Renowned Shakespearean scholar Professor Jonathan Bate and broadcaster Sally Doganis have been appointed to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Brian Follett, Chair of the AHRC, has confirmed that the Secretary of State for Universities, Innovation and Skills has appointed Professor Bate and Ms Doganis to the AHRC Council for four years with effect from 1 September 2007.

In addition, seven existing members of the AHRC Council have been re-appointed with effect from 1 September 2007. The re-appointed members are Dr Ivon Asquith, Professor John Caughie, Professor Rachel Cooper and Professor April McMahon, for three years, and Mr Nicholas Kenyon, Mr Bahram Bekhradnia, and Professor Martin White for one year.

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. From 1991-2003 he was King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and before that he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Widely known as a critic, biographer and broadcaster for the BBC, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare and is also an expert on the Romantic period.

Sally Doganis is an award winning documentary programme maker with a long career in BBC, ITV and independent production. She specialised in high quality films on political, social and business subjects, and has won every major TV industry award for factual programmes.

Sir Brian said: "It is with great pleasure that we welcome Jonathan and Sally to the Council. They bring deeply impressive academic and media achievements combined with extensive leadership experience. The Council is fortunate in being able to attract two such eminent experts to our ranks. I am grateful to those who have been reappointed for their continued willingness to serve".

For further press information please contact Jake Gilmore, AHRC Communications Manager, j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk; tel: 0117 987 6773.

The AHRC Council is the governing body responsible for determining the strategy and policy of the AHRC. Members receive an honoraria of £6,410 per annum. Appointments are made in accordance with OCPA Code of Practice. These appointments have been made on the basis of merit. In accordance with Nolan recommendations there is a requirement for appointees' political activity to be made public. The appointees have not been involved in any relevant political activity in the last five years and do not hold any other ministerial appointments.

Arts and Humanities Research Council - Each year the AHRC provides approximately £90 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,500 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. From 1991-2003 he was King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and before that he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In June 2006 he was awarded a CBE in the Queen's 80th Birthday Honours.

Widely known as a critic, biographer and broadcaster for the BBC, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), The Genius of Shakespeare (1997) and, as principal editor, The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works (2007). He is also an expert on the Romantic period: his novel The Cure for Love (1998) draws on the life of the critic William Hazlitt, while Romantic Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000) are wide-ranging studies of the ecological dimension of an international range of Romantic and post-Romantic literary works.

Jonathan Bate's book, John Clare: A Biography (2003), was short-listed for seven prizes, including the Samuel Johnson, and won Britain's two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

As a broadcaster, he has written and presented three feature series for BBC Radio 4 (The Discovery of England in the 'Elizabethans' season, Faking the Classics and The Poetry of History). His television experience includes numerous appearances on The South Bank Show and a wide range of Arts and History documentaries. He is also a frequent speaker at major literary festivals.

Sally Doganis

Sally Doganis is an award winning documentary programme maker with a long career in BBC, ITV and independent production. She specialised in high quality films on political, social and business subjects, and has won every major TV industry award for factual programmes.

After 16 years with the BBC, on Panorama, Newsnight, the Money Programme and documentary series she joined the independent sector and was Controller of Factual Programmes for CarltonTV.

She has used her knowledge of the media to teach at the London Business School, advise charities and to influence government policy. Her Panorama on child sexual abuse brought about a change in the law. She co-authored a book on child abuse with Baroness Jay and has written four childrens books. Her film on Margaret Thatcher's election policy became required viewing in the subsequent US presidential campaign.

Sally was appointed Fellow of the Royal Television Society for 'outstanding work in the industry' and is a key member of their events committee which organises debates and conferences on technical, editorial and business developments in the wider media. For many years she worked voluntarily as a manager in her local Mental Health Trust. She is currently a trustee of Rainer, a £20m turnover charity which supports young people in need. She is on the committee Friends of Kenwood House, Hampstead. A keen ballet enthusiast she was a member of the Central Ballet School's fundraising committee and is a supporter of the ENB ballet school. She is an advisor to several companies on their media strategy.

After studying History at Christ Church and University College, London, Dr Asquith joined Oxford University Press in 1977 as Commissioning Editor for History where he initiated a revival in the Press's history publishing. The OUP is a substantial business with sales of over £90m and some 600 staff. In 1984 he became Editorial Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences, putting the Press's academic publishing on a sound commercial footing. In 1989 he became Managing Director of the Arts and Reference Division, and in 1997 Managing Director of the Academic Division, with additional responsibility for Journals, Science, Medicine, and Electronic publishing. As Managing Director he oversaw the rewriting of the Press's two great scholarly works: the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He made the Press a significant publisher of law and higher education textbooks. Dr Asquith retired from the OUP in March 2004. In April 2004 he became a non-executive director of the Edinburgh University Press. A member of the Council of Academic and Professional Publishers 1989-1995. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Advisory Council of the British Library until 2002, and sits on the advisory panel of a publishing course at City University.

Bahram Bekhradnia became the first director of the Higher Education Policy Institute on its creation on 1 November 2002. HEPI is a charity established to provide and promote higher education policy research, and to ensure that policy-makers take account of research and other evidence as they make policy for HE. Prior to this he was Director of Policy for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) since its formation in 1992, having briefly worked for the Universities Funding Council (UFC). While at HEFCE he was at the heart of many of the key developments affecting higher education during the decade, serving on and chairing a number of national committees. In particular he directed the HEFCE's policy for the development and funding of research, including the establishment of the AHRC. Before joining the UFChe had spent his career in the Department of Education and Science (as it then was), where he was latterly Head of the Teacher Supply Division.

