We use the word identity very easily. But what actually is it?
Perhaps it is the unique combination of qualities, beliefs, experiences and values that makes us who we are: our culture, family heritage, language, personality, communities, values and work. Identity matters because it helps us understand ourselves. It gives us direction and purpose and helps us form connections with other people.
But identity is not set in stone. It evolves as we evolve, as we experience things, as we learn and, above all, as we grow.
My mother once told me that I was a combination of Welsh, Irish and English. She even gave me proportions, although I can no longer remember what they were. My more recent family history, as reconstructed from my DNA, places me firmly in the West Midlands, Shropshire and into mid- and north Wales. I was born in Manchester, but I define myself as Welsh. Why? Because the one place where a small, dyslexic, lonely and bullied boy felt completely happy was our family cottage in Snowdonia. It remains my spiritual home today.
As a child I lived largely in my imagination. I loved Henry Treece’s Viking books and once painted an old metal dustbin lid to make myself a Viking shield. So it was with considerable surprise — and ridiculous delight — that decades later I discovered a distant genetic connection to a headless Viking buried in York.
Did that discovery fundamentally change who I was? Of course not.
But it changed, just a little, the story I told myself about who I was. And perhaps that is a useful way to begin thinking about research identity.
The badges we acquire
When we start our careers, research identity is often relatively simple. We attach ourselves to a disciplinary badge. I was a geographer. More precisely, I was a geomorphologist who loved glaciers, mountains and cold places. My sense of myself subsequently expanded towards geology, but fundamentally I belonged to a community of geographers. In fact, geography runs through my family. My grandmother studied and taught geography; my father taught it for a time. A love of landscape, mountains, the outdoors and the stories contained within them was bred into my bones.
At that stage, though, my understanding of my research identity was largely superficial. It was defined by discipline and community: I was a geographer; therefore that was the sort of research I did. And I was a field scientist. I had — and still have — a love-hate relationship with fieldwork. I would spend months longing to return to the High Arctic and then, once there, occasionally wonder why on earth I had wanted to come. But fieldwork was part of the badge.
I was a geomorphologist.
I worked on glaciers.
I went to cold places.
I was a field scientist.
What I didn’t yet understand was what lay underneath those labels. It wasn’t really glaciers. It was discovery. It was the excitement of finding evidence, often by walking, looking and digging, and then constructing a story from that evidence. That distinction would eventually change my career.
Outgrowing a discipline
There was also an uncomfortable realisation. I knew in my heart that much of the research I was doing wasn’t going to achieve some of the things I wanted from my career. Despite several attempts, I couldn’t see a route to the sorts of papers I aspired to publish in journals such as Nature and Science. Things my competitive spirit wanted. Nor did the work always have the societal relevance that would attract the research funding I wanted. Those things mattered to me especially the latter.
They are some of the badges by which our profession judges success, and the badges which universities use to determine progression. Slowly, however, I began to outgrow the boundaries of my discipline. This happened more by happenstance than design. But I was willing to embrace that happenstance which is the key here.
The first flush of my career was replaced by something more useful: a willingness to recognise the limitations of what I was doing and to look for opportunities elsewhere. In the early 2000s I became a professor at Bournemouth. Becoming a professor was something I had wanted enormously. Yet when it happened, I felt strangely unworthy of the title. The badge hadn’t solved anything. If anything, it reinvigorated my anxiety that I wasn’t good enough and drove me harder.
Then opportunity intervened. I became involved in contaminated-land research and consultancy. I knew relatively little about contaminated land when I started, but discovered that many of the skills I had developed as a geomorphologist could be transferred to a completely different problem. At almost exactly the same time — again, more by chance than grand career design — I began working on fossil human footprints, initially in Central America and subsequently in Africa. The two developments were actually connected. Through university revenue-sharing arrangements, consultancy helped fund my early footprint research.
And gradually I redefined who I was. I stopped travelling regularly to the Arctic. I started working in hot, dry landscapes on questions concerning archaeology and human evolution. On the surface, almost everything had changed. But underneath, remarkably little had.
I still loved discovery.
I still loved creativity.
I still loved ideas.
And above all, I loved taking fragments of evidence and using them to tell stories.
Discovering the thread
My love of stories was the important realisation. I wasn’t fundamentally a glacial geomorphologist. I wasn’t fundamentally an environmental scientist. I wasn’t even fundamentally a footprint researcher. I was — and am — an evidence-based storyteller. A landscape contains clues. My job is to find them, understand them and use them to reconstruct stories about the past and, increasingly, about the people who walked through those landscapes. Understanding that essential element of my research identity did not happen suddenly. It emerged slowly.
