Female celebrity academics – who are they and what do they signify for higher education?

Celebrity academic programmes are a prominent feature of British television culture. This research examines how these figures are represented in the media through an intersectional lens. The findings reveal that cultural value is attached to a specific type of woman, one I term the scholarpreneur. She embodies the narrative that educational and life success stems solely from merit and individual effort. As a neoliberal role model, the scholarpreneur champions self-endeavour and personal transformation through extended study, while aligning academic achievement with consumerist ideals of beauty and self-promotion. In doing so, she reproduces a classed value system that reinforces the association of higher education with elite, middle-class professionalism and embeds this within a postfeminist discourse of sexual agency. This representation erases structural inequalities, marginalizing working-class women, older women, and black women, and contributes to the systemic inequities faced by academic women in the neoliberal university.