Latest News of Fellows

Honorary Fellow Lord Rees has been appointed by the Prime Minister to chair a new multi-million pound prize fund designed to tackle some of societys most pressing problems. Building on the 18th century precedent of the Longitude Prize, the new prize will offer a reward to those who can solve issues that matter most to the public.

A total of 11 British Academy Fellows have received awards in the Queenss Birthday Honours, announced on 14 June. They include knighthoods for Professor John Hills and Professor Christopher Pissarides (both LSE), while Professor Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College, Oxford becomes a Dame.  There are five further awards of CBE and two of OBE, while Professor William Cornish (Cambridge) becomes a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George.Kt/DBEProfessor John Hills, Professor of Social Policy, LSE. For services to Social Policy Development. Professor Hermione Lee, President, Wolfson College and Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. For ...

Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy, gave the annual Hesse Lecture at the Aldeburgh on 10 June. In 2013 the Festival is celebrating the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, and Sir Adam's lecture was on the topic 'Pacificism in Britten's Time and Today'.

In a new piece for the Political Observatory, Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby looks at how to make an inclusive welfare state work. In the article Professor Taylor-Gooby says that the welfare debate should be about wages before it is about benefits and he proposes ways an inclusive welfare system might be both effective and electable.

Professor Nigel Vincent and Professor Stephen Machin have contributed articles to a new report from CentreForum arguing for better funding for and better access to postgraduate education.

On 25 May, Professor Nicholas Stern (Lord Stern of Brentford), incoming British Academy President, gave the inaugural British Academy Lecture at the 2013 Hay Festival. Six years on from his landmark Climate Change Report, the event (chaired by Nik Gowing) looked at climate change and the future of economic growth in the green industries.

Professor Michael Moriarty has been awarded the R. H. Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies for his book Disguised Vices. Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford University Press)

Lord Briggs and Professor Margaret Boden have been awarded Gold Medals by the University of Sussex, as part of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the university.

Professor Margaret Boden has been awarded the Covey Award for lifetime research by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy.

Professor Peter Kornicki has been awarded the 24th Yamagata Banto Prize, a prize given every three years for the study of Japan and which is named after an 18th-century merchant intellectual of Osaka.

Professors Rudolf Klein and Theodore R Marmor are co-authors of Politics, Health and Health Care, a set of essays published in the wake of President Obamas health care reform and which analyse a number of major issues in health care policy.

Professor Martin Rudwick has been awarded the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize by the History of Science Society - the premier body in its field worldwide for his book Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform.

Corresponding Fellow Professor Susan Fiske, who is Eugene Higgins Professor in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Science in Washington DC.

Professor John Child is co-author (with international partners) of The Dynamics of Corporate Co-evolution (Edward Elgar), which examines the development of Chinas largest and most successful container port, formed in 1993 as a joint venture. The book adopts a political perspective to explore the dynamics of this co-evolution and provides a detailed analysis of strategic initiatives taken. The former chief executive of the port is a co-author.

In a letter to The Times, 54 historians including Professors Pat Thane and Martin Daunton criticise him for manipulating and distorting evidence in a speech in which he mocked a child-like approach to the subject.Last week Mr Gove ridiculed a lesson plan in which GCSE students used Mr Men characters to describe the rise of Hitler. He also mocked a history teachers organisation for encouraging the use of a Disney film to teach children about King John.The academics say that this latter claim misrepresented an article in the Historical Associations journal for primary schools. The article, for teachers of children ...

Professor Roger Louis has been awarded the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, for "the enormous contribution you have made to English literature -- both through your own writing, and through the support and assistance you have given other writers over several decades." Professor Louis is the founding Director of the National History Center of the American Historical Association and holds the Kerr Chair in English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, where for nearly 40 years he has directed the Faculty Seminar on British Studies.  Over the years, this medal has been awarded ...

Following the news that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere have reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm), Lord Stern has told The Observer it is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands over the rest of the century.  He warns that people forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died, will as a result come into possible armed conflict with people already living there and that this could become a permanent feature of life on Earth".

