legal profession. With her work on the edited collection Gender and Careers in the Legal Academy, Rosemary remains committed to fostering the study of women’s academic careers and, more politically, in advancing progress on gender and equality issues.

In her talk, Rosemary will discuss the importance of the REF, appointment procedures in UK law schools, and the intricacies of the promotion procedures in the United Kingdom. She aims to do this interactively and consider your questions about these matters.