After completing his postgraduate study at Glasgow University he took a lectureship position in 1974. Since then he has held a number of positions at the University including Co-Director of the John Logie Baird Centre for postgraduate research, Senior Lecturer, Head of Department, Vice-Dean and in 1999 Dean of the Faculty of Arts, a faculty which contains 13 departments in the fields of arts and humanities. He is an active researcher in the field of film and television with interests in adaptations of classic literature and screen acting. He is an editor of Screen, a leading international journal and general co-editor of the Oxford Television Series which has published 10 volumes in the last 5 years. He is Chair of the national advisory board for the LTSN Subject Centre in History, Classics and member of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council's working group on cultural engagement in knowledge transfer, and the Consultative Committee of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. He has served on the AHRC's Visual Arts and Media Peer Review Panel and Research Committee since 2002, and is a member of the advisory panel on the AHRC/ESRC cross-council Cultures of Consumption Programme, and the AHRC Research Centre for the Study in Intellectual Property and Technology Law. He is a member of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Committee for which he is unpaid.

Rachel Cooper is Professor of Design Management at the University of Salford, where she is Director of the Adelphi Research Institute for Creative Arts and Sciences and also co-director of the EPSRC Funded Salford Centre for Research and Innovation in the Built and Human Environment. She has been undertaking design research for the past twenty years.

Professor Cooper has received external research funding for all her work, which covers: design management; new product development; design in the built environment; design against crime; and socially responsible design. All her projects have been in collaboration with industry, working both nationally and internationally. She undertakes research in areas of design and innovation across all industry sectors. Projects include: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) study of Requirements Capture; Cost and Benefits of Partnering; Generic Design & Construction Process Protocol - a five year study involving numerous industrial collaborators e.g. BAA, Alfred McAllen, BT etc; Future scenarios for Distributed Design Teams; and three projects for the Design Council/Home Office on Design Against Crime; also for the Design Council, a study of the use of Design in Government Departments e.g. DTI, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, DCMS; and with international colleagues and US NSF funding: An 18 Country Study of New Product Development in High Technology Industries.

Currently, Professor Cooper is Principal Investigator of 'Vivacity 2020', a five year study of urban sustainability for the 24-hour city. Professor Cooper was part of the Built Environment 6* RAE submission.

Professor Cooper was Founding Chair of the European Academy of Design, and is also Founding Editor of The Design Journal. She is currently a member of the Strategic Advisory Team for Environment and Infrastructure division of EPSRC and is Panel Convenor for Postgraduate Awards in Visual Arts and Media for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), where she is also currently serving on the Management Council. Professor Cooper has written over 100 papers and six books, her latest co-authored with Professor Mike Press, 'The Design Experience,' was published June 2003.

Nicholas Kenyon started his career as a [freelance] writer and music critic on publications including The New Yorker, The Times and The Sunday Times. He was appointed Editor of the journal Early Music and Music Editor of The Listener in 1983, and in 1987 became Chief Music Critic of The Observer.

In 1991 he was Artistic Adviser to the South Bank Centre's festival Mozart Now, which won a Royal Philharmonic Society award. In March 1992 he was appointed Controller, BBC Radio 3, and was responsible for the award-winning seasons Fairest Isle (1995) and Sounding the Century (1997-1999) [as well as originating prize-winning programmes as Private Passions and Music Matters]. He was appointed Director of the BBC Proms from the 1996 season and Controller, BBC Proms and Millennium Programmes in November 1998. He oversaw the BBC's programming for the millennium celebrations, and in 2000 became Controller BBC Proms, Live Events and Television Classical Music where he is responsible for leading the strategy and programming of the BBC Proms and manages live events and television classical music departments within the radio and music division of the BBC. He is the author and editor of a number of publications on early music, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the conductor Sir Simon Rattle.

For many years he was a member of the Arts Council's Music Advisory Panel and the South Bank Centre's Music Advisory Panel, and he was a board member of London Arts. He is now a Governor of Wellington College and of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 2001 he was award a CBE for his services to music and millennium broadcasting. He is a Governor of Wellington College for which he is unpaid.

Professor McMahon took up position of Forbes Professor of English at Edinburgh University in January 2005. Before this she was Head of the School of English Language and Linguistics at Sheffield University, where she was also a member of the University Senate, the Quality and Standards Committee, the Teaching Quality Review Group, and Deputy Director of Research in the Arts and Humanities. Prior to this she was a lecturer in phonology and historical linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College for twelve years. She has published four single-author books, edited two volumes, and 19 peer-reviewed articles in the areas of historical linguistics, phonology, and the structure and history of English and Scots. She is an external examiner for a number of universities in England and Scotland. She is currently President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, a member of the Council of the Philological Society, in 2003 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2005 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She was a member of the AHRB's peer review panel five between 1997 and 2000.

Professor White began his career in 1972 as a lecturer at Manchester University, before moving to Bristol in 1976. He served as Head of the Department of Drama 1992-8, and was Graduate Dean of Arts between 1999-2002. In 2003 he was appointed head of the Institute for Advanced Studies, where he has been instrumental in developing cross-disciplinary research programmes in the arts and sciences. His own research is in the theatre and drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, focusing particularly on the work of less well known writers and issues surrounding the performance of their work in the theatres of their own, and our, time. He currently coordinates research activities at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and advises the RSC on aspects of their repertoire. From 1999 until 2003 he was Chair of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments, the national subject association, with particular interest in the development of assessment and dissemination of practice-led research and the relationship between research in creative and performing arts and the creative and cultural industries. He is a member of the Higher Education /Creative Industries Taskforce. In 2003 he was appointed by HEFCE to chair the panel on Research Capability Funding for the Creative and Performing Arts. He is also a member of the Council of Governors of the Bristol Old Vic. He was a member of the AHRC's peer review panel seven 1998-2002, and is currently a member of the AHRC'S Doctoral Working Group.