Angela Voss

It was a great pleasure to meet up again with Angela Voss for this week's Nostalgia Interview. Angela works in the Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University where she runs the MA programme in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred. She begins our conversation by talking about how she brings together esoteric wisdom traditions with transformative learning and the new methodological possibilities that this affords.

Angela was born in Chiswick and grew up in Middlesex. Her mother was a district nurse and her father was an artist and art teacher, and Angela recounts how she was an unusual teenager in that she was obsessed with the Renaissance period and would drag her parents off to country houses every weekend. She wanted to have a career in music, which she studied at Leicester University, with an emphasis on early music. Angela discusses how she would be at home listening to Monteverdi while her friends were out at discos.

We then turn to the influences on Angela’s life, including astrology, and how that can be imparted through teaching, and the extent to which there is more to education than simply regurgitating facts. For Angela, transformative learning and personal testimony is integral to the educational process, and we discuss how that impacts on the way in which she writes.

We then move on to talk about what Angela did before her PhD and how she was fortunate enough in her employment to be surrounded by early music. Angela finished her PhD in 1992 and we discuss her bizarre, anti-climactic viva experience and how she subsequently felt that it was time to start a family.

Through the late Leon Schlamm Angela recounts how she ended up teaching at the University of Kent on the MA Mysticism & Religious Experience programme, and the conversation then moves on to whether Angela would consider herself to be on a spiritual path and how she has followed a very different route to the one her parents, who weren’t interested in religious or spiritual questions, might have envisaged. Angela explains why reading Plato’s analogy of the cave was for her a liberating experience and how it paved the way for her subsequent immersion in neo-Platonism.

At the end of our conversation Angela discusses how incredibly lucky she has been in what she has achieved in her life, notwithstanding inevitable emotional angst. We discuss how we have navigated our respective relationship paths and what we learn about ourselves when we undergo difficult experiences. Finally, we learn whether Angela is a looking back or a looking forward person and why she is always looking forward to the next phase of her life.

Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and Angela Voss and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.