• Wading In
• Qualification or Formation?
• Academic Empathy
• Generation Blend
• The New Amateurism
• Learning, unlearning and relearning
• Would you do your own degree?
• General expertise – the gap between rote learning and a different sort of mastery
• Being Serious
• Learn, Play, Work, Play

• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Thanks, James, for these interesting comments. I agree with you about complexities. I...
• James Harlan An exposure to ‘complexities’ – indeed, this is the answer. Unfortunately, we in our...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Hi Muki, Thanks for this interesting comment and for the links to your blog and the ...
• Muki Haklay Hi Carl, Thanks for sharing the story and for the post - it chimes with many of th...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Hi Oliver, Many thanks for your comment. I would like to break my reply to your co...
• Oliver Quinlan Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Carl. I think particularly the way you have ...
• Joseph Podlesnik I thoroughly enjoyed reading about your grandfather, through the eyes of your father,...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Claire, Thank you for this positive comment. It is interesting that there appears ...

Hi. I’m Carl Gombrich. I'm the Programme Director of UCL's Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts degree Arts and Sciences (BASc). This blog contains my personal views and thoughts.

My educational background is mostly as a student and teacher of maths, physics and philosophy. I have degrees in these things. I have also studied and taught music and was a professional opera singer for a while, having trained at the National Opera Studio in the UK, where I was the Royal Opera House scholar. I enjoy learning languages and got to a decent level in French and Italian while studying to be a singer. I'm currently learning Mandarin. Before my current post, I was the Principal of UCL's international foundation courses.

I now mostly read on education and stuff on interdisciplinarity and expertise, but I'm interested in everything - and would like to show that this is a positive quality in academia and outside. I had a longish period when I was interested in religion, particularly mysticism, and read in this area. I have published a paper on mysticism and music called ‘Expressions of Inexpressible Truths’ which has been reprinted in a twenty-year commemorative edition of the World of Music.

My feeling is that we are at the beginning of substantial changes in academia and in our relation to knowledge in general (these sorts of things I write about on the blog) and I am interested to question my relationship to writing, reading and teaching as part of these shifts. In any event, it is a positive development that where one used to be chided for being ‘a perpetual student’, one is now lauded as ‘a lifelong learner’ and admired as showing flexibility, adaptability and an intuitive ability to negotiate the ever-changing modern age.

I come from an intellectual and academic family.

I think people can change enormously over their lifetimes: emotionally, politically, artistically, intellectually, and the rest.

At some point – and up to now – these have been some of the thinkers and doers that have shaped my life in some way. The following are listed by category and in rough chronological order, according to when I encountered them.

School teachers: Philip Pullman, Peter Malin

Fiction Writers/Poets: Homer, Dickens, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Baudelaire, George Herbert, Shakespeare

Philosophers: Plato, Plotinus, Bertrand Russell, Pascal, Hume, Bergson, Wittgenstein, A W Moore, Graham Priest, George Boolos, Martha Nussbaum

Relgious writers: Augustine, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, St Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa

Scientists/Mathematicians: Morris Klein, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Einstein, Feynman, Cantor, Godel

Musicians: The Clash, Ian Dury, Al Green, Chopin, Bach, Stevie Wonder, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers, Horovitz, Richter, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Gene Harris, Jussi Bjoerling, Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Cesare Siepi, George London

Politicians/Leaders/Business people/Sports people: Warren Buffett, Eric Cantona, Arsene Wenger, Michael Johnson, Barack Obama, Usain Bolt

and of course many friends and members of my family.

I am currently using this blog to focus on issues in education, interdisciplinarity and expertise. Below is some more personal stuff and some other stuff which I am happy to share with those who are interested

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Personal articles:

NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS

PERSONAL