ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns transitions in a lately entered academic career set into the context of the neoliberal university. Though the metaphor of portraits in a haunted gallery, this chapter helps the writer, as the protagonist, understand her experience in a one-sided conversation with an unexpected visitor. The visitor and the writer explore the writer’s experience as a woman of the so-called sandwich generation, of late middle age, as she enters academia after a career in business and transitions through two higher degrees and a doctorate. Together on the journey through her academic career, they encounter significant places, people and activities done. The woman had entered her academic career with purpose and passion, but it was short-lived. She was an enthusiastic teacher who cared for the traditions of slow scholarship. She valued academic freedom to care for herself and others. The writer discovers what she has lost but celebrates the life she has now of a different kind of scholarship which embodies the skill, knowledge and process of the ideal of slow scholarship.
