Behind every conference, podcast and online conversation is a small team of volunteers, all giving their time freely for the love of The Archers and the community we have built around it.

Meet the Team

  • Dr Cara Courage

    CO-FOUNDER

    Dr Cara Courage, Culture, Communities & Place Consultant, has dedicated her career to championing the transformative power of art in communities. Cara has been listening to The Archers for around 30 years and grew up with the programme ‘always on’ at her grandmothers farm on Exmoor. She talks about the pleasure and plain of her Archers fandom in a talk My BDSM relationship with The Archers (listen to it here.)

  • Helen Burrows

    CONFERENCE TEAM

    Helen Burrows has listened to The Archers since around 1964, sees Jill Archer as her second mum, and is the same age as Shula and Kenton. The creator of ‘The Ambridge Cardigan’, she is a keen knitter, silversmith, and is currently travelling the whole of the Shipping Forecast to write a book about the history of knitting in the coastal and island areas around the UK.

  • Louise Gillies

    CONFERENCE TEAM

    Louise has been a member of Academic Archers since the very beginning and has been listening to The Archers since 1998. By day she is a former NHS genetic counsellor, now a private practice counsellor specialising in reproductive & family health and ADHD. She maintains that The Archers has taught her just as much about human nature as a decade of studying psychology.

  • Nicola Maxfield

    CONFERENCE TEAM

    Nic's introduction to The Archers was during the early 1990s, when Mark Hebden Lloyd died. She is still pursuing a Masters and is an advocate for neurodiversity, neurodivergency and study skills, and continues a lifelong obsession with the novels of John Wyndham and Dr Who.

  • Dr Sarah Kate Merry

    CONFERENCE TEAM

    Sarah has been listening to The Archers (on purpose!) for about 35 years. A an inclusive personal coach and mentor and recovering academic, she used to research the impact of the internet on friendship and community, including TA fan groups. She has a slight obsession with the friendships and conversations of Ambridge women, which once led to her Academic Archers book chapter being horribly misrepresented in the Mail on Sunday, and subsequently criticised by Germaine Greer.

  • Abi Pattenden

    CONFERENCE TEAM

    Abi Pattenden is a longstanding AcArch Research Fellow, having drawn on her MA in Staging Shakespeare to present on Rob and Iago at the first ever conference in 2016. She is also a qualified Funeral Director and this has inspired two further papers on funerals and funeral trends in Ambridge at subsequent conferences. She is currently CEO of the National Association of Funeral Plan Providers and occasionally wonders who in Ambridge has paid for their funeral in advance.

The Founders

Back in 2014, out of an idle and irreverent conversation on social media about the Route B storyline, Cara founded Academic Archers with Dr Nicola Headlam and Professor Peter Matthews.

Dr Headlam is a Policy Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s LPIP (Leadership for Place-based Innovation and Policy) and the host of Placecast, a new podcast spotlighting cutting-edge thinking in place research and leadership. These social and spatial concerns bleed into her engagement with The Archers and she also works as the self-appointed network analyst for Ambridge, with forensic attention paid to the interactions within the clans of the village and the ways in which intergenerational capital is protected and transferred over time.

Peter Matthews is Professor in Social Policy and LGBTQ+ Studies, with a particular interest in urban policy; urban regeneration; urban inequalities; housing; equalities and diversity; queer theory and lesbian and gay studies. His favourite Ambridge resident is Lillian.

Our Facebook Team

A huge thank you too to Katharine Hoskyn and Haydon Berrow, part of our dedicated Facebook team, who along with Helen, Lou, Nic, Sarah Kate and Abi make sure the page stays true to our values of joyfulness, generosity and curiosity.

All time on Academic Archers is given on a voluntary basis and support from others is given in-kind, and very gratefully received. 

Thank you to all that have helped us out at conferences too -
special mention for Sarah Playfair and her door duties at the 2026 conference in particular!