Hi Teresa, can you tell us about your career journey so far, and how lifelong learning has shaped your professional life along the way?

My career journey has been somewhat non-linear. I began in financial services, progressing through a series of promotions to become a Project Manager for a global retail bank. While I valued vocational training, I was always drawn to deeper forms of learning and critical inquiry.

Alongside full-time work, I completed an undergraduate degree in Business and Management part-time. I found the experience invaluable as academic theory helped my professional practice, while my workplace experience enriched my engagement with business models and organisational theory. That reciprocity sparked a lasting commitment to lifelong learning.

I subsequently completed an MSc and moved into the sustainability sector, where my academic interests and professional work increasingly intersected. Since then, I have completed multiple master’s degrees across business, sustainability, and research-led disciplines. Lifelong learning has never been about collecting qualifications; it has been about expanding my skills and knowledge, deepening my understanding of complex systems, and continually reframing how I think about work, society, and inequality.

Your first step into research was a Professional Practice Masters by Research at LBU. How did taking an academic approach to your vocational work change the way you thought about practice and evidence?

My first research degree was a Professional Practice Masters by Research at LBU, following particularly positive experiences with research during my undergraduate and first master’s degree. The opportunity to undertake a Masters by Research marked a significant shift in how I understood professional life.

Drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games, I began to see organisations not simply as structures or hierarchies, but as cultural systems constituted through shared meanings, implicit assumptions, and unspoken rules. This academic perspective helped me understand why practice functions differently across organisational contexts, and how language shapes authority, legitimacy, decision-making, and strategy.

Rather than seeking to change practice, the research encouraged me to understand it. That shift, from intervention to interpretation, altered how I think about evidence, professional knowledge, and organisational power, and it continued to shape my work.

What prompted the decision to move from a corporate career into historical research, and what did those early first steps into academia look like for you?

I had always wanted to study history, and alongside my professional career I continued to study the subject through short courses and MOOCs. What ultimately drew me fully into historical research was a question that would not leave me: the depth and persistence of inequality in my home city of Sheffield.

I wanted to understand how stark divisions of wealth and opportunity had developed, how they were maintained, and why they proved so enduring. My move into historical research was deliberate, building on an extensive background in higher education and research-led study. While history required the development of discipline-specific skills, particularly in archival research and historiography, the intellectual transition itself was not difficult. Instead, it represented a deepening and refocusing of long-standing interests in inequality, power, and social structure.

Moving into historical research also meant learning to engage critically with archives, not only for what they contain, but for what they omit. I became particularly interested in how silences are produced within the historical record, and how institutional and administrative sources can be used to illuminate marginalised or overlooked lives.

Can you tell us about your PhD research, and what questions or themes you are most drawn to within it?

My PhD builds on the themes that emerged from my second Masters by Research, particularly around social inequality within industrial cities. I am interested in how patterns of wealth, opportunity, and exclusion developed at a local level, and how they were experienced in everyday life.

A central question in the project is whether the factors producing inequality in Sheffield were distinctive to the city or reflected broader structural patterns shared with other industrial centres, such as Leeds. Using a comparative, place-based approach, I aim to identify both commonalities and differences in how inequality was structured, maintained, and contested.

The themes I am most drawn to include the lived experience of class, the role of housing, employment, health, and education in shaping opportunity. Ultimately, the research seeks to show how deeply inequality was embedded in the fabric of urban life, and why its effects proved so persistent.

What forms of support have been most important in helping you transition into research in the social sciences?

The most important support I received came from my supervisors, who were consistently encouraging, rigorous, and intellectually generous. In particular, they supported me in developing my own narrative and analytical voice, which was crucial in building confidence as a researcher.

They also helped me recognise the continuity between my previous studies and my emerging work in social science and history. Skills such as analytical thinking, qualitative research, critical reading, and sensitivity to context transferred naturally into academic research. That combination of intellectual challenge, trust, and recognition made the transition into social science research both credible and sustaining.

How does your professional experience continue to shape the way you approach historical research and academic work more broadly?

My professional background gives me a strong systems perspective, which continues to shape how I approach historical research. Years working in the sustainability sector made me particularly attentive to power, institutions, governance, and the long-term consequences of policy decisions, concerns that now inform my work as a social historian.

It has also shaped my interest in reform and social change. I am drawn to historical questions that speak directly to contemporary issues, particularly inequality, inclusion, and structural disadvantage. Making connections between past and present is central to how I approach academic work more broadly and underpins my commitment to research that is both historically rigorous and socially meaningful.