And once I recognised it, I could see that the same thread ran through other parts of my professional life.
It shaped my teaching.
It shaped my research.
It shaped my writing.
And it shaped something increasingly important to me: public communication.
That last element had probably always been part of my identity, but for much of my career it remained latent.
I feel enormously privileged to have spent my life as an academic. Universities can be frustrating places and academic careers do not always offer the rewards we imagine they will. But I have been paid to think, discover, create and communicate. I have been able to educate another generation of practitioners and researchers. And occasionally I have been able to change an opinion, tell somebody something they didn’t know, or alter in some small way how people understand the world. That matters to me increasingly.
Identity changes — but the core persists.
My research identity has therefore grown as I have grown. The crucial difference today is not simply that my research has changed. It is that I understand much better what the core elements of my identity actually are. Those elements were present at earlier stages of my career, but I couldn’t necessarily see them.
Elite athletes are sometimes encouraged to visualise the endpoint: crossing the finishing line, breaking the record, winning Olympic gold. One of my strengths has always been an ability to imagine the future and envisage goals. It has also been one of my weaknesses. I can imagine where I want to be so vividly that I am painfully aware whenever reality falls short.
If we could travel backwards through time and ask different versions of me what success looked like, the answers would change.
Some would be about promotion.
Some would be about becoming a professor.
Some would be about publishing in particular journals.
Some would be about winning grants.
And many of those ambitions were driven by the competitive metrics of university life (and a wish to prove my worth to who I am not sure!) rather than by the things that really mattered to me. Only with time and reflection have I been able to identify the common threads:
Discovery. Creativity. Ideas. Learning. Communication.
The last of those still makes me smile. The dyslexic boy who struggled with words would have found it extraordinary to be told that communication would become central to his professional identity. But perhaps the struggle itself mattered. It forced me to work at communication, develop coping strategies and think carefully about how ideas are conveyed. Something that initially seemed like a weakness became part of my research identity.
What have forty years taught me?
So, after almost forty years of research, what have I learned about research identity?
First, it is never fixed — and we should resist allowing it to become fixed. I started as a lecturer in physical geography. I became a professor of environmental science. Today I am a professor of archaeology. Those labels are useful. They help us find communities and intellectual homes. But they are only labels. The willingness to evolve, learn and take opportunities matters far more.
Second, it takes time to discover what you are actually good at. With experience we begin to understand our real strengths, what makes us get up in the morning and what sort of problems we want to solve. We also begin to ask a slightly uncomfortable question: What do I want to be remembered for? Most of us, I suspect, want to be remembered for something. Understanding what that something might be takes time.
Third, promotion and institutional performance measures are not research identity. You may be the perfect colleague. You may be your institution’s REF star. You may have the four papers everybody wants. You may become a professor. All of those things can be useful. Some bring promotion, recognition and marginally better pay. But none of them, by themselves, constitutes a research identity.
Your identity ultimately has to travel beyond your institution. Research is an international conversation. A job title is awarded by an institution. A research identity is created through the way other people engage with your work. That distinction matters. I became recognised internationally for fossil footprints. One might assume that this happened because I subsequently published papers in Science and other high-profile journals. But I don’t think it did.
One of the things that did most to establish that identity was a specialist research book — something that has never contributed to a REF return. Yet that book travelled. People read it. They used it. They contacted me. Invitations followed. Collaborations developed. The work helped create an identity that existed independently of the institution employing me.
Finding a research home
This brings me to the idea of a research home. A home matters. We need colleagues. We need collaborators. We need people with whom we can test ideas, share expertise and sometimes simply complain over coffee when an experiment, paper or grant application has gone disastrously wrong. Research Centres can provide those homes.
But I would make one distinction. Your research home is not your research identity. A good research home supports your identity. It challenges it, enlarges it and connects it to other people. It should never imprison it.
Research identity is shaped by the papers and books you write; the problems you choose to tackle; the people and communities you work with; the partnerships you create; the opportunities you take; and the ones you decide not to take. It is shaped by curiosity and ambition — ambition that should ultimately extend beyond simply getting promoted.
And, above all, it is shaped by directed and focused industry. Careers contain enormous amounts of chance. Mine certainly has. But chance only becomes opportunity when we do something with it. So perhaps the question to ask is not:
What discipline am I?
Nor: Which Research Centre do I belong to?
Nor even: What do I research?
Perhaps the more useful questions are:
What repeatedly excites me?
What am I unusually good at?
What problems do I want to solve?
Who do I want my work to matter to?
What do I want people to come to me for?
And finally: What is the thread running through everything I do? Find that thread and you are beginning to find your research identity.
(C) Matthew Bennett, 2026.
