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Australian historian Carla Pascoe Leahy and Australian sociologist Emilee Gilbert were invited by the editors of Gender & History to produce a short piece on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic mothers. It is intended as a companion to an article that Gilbert and Pascoe Leahy have submitted for peer review. Inspired by the concept of 'presencing' evoked and explained by the USA-based historian Sarah Knott in a recent History Workshop feature, the authors invited Knott to join them in conversation. 1 This piece takes the form of a dialogue between the three scholars in April 2021, passed backwards and forwards across oceans, time zones and disciplines.Emilee Gilbert (EG): I come to this conversation as a feminist sociologist whose work is largely in the area of gender and health. My interest in women's negotiation of care work has coincided with my much more recent experience of becoming a mother in the academy. Within the space of two years, I gave birth to three children: a son, and a set of twins (girl/boy). I held a full-time tenured position when I become pregnant with my children, but having three small children meant that my career 'interruption', 'break', 'disruption', or however it tends to be conceived of in academia, was significant. I experienced an almost continuous, four-year career interruption during which time I work(ed) hard to get mothering 'right', whatever that means. This significant interruption meant that I had to hand back, or hand over, all of my hard-fought academic symbols of success: competitive grant funding; publications; a book contract; invited talks; the ability to be mobile. Yet, as a mother -whose daily routine was centred around a cycle of feeding, bathing, nurturing and caring for my children -it was easy -if not essential -to reposition these symbols as trivial; they were peripheral to the essential stuff of 'real' life.As I came to re-enter academia back into my tenured post, I did so in a part-time capacity for a few years, and I suffered the immense penalties that follow a return to work after a period of maternity leave. It is only recently that I have transitioned back to my full-time tenured position, which in itself is a 'privilege' I recognise is not afforded to my colleagues who are precariously employed, and I am still angry about what has resulted in an effective re-build of my research career. As I've mentioned to Carla, my research with other mothers in the academy has been a kind of catharsis

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