This week I will be delivering A Room of One’s Own Annual Lecture at Cambridge University.

For me, Virginia Woolf was not only a remarkable novelist and storyteller, but also a feminist thinker, a public intellectual.

And yet, both in the UK and US the word “intellectual” is widely denigrated, often belittled. Not only that, it is almost always masculinized.

I think it’s time we dismantled this hackneyed approach. We need a new approach.

Studying Virginia Woolf is a good reminder that we need more—not less- women and minority background and working class intellectuals in our public spaces, public debates today.