New lecturers talk about language, mental health…and ‘gayology’

The number of new faces in the Faculty of Health and Society continues to increase with new additions to the psychology team.

Sebastian Bartos and Evgenia Volkovyskaya joined the University of Northampton in September and are specialists in, respectively, the politics of human sexuality and the psychology of language.

Dr Bartos is the University’s new Lecturer in Social Psychology, a branch of the discipline that looks at how people behave and why when they interact with others (such as prejudice, obedience and aggression).

Sebastian joins the University from the University of Surrey where he also lectured in social psychology. He completed his PhD there, which looked at how homophobia has changed over the past few decades and the relative sea-change in public attitudes towards gay men since decriminalisation in 1967.

Of his appointment, he said: “It’s interesting that I join a University that itself is coming out of a period of massive change, and that my research focused on the large social change experienced in around ‘legalising’ being gay, still within living memory for many people.

“I light-heartedly refer to my work as ‘gayology’, but what I mean by this is the psychology involved in people’s social and political attitudes toward sexuality, how do people change their minds about how they think about sexuality? Clearly, people think something else today than they did 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

“I don’t exactly shy away from sensitive subjects, so psychology students who want to focus on these big, contemporary issues, coupled with sound research methodology, are in good hands.”

Dr Volkovyskaya is the University’s new Lecturer in Psychology and will teach the Psychology of Mental Health, Psychology of Health for undergraduate (UG) students as well as the Introduction to Counselling module and supervising both UG students and Masters’ students with their dissertations.

She previously worked at the Open University, as well as in private practice working with people who have anxiety and mood issues.

Evgenia originally qualified as Clinical Psychologist in her town of St Petersburg, Russia and came to the UK to complete a Masters’ in Health Psychology that focused on the role of alexithymia (or a person’s inability to identify and describe their emotions) in the rehabilitation of stroke survivors.

Her PhD, completed at the University of Middlesex, focused on how language and memory work together in monolingual and bilingual (Russian/English) speakers.

She commented: “So far, I’m very impressed with the facilities here, it’s a very 21st century set-up and up to date and the lecturing team are superb. They are all very supportive and I saw immediately how they do their best to make sure students have the best experience here.

“I have a very student-centred approach to my teaching, so I’m looking forward to getting to know them and really tailoring my teaching to their interests.”