Equipped with a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature (from Jesus Colleage, University of Oxford) and teacher qualifications, I became a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) practitioner in the UK and overseas before a short spell in corpus-based lexicography at Birmingham University/COBUILD.

I then took my MEd TESOL (1993) and this enabled my second career - as a language teacher educator for TESOL practitioners, based in the School of Education at Manchester since 1994. In this role, I developed specialisms in intercultural aspects of TESOL (e.g. Language Education as Intercultural Practice) and intercultural education more generally, in (appropriate methodology for) distance education /elearning, and in Developing Researcher Competence (with a particular interest in Narrative Inquiry and researching multilingually).

I also had the opportunity to forge strong links with educational projects in the Balkans (especially Greece and Bulgaria). My doctoral studies (completed in 2004) focused on one such project, a 10-year collaboration between the University of Manchester and the Hellenic Open University (HOU) through which the HOU developed its distance learning MA TEFL programme as based on courseware licensed from Manchester's distance learning MA TESOL programme.

Most recently, I have become involved in the development of undergraduate courses broadly in the area of global citizenship/intercultural communication including Computer-Mediated Intercultural Communication and Global Citizenship and Sustainability. I also supervise doctoral students using narrative methods to explore broadly intercultural topics.

Finally, my own studies continued recently with a part-time MusM degree in Ethnomusicology (graduated Decemeber 2011). My dissertation focused on the various perceptions on the Cretan lyra. Thus, on the one hand, I explored the understandings of a number of contemporary players and, on the other, I explored the ethnomusicological literature on this instrument, a literature which largely dates from the 1980s/early 1990s. The genesis of this study lies in my experience of a disjuncture between these two sets of perceptions, with a partucular concern for the topic of musical identity and gendered musical performance vis-a-vis the lyra.