| By Giovanna Pasquariello

2021 marks a changeover for Pubs and Publications. With our former Chair Tim Galsworthy leaving the Committee, the blog is now entirely run by new and newest recruits. I am honoured to take Tim’s place as Chair and I hope I will do a job as good as his, especially in these challenging times. Anyway I am lucky to rely on the help of some brilliant fellow members, who have been amazingly contributing to Pubs and Pubs since they joined.

Ellie is now Vice Chair, and also keeping her role of Editor-at-Large. Our teams of Topical editors (Rachel and Vesna), Publicity editors (Megan and Craig), and Contributions’ editors (Ellis, Grant and Séveric) are continuing to do their amazing jobs, while Séveric is also taking the role of Technical editor. I am grateful to all of them for being so enthusiastic and proactive – and I am sure that they will make my role of Chair very easy, thanks to their reliability.

I would like to thank Tim again for the effort he put in keeping Pubs and Publications together during such difficult times last spring and throughout the year; I will take inspiration from him and former members whose creativity and energy made the blog what it is.

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

Pubs and Publications is a great example of team work, and I have been appreciating it recently more than ever. We all come from different backgrounds, we live in different cities – or even countries!, we study different things, yet we are working together to offer you the product which is Pubs and Publications. This is what I am most proud of: the blog teaches us every day that the PhD experience can keep us together and make a community out of us, and I hope that we are able to convey this message through our contributions.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank you all, for reading us and hence supporting us, and to invite you to take an active role in the community we want to build. If you like, you can write for us – we are always happy to accept guest contributions (“Call for Contributions”) and to know more about our fellow PhD students.

Happy New Year!

Featured image: Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash

Giovanna Pasquariello is Chair of “Pubs and Publications: the PhD experience”. She’s a second year at the University of Edinburgh, studying something old, very old: the vocabulary of Greek inscriptions on the Celts. Apart from this, she swears she is a fun person.