A little over two years ago, when interviewing for the research fellow who would be working with me at Birmingham, I was pleased to remake the acquaintance of Dr Saskia Warren, who I’d first met as part of a conference session I co-organised with Harriet Hawkins at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in Seattle, 2011. Saskia did an excellent presentation and interview really impressing the appointment panel and I was delighted to offer her a job.
At the time I thought I was simply hiring a good researcher, but it turned out that, more than this, I was hiring a truly excellent colleague who took hold of the cultural intermediation project and ran with it, taking it to places that I never expected it would go. What’s been really impressive is the way that Saskia has delivered a huge amount of material for the project as well as keeping her own research work active, writing a papers, running a small grant on surrealism and organising multiple conference sessions an exhibitions. I feel exhausted even thinking about how much she’s achieved in the last two years.
It was always clear that Saskia was going places and so it was no surprise to me that Manchester – one of the UK’s top geography departments – offered her a job earlier this year. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such a fantastic colleague and now, as she starts the next stage of her career, I just wanted to say a big thank you for all her work on the project and good luck with the new post.
Cultural intermediation & the creative economy 