Twelve Women in Academia: a masterly take on female scholars

Twelve Women in Academia, now on display in the university’s Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, consists of work by the fine-art photographer and Sussex alumna Miss Aniela.  She decided to portray the early-career and well-established scholars, “each pictured with a prop that relates to their practice or their personality”, in a “low-key, dark, moody, almost Rembrandt-inspired style”.

Vinita Damodaran, senior lecturer in South Asian History, for example, is shown holding palm leaf manuscripts about plants and their medicinal effects from her home region in Southern India which represent the kind of material she has used to study how earlier generations survived in hostile environments. Others featured include an anthropologist, an epidemiologist and a pharmacist, as well as Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin research fellow Lily Asquith, who analyses data collected from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com