Other people have started calling me a professor. When I worked in South Africa last October, Professor Lynn Hendricks, who brought me over, referred to me as Prof Helen Kara. When I queried this, she told me firmly that as far as she’s concerned, I am a professor.

Then this year Professor Jackie Carter made a similar comment on LinkedIn.

So can I call myself a professor now?

On the one hand, I can call myself whatever I like. I could style myself Sovereign of Scholarship or Empress of Enquiry if I wanted to. My friend and colleague Janet Salmons calls herself a free-range scholar, and I wish I’d thought of that first! So in this sense, yes, I could call myself a professor.

On the other hand, the title of professor is given to people by other people in recognition of their professional accomplishments. The recipients are usually experts in their field. I was very uncomfortable with the idea when people began to call me an expert, but that was over 10 years ago and I’ve got used to it now. (Though I’m still questioning it as a concept, particularly the way it intersects with power.) Also, professors have usually made a significant contribution to their field. Well, OK, I’ve done that too. But, and this is the crucial part, professors are all academics, and I am not, and never have been, an academic.

Professorships are given to people by other people, but always in an institutional context. There are honorary professorships, but I’ve never been offered one of those (except for the time an invitation came from a person who hadn’t checked whether their institution agreed with the offer, which they didn’t, so it never actually happened).

I’m happy calling myself an independent researcher and scholar because that’s what I am. So I won’t be calling myself a professor. If an institution ever wants to award me an honorary professorship, I may rethink this, but given the current state of academia I don’t see that happening.

What might happen, though, as I’m in my 60s now, is that in a few years’ time I could award myself the title of ‘independent researcher emerita’. We’ll see!