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How are postgraduate students and postgraduate education represented in popular culture and the media? And what do these representations tell us about how postgraduate and academic life are imagined?

If you are interested in these questions please register for an upcoming event "Representing Postgraduate Education — Media, Pop Culture and Public Imaginaries". This is a hybrid symposium at the University of Warwick on 7th September 2026 (12.30–4.30pm BST). Registration is free.

Hosted by the Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR) at the University of Warwick, this symposium brings together researchers exploring representations of postgraduate education across popular literature, fiction and social media.

The programme includes contributions on:

• Public attitudes towards the PhD by Dr Rachel Handforth

• Queer graduate students in contemporary Anglophone fiction by Dr James Burford

• Dark Academia as Public Pedagogy in the Novel Katabasis by Dr Thornchanok Uerpairojkit and Mary Eppolite

• Online self-representation among Chinese doctoral applicants by Evan Zheng.

The day will also start with some opening remarks by Owen Gower the Director of the UKCGE, and we will be joined for a roundtable by Professor Pauline Reynolds and Professor Emily F. Henderson, alongside the symposium presenters.

The symposium is deliberately exploratory and we have asked presenters to share work in progress. We hope the presentations will ask what popular representations reveal about the public imagination of postgraduate education, and how these representations may go on to shape understandings of postgraduate life, identity, belonging and success.

Join us either in person at Warwick or online. Registration is required.
Register here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ces/desresearch/dear/rpe/