Hey, I’m Katie!

I’m a book lover, music lover, writing and researching lover…

I could go on. As an academic researcher, I’m interested in how we consume culture, and how it consumes us – I have a degree in Music and hopefully will soon have a Masters degree in Musicology. Although my background is in musical performance, my studies have taken me in a whole load of different directions: teaching, community projects, performance. But I’ve always come back to what I really love: reading and writing.

This Blog

On here you’ll find blog posts on my research into the cultural icon of the witch (she’s everywhere – Glinda and Elphaba, WitchTok, not to mention Manon Blackbeak and The Thirteen!), but also the stuff that doesn’t make it into my academics but consumes me in my free time.

My main hobby is reading. Having taken a teenaged hiatus from it, I was catapulted back into obsession when a friend convinced me to read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas – a rite of passage for many bookish girls. Fantasy makes up a large part of my reading taste, so if you love epic stories from the likes of Brandon Sanderson & Robin Hobb, the satirical spoof-universe of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and a healthy dose of some good old-fashioned and YA fantasy from Sarah J. Maas, Victoria Aveyard, Rebecca Yarros and Leigh Bardugo, you’re in the right place! It’s not all dragons, cauldrons and magic, though. You’ll find contemporary fiction, psychological thrillers, dark academia and the like on here too.

So…why am I blogging?

Simply put, I love reading and I want to write more. I spend most of my time researching and writing pieces of academia, investigating and prodding at an idea until I come up with something original. This is the part of my degree that I love. The part I don’t love, however, is when I have to squeeze it all into a teeny tiny word count only to be read by lecturers. We often say we want to carve out more time for the things we love. Well, this is what I’m doing. By starting this blog, I’m going to write more about what interests me, in a way that hopefully interests other people.

The world around us is changing – in ways both good and bad. In an age of constant digital connectivity, it’s surprising that we feel more and more isolated. I hope that by blogging I can connect people with mutual interests and combat the increasing amounts of AI generated, soulless material on the Internet.

This blog is designed to function as a casual portfolio of my writing, my interests, and my life. Peppered with excerpts of my professional endeavours, I’m aiming to curate a place where academic concepts coexist with popular culture.