Professor Sir Alan Wilson, Chair of the AHRC
Sir Alan graduated in Mathematics from Corpus Christi College Cambridge in 1960, following which he worked at the Rutherford Laboratory at Harwell on computational bubble chamber physics.
He moved on in 1964 to the University of Oxford's Institute of Economics and Statistics as a Research Officer, and then in 1966 to London as Head of the Mathematical Advisory Unit at the Ministry of Transport. In 1967 he wrote his seminal paper 'A statistical theory of spatial distribution models', which continues to be essential reading for researchers in fields where flows of people, goods, information or money need to be predicted. In 1968 he became Assistant Director at the Centre for Environmental Studies in London. During this period he laid the foundations of rigorous, mathematical analysis of geographical systems, an approach which he would pioneer and promote for the next twenty years in a stream of conference presentations, papers and books.
As Professor of Urban and Regional Geography at the University of Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of a small number of academics with a genuinely international reputation. In 1991 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the university. Under his stewardship Leeds increased its student numbers, turnover and research income several times over.
He was instrumental, with Sir Robert Ogden, in launching a scholarship scheme to encourage 16-year-olds from disadvantaged areas in South Yorkshire to stay on in school and then enter higher education. This scheme, later extended to North Yorkshire with help from the County Council and the Skipton Building Society, was the precursor of the Government's Education Maintenance Awards.
His knowledge of the university sector led to his appointment as first Director General for Higher Education by the UK Government, a post which he took up in 2004. In this role he played a critical role in the government's drive to widen participation in higher education and maintain a world class education system. He is now Professor of Urban and Regional Systems at University College London. Sir Alan was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1994 and was knighted in 2001. In 2004, he was awarded the Laureat d'Honneur by the International Geographical Union and the 2004 Prize in Regional Science by the European Regional Science Association. In the same year he was also elected an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College. In May 2006 Sir Alan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Rick Rylance, Chief Executive of the AHRC
Before taking up the post of AHRC Chief Executive, Rick Rylance was Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter. Prior to moving to Exeter in 2003 he was Dean of Arts and Letters at the then Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge which he left as Dean of Arts and Letters.
His own research is in English and he was Chair of the English Sub-panel of the RAE 2008 and a member of Main Panel M (Languages and Literature). He was a founder member of the English Subject Centre’s Advisory Board, a past chair of the Council of College and University English (CCUE), and is currently a member of the Higher Education Committee of the English Association. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in 1998 and a Founding Fellow of the English Association in 1999.
His main research interests are in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and the intellectual and literary history of those periods. He has a particular interest in the history of psychology and the relationship between literature and psychology.
Professor John Butt, University of Glasgow
John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow and musical director of Edinburgh's Dunedin Consort. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he held the office of organ scholar at King's College. Continuing as a graduate student working on the music of Bach he received his PhD in 1987. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge, joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1989 as University Organist and Professor of Music. In Autumn 1997 he returned to Cambridge as a University Lecturer and Fellow of King's College, and in October 2001 he took up his current post at Glasgow.
His books have been published by Cambridge University Press: these include Bach Interpretation (1990), a handbook on Bach’s Mass in B Minor (1991), Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (1994). Playing with History (2002) marked a new tack, examining the broad culture of historically informed performance and attempting to explain and justify it as a contemporary phenomenon. He is also editor or joint editor of both the Cambridge and Oxford Companions to Bach and of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music (2005). His book on Bach’s Passions, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, was published in 2010, and explores the ways in which Bach's passion settings relate to some of the broader concepts of modernity, such as subjectivity and time consciousness.
John Butt’s conducting engagements with the Dunedin Consort (2003-) have included major Baroque repertory and several new commissions. His recording of Messiah in its first performed version (Dublin, 1742) was released by Linn Records in 2006 and received the ClassicFM/Gramophone award in the Baroque Vocal Category in 2007 and the MIDEM award for Baroque Music in 2008. Linn released his recording of Bach's Matthew Passion in March 2008 (which was ClassicFM Magazine’s Recording of the Month), and Handel’s Acis and Galatea in November 2008 (which was Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice and Recording of the Month). His recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor was released in May 2010 and was also Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. He has been guest conductor with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Göttingen Handel Festspiele, the Berkeley Festival, the RSAMD Chamber Orchestra and Chorus and the Irish Baroque Orchestra. He conducts Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in December 2010. John Butt also continues to be active as a solo organist and harpsichordist. Eleven recordings on organ, harpsichord and clavichord have been released by Harmonia Mundi. As conductor or organist he has performed throughout the world, including recent trips to Germany, France, Poland, Israel and Korea.
In 2003 John Butt was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and received the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association. That year his book, Playing with History, was shortlisted for the British Academy's annual Book Prize. In 2006 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy and began a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for his research on Bach's Passions. In January 2011 he will become the fifth recipient of the Royal Academy of Music/Kohn Foundation's Bach Prize, for his work in the performance and scholarship of Bach.
