Dr. Will May, Associate Professor in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, has been awarded a £178k AHRC Leadership Grant to complete a study of mentoring in the creative industries. Working with Artful Scribe , a literature development agency, and the Winchester Poetry Festival, May will set up a new national mentoring scheme for young poets, co-authored a report on mentoring and creative practice, and complete a monograph on history of mentoring in British poetry.
Mentoring has long been of interest to government policy: a 2012 Mentoring Action Plan from the Department for Innovation, Business and Skills looked to stimulate economic growth in SMEs across the country. However, the 2017 Bazelgete report on the creative industries noted the need to increase our understanding of how mentoring works beyond traditional office environments. Lockdown has only increased this urgency. May's new project will explore how mentoring can adapt to online delivery, scale-up effectively to deliver national benefits, and help transform the lives not only of mentors and mentees, but the organisations that support them.
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Dr Will May
Dr Will May is a Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Southampton.
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