April 24th 2009 will see the first meeting of the newly appointed Advisory Board of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Meeting four times a year the role of the Advisory Board is to advise Council on the development of strategies that reflect AHRC’s Charter and the challenges facing arts and humanities research.  It will develop and recommend priorities, programmes and other initiatives that will deliver the AHRC’s strategies and monitor and report on their progress.  It will assess and advise Council on the health of the UK’s arts and humanities research base and act as a quality assurance body to oversee the procedures regulating the Peer Review College.

The new Advisory board brings together the work of the previous Research, Postgraduate and Knowledge Transfer and Evaluation Committees, allowing for joined-up discussion of all aspects of the AHRC’s funding schemes.  A shift from the previous system is that members will sit on the Board as individuals and not to represent their discipline.

With a Council member as Chair the members of the Advisory Board all have a significant research record or active engagement with research and are experienced at articulating the value of research to a range of audiences.  The Board includes a majority of academic members along with an appropriate representation of non-HEI user communities.  Members will normally be appointed for three years, although in the initial phase of setting up the Board there will be a range of appointment periods to allow for staggered succession planning.

Membership of the Board from April 2009 is confirmed as follows:

The Advisory Board is an advisory body only.  All final decisions about strategy and future direction are taken by Council.

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Media contact: Jake Gilmore, Communications Manager, 0117 9876773

Editors notes

Arts & Humanities Research Council: Each year the AHRC provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 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 over 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.

Arts and Humanities Research Council Advisory Board terms of reference

• At Council’s request, to advise, on strategies for research, training, knowledge transfer, impact, evaluation, and international engagement that reflect AHRC’s Charter and the most important national, European and global needs and challenges facing arts and humanities research. 
• At Council’s request, to develop and recommend priorities, programmes and other initiatives that will deliver the AHRC’s strategies.
• Monitor and report to Council on the implementation of the strategies by the evaluation of AHRC’s research portfolios, outputs and their potential impacts.
• Assess and advise Council on the health of the UK’s arts and humanities research base, including the provision of trained people and research capacity.
• Receive reports from commissioning and prioritization panels about the range of grants awarded and matters arising.
• Act as a quality assurance body to oversee the procedures regulating the peer review college.
• With the approval or instigation of the Chief Executive and/or Council, commission time-limited task groups for specific matters
• Submit an executive report regularly to Council

Advisory Board Biogs

Professor Ellen Douglas-Cowie, Chair
Professor Ellen Douglas-Cowie is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen's University Belfast and Pro-Vice-Chancellor designate. 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 title, 'Postlingually Acquired Deafness: Speech Deterioration and the Wider Consequences' and co-edited the special edition of Speech Communication on 'Speech and Emotion'.

Professor John Caughie
John Caughie is Professor of Film & Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 1999 to 2005, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He currently serves on the AHRC Council. He was Chair of its Research Committee and its International Advisory Group. He also convened the AHRC Working Group on support for individual scholarship which resulted in the new Research Fellowships scheme. As representative for the AHRC, he prepared the specification for the HERA Joint Research Programme, Creativity and Innovation, which was launched in February 2009. He is a member of the Scottish Funding Council’s Knowledge Transfer and Innovation Group and convenes its action group on Cultural Engagement.He is an active researcher in the academic field of film and television with current interests in film theory, television drama, and early cinema history. His most recent books are Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a short monograph on Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (British Film Institute, 2007). He is one of the editors of Screen, the leading international journal in film and television studies.  He was co-editor, with Charlotte Brunsdon, of the Oxford University Press series Oxford Television Studies.

Professor Catherine Davies
Catherine Davies is Professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies and Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham. Her research specialism is modern Spanish and Spanish American literature and culture. Her books include A Place in the Sun? Women's Writing in Twentieth-century Cuba (Zed 1997); Spanish Women's Writing 1849-1996 (Athlone 1998), and South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (LUP 2006) with C. Brewster and H. Owen. She has held a large AHRC research grant (2001-2006), chaired Subpanel 55 in the 2008 RAE, and served in the AHRC Peer Review College and AHRC BGP Moderating Panel. 