Vice-President, Professor Nigel Vincent has written the foreword to the latest What Do Researchers Do? publication from Vitae, which looks at the employment of doctoral graduates. The report suggests those with a doctoral qualification are more "recession proof" than those with other qualifications.  Professor Vincent said:This publication is essential reading for multiple audiences. It is an invaluable resource to inform policy making and investment in doctoral education, particularly in the current challenging funding environment. It gives actual and prospective doctoral researchers clear evidence of the value of their degree. It provides careers advisers, researcher developers ...

Professor Geoffrey Parker is the author of a new book - Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale UP) - which has been described as a magisterial book that argues that 17th-century climate change led to social unrest, and offers a timely 21st-century warning (Financial Times).

Professor Peter Brown, historian of late antiquity, has won the American Publishers RR Hawkins Award for his book, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. The prize recognises outstanding scholarly works in all disciplines of the arts and sciences. Professor Brown has won many prestigious international prizes, including the Heineken prize (1994), the Kluge prize (2008) and the Balzan prize (2011).

Professor Michael O'Brien, Fellow and Professor of American Intellectual History, is the first recipient of the Woodward-Franklin Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. This is a lifetime achievement award for his many publications on the American South. Notable among them is his 'Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860' (2004). Professor O'Brien was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.

Professor Harold (Harry) Collins FBA, Distinguished Research Professor, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University is newly elected to the Learned Society of Wales.

Following the conclusion of HEFCE's funding review of the University of London's School of Advanced Study, its Dean, Professor Roger Kain, discusses the School's future, including ways of providing more agenda-setting leadership for the humanities, in an interview with Times Higher Education.

Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology at LSE and former Director of the ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester has lead a new survey of social class in Britain.

Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Master of Sidney Sussex College and Honorary Professor of Roman Studies at University of Cambridge and former Director of the British School at Rome presents a BBC documentary on Herculaneum, where he has led a major conservation project. The documentary airs on 1 April 2013. 

Peter Simons, Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin is elected a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy. Professor Simons currently sits on the Royal Irish Academy's Philosophy and Ethics Committee.

Marina Warner's book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, has been named winner of the 2013 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. This prestigious $30,000 prize is administered by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Professor Warner has already won the US National Critics Circle Prize for this book.

Sir Tony Atkinson is among 63 leading academics and economists who have written a letter published in today's Guardian criticising yesterday's Budget and its impact on "the millions of people in Britain who face an impoverished and uncertain year as their wages, jobs, conditions and welfare provision come under renewed attack". They add: "it is important that people understand that there is a large body of opinion against these policies."

Professor Noam Chomsky gave the Edward W. Said London Lecture on Violence & Dignity: Reflections on the Middle East on 18 March. He was also the subject of a profile in the Financial Times on 16 March.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, FBA, will share the £1m award with Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen. The citation panel said the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades.

Professor Andrew Whiten has been awarded the Sir James Black Prize and Medal of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, its most prestigious award for the Life Sciences.  Professor Andrew Whiten, an expert in primate behaviour and psychology, has been awarded the senior prize for the Life Sciences by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  In being honoured with the Sir James Black Prize and Medal, Professor Whiten is recognised for his outstanding contributions to making Scotland foremost in the UK in the study of primates and animal behaviour and to our understanding of the importance of a cultural second inheritance system ...

Sir David Cannadine's new book The Undivided Past: History Beyond our Differences (Penguin 2013) was launched on 14 March at the RSA.

The Guardian is hosting a live webchat with Professor Christopher Prendergast on Proust at 1pm today. Professor Christopher Prendergast, as general editor of the acclaimed Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time, is writing a book on Proust and scepticism, and has written and edited others about Balzac, semiotics, close readings of French poetry, and Napoleon and History Painting. He is also Professor Emeritus in French at Cambridge University and Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Aditi Lahiri has been accorded the rare honour of election as an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America.  The Society was founded in 1924 to advance the scientific study of language. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship both to professional linguists and to the general public.

