Lucia Thesen has been working in academic literacy teaching, research and development since the mid 1980s. She convenes a Masters option on academic literacies in the School of Education, and initiated the Postgraduate Literacies Project, with links across CHED.

She co-authored (with Ermien van Pletzen) Academic Literacy and the Languages of Change (2006, London, Continuum), and was grant-holder for the Carnegie-funded international research project ‘Postgraduate writing, risk and the making of new knowledge’, part of UCT’s African Knowledge project. The book ‘Risk in Academic Writing – Postgraduate students, their teachers and the making of knowledge’ (2014,  New Perspectives on Language and Education) developed as part of this project, which Lucia co-edited with Linda Cooper, was recently launched in Cape Town.