Welcome to “Meet the Visiting Academic”, a section dedicated to introducing to you our Visiting Academics, Professors and Researchers, where you will have the opportunity to get to know them and find out how they engage with Edinburgh Napier University, and specifically with the Tourism Research Centre (TRC).
Today, Dr Ivana Rihova, Lecturer at the Universidad Europea de Valencia, Spain, tells us about how her journey has always brought her back to ENU, first as a student, then as research assistant, becoming a full-time lecturer and now as TRC Visiting Researcher!
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“My journey with Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) began in 2006 as a postgraduate student pursuing an MSc in International Tourism Management. During my studies, I met Prof Anna Leask, who would later become my dissertation supervisor, and Prof Paul Baron, who contacted me a year after I graduated, asking if I would be interested in applying for a research assistant role at Napier. I went for it and was successful, marking the start of an academic career that took me from Edinburgh to Bournemouth, where I started my PhD in 2010, through Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, and then back to Edinburgh (via Glasgow), where I began a full-time lectureship at ENU in 2014.
Although my background is in tourism, my research and my teaching focussed on festival and event management and service marketing. At Napier, I visited and taught at a number of institutions across Europe and Asia, and developed a wide network of collaborations and research ties with colleagues from Macau, Poland, Austria, and the UK. ENU provided me with numerous opportunities for professional grow in both teaching and research. I was very happy to return to the university after two periods of maternity leave, always finding a supportive team of colleagues who over the years became good friends.
In 2022, I made the difficult decision to leave Edinburgh for a new life in Spain with my Valencian husband. Language barrier aside (I had started learning Spanish only a couple of years previously), I found it quite difficult to integrate into the new culture. I dedicated that period to think and write, and to look for new partnerships and projects. I was unable to work initially as I awaited the homologation of my UK doctorate by a Spanish university. When in July 2023 I was given the opportunity to re-join ENU as Associate Researcher at the Tourism Research Centre, I very happily took up the offer, starting a new collaboration with my Napier ex-colleagues Dr Sarah Snell, and Prof Constantina (Dina) Anastasiadou and her team.
Valencia is a fantastic place to be, and I am finally settling into my new home. I have also secured a lecturer position at Universidad Europea de Valencia, and while adapting to the new institutional and cultural context has been challenging, it is also very exciting. My Associate Researcher at ENU allows me to maintain strong connection with the university, and it has been a great excuse to escape the Spanish heat a couple of times a year to work on research projects and to visit friends.”