Dame Lynne Brindley, has been the Chief Executive of the British Library since July 2000. While in post, Lynne has championed a major strategic overhaul of the British Library ensuring the organisation continues to remain relevant, innovative and accessible in the 21st century. Prior to her role at the British Library, Lynne was Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leeds and a senior consultant with KPMG and has held leadership positions in information technology and knowledge management at Aston University and at the London School of Economics.
Lynne is a non executive Board member of Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries. She is a member of the Council of City University and on the Court of the Goldsmiths’ Company. Previously, Lynne chaired the national Online Learning Taskforce set up by HEFCE, and was a member of the UK’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP).
Ms Sally Doganis, Doganis Associates
Sally Doganis has had a long career in the media. She was an award winning producer of Newsnight, Money Programme, and Panorama, an executive producer of several documentary series and became controller of Factual programmes at Carlton TV, a publicly quoted ITV company. She is now an executive producer in the independent television sector. Her work has brought her into contact with politicians at all levels, as well as presenters and people in business. She used her knowledge of the media to teach at the London Business School, advise charities and influence government policies. A Panorama on child sexual abuse brought about a change in the law. A film on Margaret Thatcher’s election policy became required viewing for the subsequent US election. A documentary on poverty sparked a series of political debates. She co-authored a book with Baroness Jay on child abuse, and has written four children’s books. Appointed a Fellow of the Royal Television Society ‘for outstanding work in the industry’ she is a key member of their events committee which organises debates and conferences on topical issues facing the media. She worked for many years as a Mental Health manger in her local hospital and chairs the Fundraising committee of a £60 million turnover charity ‘Catch 22’ which looks after vulnerable youngsters. She chairs the Benefactors committee of Kenwood House, Hampstead and is on the Development committee of the Tricycle Theatre. She advises several companies on their media strategy.
Professor Ellen Douglas-Cowie is the Pro Vice Chancellor at Queen's University Belfast. A Linguistics expert, Ellen's range of topics include spoken English, phonetics and sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on speech analysis including speech deterioration in post-lingual deafness and the identification and recognition of emotion from speech and face. She has written numerous journal articles, co-authored the book, 'Postlingually Acquired Deafness: Speech Deterioration and the Wider Consequences' and co-edited a special edition of Speech Communication on 'Speech and Emotion'.
Professor Roger Kain is Dean and Chief Executive of School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990, from 2000-2010 was the Academy’s Treasurer and a Vice-President, is a member of its Research Committee and of HEFCE’s Research and Innovation Committee. Roger Kain was appointed CBE in 2005. John Howkins, is an expert in creativity and innovation and the author of, 'The Creative Economy' (2001) and ‘Creative Ecologies’ (2009). He is a Visiting Professor at City University, London, and Vice Dean and Visiting Professor at the School of Creativity, Shanghai. Previously he was Chairman of the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property. His books include 'Understanding Television', 'Communications in China', 'New Technologies, New Policies', 'Four Global Scenarios for Information' and ‘Dutty’s Dare’. John is Chairman of BOP Consulting and HotBed Media Ltd.
Professor Ewan McKendrick, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford
Professor McKendrick is Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education, Academic Services and University Collections) and Herbert Smith Professor of English Private Law. He is a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and a Delegate of Oxford University Press. He gained his LLB Hons from Edinburgh University and his BCL from Oxford. His main areas of research are contract law, commercial law and tort law and he has published widely in those fields. He was called to the Bar in 1998 and is a barrister at 3 Verulam Buildings and a Master of the Bench at Gray’s Inn. Prior to his appointment as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor he was Head of the Law Faculty. As PVC, Professor McKendrick is responsible for the University’s strategy and policies for teaching, learning, student support and admissions, as well having the oversight of Oxford’s libraries, museums and collections and its computing and language teaching services. In July 2010 he was appointed Registrar of the University of Oxford and he will take up this post on 1 January 2011.
Professor Andrew Thompson, Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter
Andrew Thompson is a historian of modern empire. He studied for his D.Phil at Nuffield College in Oxford under the supervision of John Darwin, and was later a fixed-term Tutorial Fellow in Modern History at Corpus Christi College. The major strand of his research interests have focused on the effects of empire on British private and public life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Imperial Britain (2000) and The Empire Strikes Back (2005) and, most recently, a companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire seres entitled Britain's Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (2012). He has also written on Anglo-Argentine relations, colonial South Africa, transnational migrations and migrant remittances, and public memories and the legacies of empire. A project on Asian Britishness, undertaken with the Institute of Public Policy Research and Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, led to an invitation to address the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit of the subject in 2005. His co-authored monograph Empire and Globalisation. Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, 1850-1914, with Professor Gary Magee, (Cambrdige, 2010) offers a fresh perspective on the historical roots of modern globalisation and its relationship to imperial expansion. He co-founded Leeds University's Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and was also previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, at the University Leeds.