Professor Vernon Bogdanor was an adviser on the script of the new hit West End play The Audience. Starring Helen Mirren and directed by Stephen Daldry, it imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional.

William Beveridge, renowned as father of the welfare state, was also instrumental in rescuing persecuted scholars from Hitler and the Nazis. He founded the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), and his work will be commemorated by a lecture as part of CARA's 80th anniversary celebrations. 

Marina Warner has won the 2012 US National Book Critics Circle Prize for a work of Criticism for her 2012 book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, published in the UK by Chatto & Windus (2011). The book uses the fables of the Arabian Nights to provide a history of magical thinking. Professor Warner convened a workshop and readings at the British Academy in 2008 as part of her research on the topic.

Professor David Abulafia is giving a lecture tonight on 'Our Great Sea' as part of the LSE Literary Festival.  One great sea, a multitude of cultures and an embarrassment of riches: he will share his intellectual odyssey from Alicante to Alexandria, from Salerno to Smyrna. David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and author of The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean.

Charles Bawden has been awarded the Indiana University prize for Altaic Studies 2012, awarded under the aegis of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference. The gold medal was awarded to him at home on 13 January.

Historian Professor Tom Devine has suggested that the resignation of Cardinal Keith O'Brien "is probably the gravest single public crisis to hit the Catholic Church in Scotland since the Reformation" in a commentary piece for The Daily Telegraph. However, Professor Devine believes that, although the faithful in Scotland would be stunned by the "seismic turn of events", the church had a powerful resilience that should not be underestimated.

Developmental psychologist Professor Uta Frith DBE was this week's castaway on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, where she talked about her groundbreaking work on autism. The programme is repeated on Radio 4 on 1 March and can also be heard on BBC iPlayer.

Scotland should be ready to adopt an independent currency if the country votes in favour of leaving the UK, Professor John Kay will warn. In a lecture later, the economist will say the Scottish government "would be right" to try to form a monetary union with the rest of the UK.

In an article for the Guardian, Professor Nigel Vincent has highlighted the state of foreign language learning in the UK and its effect on UK market competitiveness. Professor Vincent draws on the new British Academy new report - Languages: State of the Nation - which analyses the worrying state of the current demand and supply of language skills in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The report is the latest in a series of reports and position papers the Academy have dedicated in recent years to the declining status of languages in our schools and universities. ...

Sir Denis Mahon, who died in 2011, was a distinguished art historian, and a specialist in Italian art. Under his will, he has left a collection of art, valued at £100m, to the nation.  The previous year, he celebrated his 100th birthday in the National Gallery, which will now keep 25 pieces from his collection.Other institutions which will benefit from keeping the paintings for nothing: the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh; the Ashmolean in Oxford; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; and Temple Newsam House in Leeds.

Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd has been awarded a Dan David prize for 2013.  This is a major international prize, worth $1m, for achievements having an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on our world. The Dan David Prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms.  It is unique in that its laureates donate 10% of their prize money to graduate students in their respective fields, thereby contributing to the community and fostering a new generation of scholars.

Baroness Brenda Hale of Richmond, Supreme Court judge, is number 4 on the women's power list, published by Woman's Hour. See the full list here.  

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch Kt discusses the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI on the Today programme. He also wrote a column on the subject in The Times (please note, this links to a subscription only website).

Following the Governments announcement that 12 new Regius Professorships are to be created (including three in the social sciences and one in music) Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, has written a fascinating and entertaining history of the Regius Professorships, first endowed by the Scottish King James IV in 1497, in this week's Times Higher Education.

David Cannadine writes for A Point of View (BBC) on grown ups with teddy bears.

British Academy President-elect Professor Lord Nicholas Stern reviews the morning newspapers on BBC Radio 4 programme Broadcasting House on Sunday 3rd February 2013.