Hello and welcome to Learning Experiences! The purpose of this blog is to share information and reflections about teaching, learning, and research in higher education libraries. The title of blog reflects my interest in the process of how AND why we learn. It was inspired by my favourite bumper sticker

oh no! not another learning experience!

which encapsulates my belief that the process of acquiring knowledge and skills is unexpected, challenging, and sometimes also funny.

Meet The Blogger

My name is Dr Hope Williard and I am a librarian, associate lecturer, and medieval historian based at the University of Lincoln, UK. My staff profile can be found here

As an academic subject librarian, I support teaching, learning, and research across a baker’s dozen of subjects in the arts and humanities. My role also includes responsibilities as the liaison librarian for Lincoln’s Doctoral School, where I facilitate workshops on research skills and researcher development. Within the ASL team, I collaborate to develop workshops on study skills, referencing, and information literacy. I coordinate the library’s Research Support Group, a forum for peer learning and discussion of issues related to support for research and researchers at all levels within the University of Lincoln. I also contribute to efforts to decolonise and diversify our library and institution through membership on university and library committees dedicated to this work. I am the co-author of publications about students’ experiences of doing academic reading online and decolonisation in academic libraries.

As an associate lecturer, my teaching has focused on the premodern Mediterranean. I taught late antique and medieval history, as well as medieval Latin, to undergraduates at the University of Leeds (2014-2017). I have also taught Latin to postgraduates at the University of Lincoln (2019-2021). Since 2016, I have taught ancient, late antique, and medieval history to Lincoln undergraduates, including a module on Ancient Graffiti.

I have a PhD in medieval history from the University of Leeds and am fascinated by the world of late antiquity. My publications focus on letter writing and literary culture in the fourth through seventh centuries. My first book, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries, comes out with ARC Humanities Press in November 2022. My research journey has taken me all over the world and on fellowships at the John Rylands Library, Manchester and Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, where I researched the role of female library workers in the study of medieval manuscripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My project shed light of the labour of these remarkable women and provided a new model for thinking about unseen scholarly work.

While this blog focuses predominately on library teaching, my academic and research background have inevitably shaped the way I approach and think about experiences of learning. Plus, the Middle Ages pop up in all sorts of surprising places!