Professor Tim Hitchcock
Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Hertfordshire.  He was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Oxford University.  He has written or edited eleven books on the histories of eighteenth-century poverty, street life, sexuality and masculinity.  His most recent books include Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (Hambledon and London, 2004) and with Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (Hodder Arnold, 2007).  He is also the co-director, with Professors Robert Shoemaker and Clive Emsley, of  the Old Bailey Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org), a fully searchable edition of all printed trial accounts from 1674 to 1913; and is currently engaged in an ESRC funded project ‘Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London’, which will result in the digitisation of approximately 40 million words of eighteenth-century manuscripts.

Professor John Rink
John Rink is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He studied at Princeton University, King's College London, and the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal structure in Chopin's early music and its relation to improvisation. He also holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He specialises in the fields of performance studies, theory and analysis, and nineteenth-century studies, and has produced numerous books for Cambridge University Press, including The Practice of Performance (1995), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Musical Performance (2002), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; forthcoming 2010). Professor Rink is one of three Series Editors of The Complete Chopin - A New Critical Edition, and is Director of Chopin's First Editions Online (CFEO; www.cfeo.org.uk) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE; www.ocve.org.uk), funded respectively by the AHRC and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) and from 2009 to 2014 will direct the Phase 2 AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP; www.cmpcp.ac.uk), which will be based at Royal Holloway in partnership with King's College London, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, with a budget of c.£2.2 million. Professor Rink chairs the Steering Committee of the AHRC's Landscape and Environment programme, in addition to serving on other AHRC bodies such as Peer Review College, Beyond Text Steering Committee and (from 2004 to 2007) Strategic Advisory Group.

Professor Richard J Evans
Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. He studied at Oxford and taught at the Universities of Stirling and East Anglia before being appointed Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was Vice-Master from 1993 to 1998. In 1998 he moved to Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He has been Visiting Professor of History at Gresham College, London. His publications include Death in Hamburg (1987), Rituals of Retribution (1996), In Defence of History (1997), and a trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany, of which the last volume, The Third Reich at War, was published in 2008.

Professor Nigel Llewellyn
Nigel Llewellyn BA MA (Cantab) MPhil PhD FSA was trained at the University of East Anglia and at the Warburg Institute where he held a research fellowship and was taught by EH Gombrich and Michael Baxandall. He also held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge (1977-78). He taught art history at the University of Sussex between 1978-2006 where he also served as Dean of European Studies (1995-1998) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (2000-2003) before moving to Tate as Head of Research. He was Chair of the Association of Art Historians (1992-1995) and Director of the 40th International Congress of Art History held in London in 2000. He has held a number of posts for the AHRC and its predecessor the AHRB, chairing the specialist subject panel, acting as Programme Director for the Research Centres scheme (2003-2005) and was recently appointed chair of the Moderating Panel for the Council’s Block Grant Partnerships competition. He directed a major research grant for the AHRC in 2000-2002 to undertake the largest ever case study of commemorative art in England. His scholarly and research interests lie mainly in commemorative art, early modern art (especially eighteenth-century Italy) and in historiography. He is the co-curator of an exhibition on the International Baroque to be held at the V&A London in 2009 and has published widely on funeral monuments. His monograph Funeral Monuments in post-Reformation England (CUP, 2000) won the British Art History prize. In 1992 he curated the Art of Death exhibition, also at the V&A. He has published more than 40 articles and essays on architectural theory, mythology in the visual arts, Baroque and eighteenth-century art, commemorative art and the history of art history. He has acted as institutional reviewer and external examiner in many UK Universities and sits on the Philip Leverhulme Prize committee and the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries.

Ms Clare Reddington
Clare Reddington is Director, iShed and The Pervasive Media Studio. Clare joined Watershed in Bristol in 2004 to work with HP Labs on utility computing project SE3D. In 2007, Clare set up iShed CIC as a subsidiary of Watershed, to initiate and support creative technology research and development. Working with industry, academic and creative partners, Clare’s projects include the R&D investment scheme Media Sandbox, Light Up Bristol, which mapped 400ft projections on to Bristol’s Council house, and the Creative Technology Network. In 2008, Clare also became a Director of the Pervasive Media Studio, an innovative collaboration between Watershed and HP Labs situated in the heart of Bristol. Bringing together practitioners and users from diverse backgrounds, the studio explores new forms of mobile and wireless media. Before joining Watershed, Clare organised the Cheltenham Festival of Science, an annual five day festival exploring, promoting and encouraging debate around contemporary scientific development.

