If I think of these opening chapters as a perfume, the top notes are light and immediate: hope, wit, movement, the invitation to think otherwise. The heart notes emerge in the encounters: companionship, attention, trust, the way thinking becomes possible in company rather than through assertion. And the base notes linger quietly but insistently: care, humility, grace, and the sense that knowledge can arise through attentiveness, modesty, and being with others, rather than through dominance or fixation.

Dr Despina Christoforidou, Lecturer in the School of Industrial Design, Lund University, Sweden

To the many ways in which modern academia poisons our souls and minds, Pirrie's wise and insightful book is the antidote. Reading it has felt like taking shelter during a violent hailstorm – a true respite, a love letter to life's 'smaller' moments, and an emboldening reminder to assert our freedom.

Dr Aline Nardo, Lecturer in Philosophy of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK

This book provides a storied and provocative way of moving beyond the neoliberal university and I believe it offers an outworking of many of the things that are troublesome in higher education in the 2020s. It is a fascinating and challenging read which is also humorous and reflective. It is a book that academe needs at this time and is one which will help many scholars to rethink their role and energy use as well as encouraging them to take time to make space to write.

Maggi Savin-Baden, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford, UK.

Anne Pirrie's work overflows with scholarly joie de vivre, with what she describes in Gravitas and Grace as the desire for academic work to embrace an 'art of living' as an academic that 'opens up space for joy' and thus 'brings gravitas and grace into alignment.

Sean Sturm, Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Annie Pirrie's voice in this refreshing book is humane, insightful, and timely. Her writing constitutes an absorbing invitation to contemplate things that matter. Any scholar who takes the volume in hand and thinks 'with' it will rediscover why they are in higher education in the first place.

David T. Hansen, John L & Sue Ann Weinberg Professor in Historical & Philosophical Foundations of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA