Associate Professor Celia Whitchurch

IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society

Dr Celia Whitchurch is Honorary Associate Professor at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education. Her research interests focus on academic and professional roles, identities and careers, and on third space environments in higher education.

She has conducted projects for the UK Leadership Foundation and Higher Education Academy, and was latterly the Principal Investigator on the Centre for Global Higher Education project The Future Higher Education Workforce in Locally and Globally Engaged Higher Education Institutions. She is the author of over 50 publications, and monographs include Challenging Approaches to Academic Career-making (2023) (with William Locke and Giulio Marini); Reconstructing Relationships in Higher Education: Challenging Agendas (2017) (with George Gordon); and Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The Rise of Third Space Professionals (2013). She was Founding Editor of the AUA journal Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education from 1998 to 2008, Editor of Higher Education Quarterly from 2008 to 2018, and is currently Assistant Editor of the London Review of Education.

Select recent publications

  • From a diversifying workforce to the rise of the itinerant academic.
    Higher Education. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-018-0294-6.
  • Being a Higher Education Professional Today. Working in Third Space.
    In C. Bossu and N. Brown (eds). Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education. University Development and Administration. Singapore: Springer.
  • Professional Staff Identities in Higher Education.
    In Encyclopaedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Dordrecht: Springer
  • Changing Professional and Academic Identities
    In Oxford Bibliographies in Education. Ed. Anne Hynds. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017.
  • Shifting landscapes: meeting the staff development needs of the changing academic workforce
    The Higher Education Academy, January 2016
  • The rise of third space professionals: paradoxes and dilemmas
    Springer, 2015