I am Professor of Accounting at Northumbria University. From 2022-2024, I have been awarded a Major Fellowship by The Leverhulme Trust. I am also a Chartered Accountant and Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).

I have held numerous leadership roles in Universities. Previously I was Dean of the Faculty of Business, Law and Politics and Director of the Business School at the University of Hull. I also held the Northern Society Chair in Accounting & Finance at Newcastle University, UK, where I was Accounting & Finance Subject Group Head before becoming Deputy Director of the Business School. I was a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), where I was Lead Fellow of the Services research cohort. I have had several grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) addressing gender, responsible management and the sustainable development goals. I maintain close links with the ICAEW and was previously a member of the ICAEW’s Sustainability Committee. I was co-facilitator of the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) Gender Equality Working Group for 8 years.

My current research project, Contemporary Feminisms and their Emancipatory Implications for Accounting, is funded by The Leverhulme Trust who awarded me a Major Fellowship. This project explores contemporary global feminisms and their potential emancipatory implications for accounting, as a profession and as a discipline. It will extend my existing feminist research in the field of gender and accounting, expanding its depth and significance.  It will result in a major piece of career-defining work, which will be definitive in the accounting field and of interest to other disciplines.

The overall objectives are to:

• Provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary feminist theories applied to accounting, in terms of accounting practice and the accounting profession
• Advance feminist theorisations of accounting, offering new insights into their relevance
• Illustrate how feminist accounting research can have emancipatory potential
• Provide a rich theoretical and practical resource, in the form of a monograph and two journal articles, to advance knowledge in the discipline and stimulate further interdisciplinary research

I am interested in issues of gender and diversity in relation to the professions, particularly accounting. My research addresses identity and its relationship with gender; the body and embodiment within organisations; the juxtaposition of professional and personal identities; and the conduct of the professions and professional services firms. Published work addresses the interaction of motherhood, feminist theory, and accounting.

I am also interested in reflexive research methodologies, including narrative, autoethnography, oral history and ethnography. I have experimented with autoethnography and published numerous articles and book chapters in this genre.

I am interested in supervising PhD students on any aspects of gender and diversity in relation to professions and organisations, or sustainability and its relation to accounting and business. My methodological expertise is qualitative and I welcome projects which use autoethnographical, ethnographical, narrative or other qualitative methods.