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Professor Catherine Will

Our much-loved friend and colleague Professor Catherine Will died on Monday 12 August 2024 after a long battle with cancer.

Catherine was born on 24 March 1977 and grew up in Leeds. She attended Leeds Girls High school, studying Greek, Latin and History at A level. She was also a keen choral singer. Before university, Catherine took a gap year, teaching English to visually impaired people in Hungary. On her return to the UK, Catherine started a degree in History at Clare College Cambridge, graduating with a first.

It was whilst at Cambridge that Catherine made many friends who remained with her for life – including her partner, Tom. University also galvanised her lifelong concerns with injustice, inequality and environmentalism. She was politically engaged and politically active, organising events – in particular for Oxfam – and attending protests and rallies on issues that remained close to her heart.

After University, Catherine won a scholarship to spend a year at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany. It was here that her fascination and love for sociology developed. She decided that she wanted to pursue a sociological path and completed a Masters and then a PhD in Sociology at Essex University. She was a gifted sociologist, and having completed her PhD was then awarded a Medical Research Council/Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship back at Cambridge University.

In 2007, Catherine joined Sussex as a lecturer in Sociology. At that time the Department was small, and Catherine joined a group of nine delivering a highly regarded and typically ‘Sussex’ set of courses. She quickly established herself as integral to the delivery of sociology at Sussex, combining a sharp intellect with collegiality and a wicked sense of humour. It is testament to Catherine’s skill as an educator and communicator that examples of her influence still abound in what is now a large department of Sociology and Criminology.

As one example, Catherine designed what is still the most effective ‘quantitative research methods for sociologists’ module that any of us had encountered. Incorporating incremental learning, ‘real life’ research and secondary sources it has taught hundreds of sociology undergraduates how to analyse and produce social statistics. The module was so successful that although it has developed with technology, it has remained pedagogically unchanged for over a decade. Whilst this may seem a relatively trivial observation, any scholar that has tried to design quantitative modules will know quite how difficult a job this is.

During this period of Catherine’s life, she also managed to balance the demands of an academic job with raising, with Tom, the source of her greatest pride and happiness – her children Josie and Fred. Catherine threw herself into motherhood with the same conscientious thought and energy she applied to everything else, and was a role model for colleagues who were also combining work and home life. As part of this, she chose to work part-time while her children were young, but still managed to achieve more in 3.5 days per week than most of us could hope to do in five.

In academia, Catherine’s early concerns for equity and fairness blossomed into an impressive and impactful body of research. In particular, she developed an important theme around how patients understand their own experience of illness and care, whether this involved monitoring their own blood pressure, consumers deciding whether or not to take statins on prescription, or how we all processed the experience of the Covid pandemic. 

The quality of Catherine’s research won praise and recognition nationally and internationally. She gained grants from the Economic & Social Research Council, the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2019, Catherine won a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award – a prestigious grant and the result of a huge amount of effort. The award was especially significant given its size – very large for a social science project. Catherine was excited to undertake such important and innovative work, so it was devastating when Covid meant that revisions and compromises had to be made - particularly with regard to outcomes. Nonetheless, Catherine remained stoic and committed to the project, demonstrating her tenacity and strength of will. 

It was during this period, in 2021, that Catherine received her diagnosis of a brain tumour, later identified as an anaplastic astrocytoma. Catherine’s illness and the process of her treatment made it difficult for her to continue working, which was the source of great frustration. However, in a typical example of her sociological curiosity and insight, she began to reflect on her own experiences as a patient. In a post on the Cost of Living blog, she wrote a searching and achingly honest account of the impact of her diagnosis on her life and work, ruminating on how her own illness changed how she viewed research questions related to healthcare. Catherine continued to write about her experience online and become a champion for further research into brain tumours.

Catherine was a lovely human. Kind, thoughtful, funny, compassionate and wise. She was a natural sociologist, not content with documenting the world she encountered but determined to influence it in favour of the underrepresented and disenfranchised. She was a campaigner academic of the best sort – driven by the desire that the world could, and would, be a better place. It is certainly a better place for having had Catherine in it. As a colleague she was supportive, interested, and always willing to do more than her share. She is already so missed – those of us that knew and worked with her are devastated at her death and will endeavour to follow the academic, professional and personal example she set.

Author: Dr Ben Fincham, School of Law, Politics and Sociology

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Honouring the life and work of Catherine: Monday 14 April

A one-day symposium on Monday 14 April will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines and topics that have connections to themes and approaches in Catherine’s work. Please send abstracts to Dr Mark Erickson by Friday 31 January 2025 by emailing: mie23@sussex.ac.uk. An event registration page will be made available closer to the date.

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