New friending meme up on LJ

falena pointed me in the direction of the "Yes, I'm still on LJ!" Friending Meme, hosted by phoebeagle over on LJ. If you feel like participating, you should head on over there.

Hello, new people!

I've picked up quite a few new readers due to the friending meme mentioned on the last post, so I thought I'd post an updated introduction with more information than I provided on the meme.

My name is Ronni, and I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. My thesis is on representations of exile in medieval Irish literature. I'm in the final stages of my research (as in I should be completely done in the next few months), so I'm not posting as much as usual, but I read my flist every day and am a fairly regular commenter. I'm from Australia (I grew up in Canberra, went to university in Sydney, moved back to Canberra for a year for work, then moved back to Sydney for another year) and have lived in Europe for the past five years. Four of those years have been in Cambridge, and I also spent one year on academic exchange as a visiting scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany. A lot of my posts are about my experiences of life as an academic, and as a migrant living in a foreign country, and I'm always very interested in hearing about other people's experiences of similar things.

I currently work part-time in an academic library, and am hoping to work in this field full-time after I've finished my PhD. In the past I have worked as a newspaper subeditor (copy-editor), a tutor of children in maths and English, a childcare worker, selling food and drink at a Cirque du Soleil show, and as a sales assistant at several bakeries. I also work as a freelance book-reviewer for an Australian newspaper, a job I've had since I was in high school.

My partner's name is Matthias, and we've been together for just under three years. When we met he was still working on his own PhD on Old English in my department. Since he finished, he's worked in a variety of jobs in Cambridge, mainly as a librarian and university lecturer. We currently work together in the same library.

From time to time I talk about my family: I'm the oldest of four sisters. Mim is in her twenties and works in the public service in Australia. Kitty is nearly eleven, and Nell is six. The youngest two are half-sisters; my parents divorced when I was ten and my father has been with my stepmother for about twelve years. Apart from the initial shock at both events, I've always been very happy that my parents chose to divorce and that my father has a new partner. I'm pretty close to my extended family, especially on my mum's side, although living overseas has made it harder to stay in touch, especially with my youngest sisters and cousins. I go back to Australia about once every two years, and my mother visits me every year.

This blog is a pretty mixed bag, content-wise. I'm pretty scrupulous about tagging entries, so if you're interested in reading back, but only on particular subjects, my list of tags is fairly self-explanatory. I post about my own life, reviews of, or commentary about books, TV shows, films, music, internet and fan culture, about politics (mainly Australian or British) and social justice, as well as the odd meme or linkpost. I'm very passionate about feminism, and from time to time I post about rape culture, misogyny, and other potentially upsetting topics. However, these posts will always be behind a cut, tagged appropriately and warned for, so they will be easy to avoid if they're not your cup of tea.

One final note. I often post about 'sraffies'. Sraffies were originally people who hung out on this Philip Pullman fansite, but these days, we tend to socialise elsewhere online, or in 'real life'. When two or more sraffies meet up, it's called a srafcon. My closest friend and sister in all but blood, bethankyou, is a sraffie.

Since the meme seemed to be focused on blogging more as a public journal, rather than about fandom, I won't discuss all the things I'm fannish about here, but my profile page should give you a fairly good idea of my fannish interests.

My LJ is a mirror of my Dreamwidth blog, so if you're also on Dreamwidth, feel free to add me there too. I comment and reply to comments on both platforms.

You can find me elsewhere online at:

My Wordpress review blog, where I post longer, more serious and in-depth reviews and essays.

My fanblog for sophiamcdougall's Romanitas trilogy.

Twitter.

Tumblr.

Last.fm.

Feel free to add me on any of those places if you're interested. I should warn you that I don't really use Tumblr all that often.

Anyway, that's probably enough from me for now. Feel free to ask me anything - I'm fairly open about my life and am always happy to meet new people.