Professor Chris Gosden
Chris Gosden is Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford. He has carried out archaeological and ethnographic work in Britain, Borneo, central Europe, Papua New Guinea and Turkmenistan. He teaches on the Archaeology and Anthropology undergraduate degree and on various graduate courses. He is a fellow of the British Academy and was a member of RAE sub-panel for archaeology. Recent works include Gosden, C. 1999. Archaeology and Anthropology: a changing relationship.  London: Routledge.  Gosden, C. 2003. Prehistory. A very short introduction.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gosden, C. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Gosden, C. and C. Knowles. 2001. Collecting colonialism: material culture and colonial change in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Berg.   Gosden, C. and F. Larsen 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gosden, C. 2001. Post-colonial archaeology: issues of culture, identity and knowledge.  In I. Hodder (ed.) Archaeological Theory Today: 241- 261.  Oxford: Polity Press.

Mr John Holden
John Holden is an Associate at the think tank Demos, where he was Head of Culture from 2000-2008, and a Visiting Professor at City University. He has Masters Degrees in Law (from Oxford) and in Design History (from Southampton).  He has been involved in numerous major projects in the cultural sector not only with aspects of culture ranging from music to heritage to libraries, but also with issues of leadership and workforce development. He has worked with Government, funding bodies, trusts and foundations, agencies, and many major cultural organisations, including the RSC, the British Museum, the Sage, Gateshead, V&A, and Tate. He is a member of the Strategy Board of the Clore Leadership Programme, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was for six years Chair of the Anvil concert hall. John has delivered many keynote speeches in the UK, Europe, Australia and Canada. His publications have had a direct impact on cultural policy in the UK and beyond, and include Democratic Culture, Capturing Cultural Value, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, Creative Reading, Hitting the Right Note and Cultural Diplomacy. All of these can be downloaded free of charge from the Demos website at www.demos.uk

Professor David Fergusson
Formerly Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, David Fergusson has been Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh since 2000 and served as Head of the School of Divinity from 2004-7. He was President of the Association of University Departments of Theology & Religious Studies from 2004-8, and is the Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Bruce Brown
Professor Bruce Brown is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Brighton. Most recently he chaired the RAE2008 Main Panel O with responsibility for: Art and Design; History of Art, Architecture and Design; Drama, Dance and Performing Arts; Cultural, Communication and Media Studies; and Music. He is currently involved in the HEFCE Expert Group consulting on the Research Excellence Framework and before this was a member of the AHRC/HEFCE working group on Research Metrics (2006). He was a member of the RAE2001 art and design panel then, subsequently, involved in the allocation of HEFCE’s Research Capability Funding (2003 and 2005).  He was a founding member of the AHRB’s post-graduate panel for Visual Arts (1998-2000) and has served on the executive committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education (2000-2004). In January 2009 he participated in an international panel of four persons advising the Secretary of State for Portugal on the development of Higher Education and Research in the Arts and since 1991 has been a member of the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation chairing many events in the territory. Other advisory roles concerned with research in the arts and humanities have recently included the Qatar National Research Foundation (2006-), the Flemish Ministry of Education (2006) and individual organisations such as the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans (2007), Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien (2008), Artesis Hogeschool Antwerpen (2008) and Universiteit Gent (2008). He presently is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and an editor of Design Issues research journal published by MIT press (2006-).

Professor Lyn Pykett
Lyn Pykett is Professor of English and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Aberystwyth University. She has published widely on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture. Her books include: Emily Bronte (1989), The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone (1994), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995), Charles Dickens (2002) and Wilkie Collins (2005). As convenor of  its English Language and Literature panel she was a member of the AHRC’s postgraduate panel from 2004-8.

Professor Helen Beebee
Helen Beebee is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Director of the British Philosophical Association. She has published widely in the area of analytic metaphysics, particularly on the topics of causation, laws of nature and free will, and is the author of *Hume on Causation* (Routledge 2006).

Professor Nichola Johnson
Since 1996 Nichola has been Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, where she also directs the MA programme in Museology and the annual residential Museum Leadership Programme.  She trained as an archaeologist and art historian, and lectured in the Department of History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex.  She went on to work at the Museum of London but retained academic links with the University of Essex where she was involved in establishing the Gallery Studies Masters Programme. She is a member of a number of heritage-related boards, a Council Member of the National Trust, a Trustee of Dulwich Picture Gallery and Chair of the Clore Cultural Leadership Programme and has just completed 'stints'
as Chair of the University Museums Group and Institutional Vice-President of the Museum Association.