Professor Sarah Worthington QC(hon) FBA is the Downing Professor of the Laws of England, University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, and an academic member of 3/4 South Square, Gray's Inn. She is a specialist in commercial equity, especially personal property and secured financing, and in company law. Her books include Equity in the Clarendon Law Series (2nd edn, 2006, OUP), Sealy's Cases and Materials in Company Law (9th edn, 2010, OUP) and the forthcoming edition of Gower and Davies Principles of Modern Company Law (with Professor Paul Davies QC(hon) FBA). She has worked with law reform bodies in the UK, Europe and Australia, was President of the Society of Legal Scholars in 2008/9, and recently concluded a five-year term as the LSE's Pro Director for Research and External Relations. She is currently a Bencher of Middle Temple; Member of Council of the British Academy; Member of Council of the AHRC; and Director and Fellow of the International Academy of Commercial and Consumer Law.
Mr Trevor Spires, Following the completion of a university engineering apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce Aero Engines, Trevor joined the Royal Navy from which he retired in early 2009, in the rank of Rear Admiral. Having initially joined as an academic training specialist, as his naval career developed he undertook a variety of operational and management roles. In the latter part of his career he specialised in personnel management and spent the 6 years prior to leaving the Royal Navy as the Chief Executive of the Agency responsible for support services to all UK armed forces serving and retired personnel. Key parts of this role were the payment of £13billion per annum in salary and pensions to a global customer base of around 1 million individuals and the building of effective relationships with commercial partners. He was awarded a CBE in the 2009 New Year Honours list.
Since leaving the Royal Navy Trevor has developed a small portfolio of Non Executive Director and Trustee roles, including for The National Archives and the Royal Naval Submarine Museum. To all of these roles he brings expertise in financial management, strategic thinking, change and risk management, service delivery and corporate governance.
Mrs Felicity Harvest has spent all her working life in the arts. For the first half of this career she worked as a costume designer, an administrator, a trainer, and a strategist, in theatre, cinema, community arts and local government. For the last 20 years, she was a senior manager with Arts Council. In her final post with the Arts Council she was Regional Executive Director in the South East and a member of the national Executive Board. She took lead responsibility for developing the Council’s strategy for working with the Higher Education Sector, and for developing their International Strategy. She was also lead Director on the process of streamlining the Lottery Grants for the Arts process, and moving the grants function to Manchester.
Felicity is a governor of the University for the Creative Arts, and a member of the BBC’s Regional Audience Council. She has a passion for the inter-relationship between arts and heritage, and for the contemporary visual arts and crafts.
Professor David Eastwood became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham in April 2009. Former posts include Chief Executive at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Vice-Chancellor at the University of East Anglia, and Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
He has chaired the 1994 Group of Universities, UUK’s Longer Term Strategy Group, and the Association of the Universities of the East of England, as well as a number of other national bodies and committees. He also chaired the Westminster Education Commission in 2009, and was a member of the Government’s Independent Review Panel looking at Higher Education Funding and Student Finance.
He is currently Chair of Supporting Professionalism in Admissions (SPA), a Director of Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), a Board member of Universities UK (UUK), and Chair elect of Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Higher Education Policy Institute.
Professor Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and Head of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, having previously been the University’s Masson Professor of English Literature. He gained his first degree in English and History and subsequent PhD at the University of Southampton between 1979 and 1986, and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Southampton, and lectureships at the Universities of Queensland and Buckingham, before joining the University of Leicester in 1991. He was successively lecturer, reader and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture and Director of the Medieval Research Centre at Leicester before moving to Edinburgh in 2007. He was Chair of the Council for College and University English from 2006-9, and is still a member of the CCUE Executive committee. He was a member of the RAE 2008 sub-panel for English and the HEFCE REF pilot ‘impact’ panel, and is a member of the REF 2013 sub-panel for English, the AHRC Peer Review College and Strategic Reviewers Panel, and the Higher Education Committee of the English Association. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, The English Association and the Society of Antiquaries.
Greg’s research is primarily focused on the literary and political history of the late medieval period and the sixteenth century, although he has also published on modern popular music and the films of Alexander Korda. He is interested in the history of the stage, and in the cultural consequences of the Henrician Reformation. His first book, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988) was a study of early Tudor poetry and politics, and he has maintained a strong affection for England’s most belligerent Poet Laureate ever since. His most recent books are Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005) and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (Oxford, 2010), co-edited with Professor Elaine M. Treharne. In his spare time he is a passionate enthusiast for Nottingham Forest Football Club and progressive rock music.
Updated 7th February 2012