SSEES Staff Spotlight: Dr Dominique Gracia

What brought to you work at SSEES?

I was a Department Manager elsewhere at UCL beforehand, and this was a great opportunity to work for a bigger, more complex department while Alex Craven was doing his new role in Faculty.

If you weren’t working in Higher Education, what would be your dream job?

I write (detective fiction mostly, at the moment), so at some point would probably like to just do that!

Can you describe your role and tell us what you find most rewarding about it?

I like understanding how things work and seeing whether I can make them work better. Department/Institute/School Managers (they all mean the same thing, depending on which bit of UCL they’re in) are responsible for the smooth running of all the machinery that makes academic and research work possible. It involves everything from recruitment (staff and students), HR advice, budgets, navigating all the UCL rules (there are many), running committees, managing spaces, etc. At SSEES there’s fantastic teams running key bits — Education, Operations, Marketing and Communications — and the School Manager helps to knit those all together and make sure that everyone has what they need, both in and from those teams. It has what job descriptions sometimes call a “complex portfolio”!

Outside of work, how do you unwind?

I knit (not very fast), and run (neither far nor fast), and write fiction (also not very fast at the moment).

If you could recommend only one book, what would it be?

My doctorate is in Victorian literature, and I largely write on poetry, so perhaps something unfashionable, like Idylls of the King. (The book I own the most copies of is The Picture of Dorian Gray, though….)

Who has been the greatest source of inspiration to you, and how have they impacted you, personally or professionally?

I always list Tressie Mcmillan Cottam in questions like this. She’s a fascinating sociologist who does lots of public communication work. Her work on Higher Education is fascinating and part of what initially made her so well-known, but she has lots of areas of expertise and wisdom, including things like the hustle economy and Dolly Parton/blondeness.