Academic Promotions - October 2011

The UK’s European university

ACADEMIC PROMOTIONS October 2011

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NEW PROFESSORS Iain Fraser (School of Economics) My research interests span agricultural, environmental and resource economics. I have conducted extensive research on agri-environmental policy, household waste management, estimation and measurement of economic efficiency and, most recently, non-market valuation. I have just completed three years as an Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics and, from September 2012, will become an editor of the European Review of Agricultural Economics.

In addition, as Director of Learning and Teaching, I will help steer the School of Economics through its Periodic Program Review in 2012.

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NEW PROFESSORS (CONT)

David Herd (School of English)

The past year has been a busy one for the Centre of Modern Poetry, which I direct. In November 2010, we hosted the Charles Olson Centenary Conference, an event that drew international scholars and poets to Canterbury to mark Olson’s achievement as poet, theorist and educator. In May 2011, working in collaboration with the Centre for Creative Writing and the Sounds New Contemporary music festival, we staged the inaugural Sounds New Poetry festival; a week-long event featuring award-winning poets from Britain and the USA. My own work continues to have a double focus on contemporary poetry and the politics of movement. In the past year, I have given lectures and talks at universities in Vancouver, Paris, Boston, Melbourne and Sydney as well as in the UK. I have also given readings from my forthcoming collection of poetry, All Just, to be published

by Carcanet in July 2012. Looking at key challenges ahead, it is crucial to ensure that, in the new funding climate, educational values are not overridden by ideas of consumerism.

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NEW PROFESSORS (CONT)

Bernard Ryan (Kent Law School)

My academic work explores the challenges for law and public policy posed by migration. I have published across the field of migration law, including the legal aspects of immigration control, labour migration and nationality. In 2010, I co-edited a work on ‘extraterritorial’ immigration control, which addressed the legal framework when a state controls migration prior to arrival on the territory.

I have also recently conducted research on the impact of the ‘life in the UK test’, taken by applicants for long-term residence or for British citizenship. My teaching at Kent covers all aspects of migration law, with modules on British, European Union and international law. I am also the joint chair of the Migration and Law Network, which promotes the study of migration law within British universities.

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NEW PROFESSORS (CONT)

Miri Song (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) Since my appointment to a lectureship at Kent in October 1995, I have undertaken significant research across migration, race and ethnicity, and ‘mixed race’. In particular, I have contributed to and shaped the scholarship on second-generation migrants in Britain.

This has related especially to issues of belonging and the assertion of public ethnicities and, more recently, the emergence of ‘mixed race’ young people in Britain and Western Europe. The social and political implications of this growing ‘mixture’ cannot be exaggerated; we will have to think critically about the meanings and enumeration of who is and isn’t a ‘minority’, the social distance between White and non-White people, and continuing salience of racial and ethnic difference. A key challenge for the future of sociology at Kent is to establish and publicise the varied sub-fields of sociology in which our staff have expertise at national and international levels.

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NEW PROFESSORS (CONT)

Tim Strangleman (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) I have been drawing on my previous research projects focusing on work identity and meaning, deindustrialisation and nostalgia. I have also helped to successfully launch a network – Reworking Kent – for staff researching work across the three faculties. The main focus of my work over the next year or so will be writing a book from my research into the Guinness Company and its Park Royal Brewery in West London.

This innovative book, Imagining Work in the Twentieth Century, draws on extensive visual material and aims to tell the story of work in the 20th century. The state of the global and national economy make work and employment one of the most important areas for contemporary research and I want to make sure that Kent is at the forefront of this activity.

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NEW READERS Jennie Batchelor (School of English) Over the past year, I have enjoyed working with colleagues to expand our growing community of graduate students. As Co-Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century (CSLEC), I helped to design the interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies. The programme, which runs with modules from English, History & Philosophy of Art and the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL), launched in 2010-11 with a successful day-conference on ‘The Visual and the Verbal in the Eighteenth Century’. Graduate students are, of course, vital members of our teaching and research culture. Ensuring that we continue to recruit excellent students at MA and PhD level through innovative, interdisciplinary programmes and specialised training for their work within and beyond the University is, I think, one of the biggest challenges we face post-2012.

Julie Beadle-Brown (Tizard Centre) In 2010/11, we have strengthened collaborative work in the fields of autism and intellectual disabilities – work spanning both academia and applied consultancy work. Within the UK, new collaborations with colleagues in the Schools of Arts and Psychology have resulted in AHRC funding for a project on ‘Imagining Autism’. New training materials in autism and guidance for trainers and those commissioning training has emerged from collaboration with the National Autistic Society. Working as part of QORU (Quality and Outcomes in person-centred care for people with long-term conditions Research Unit) as well as in other projects, I have focused on ensuring that people with intellectual disabilities and autism are included in research as well as in society. I am also working to understand what determines good outcomes for people with intellectual disabilities and complex needs.

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Jenny Billings (Centre for Health Services Studies) My primary focus has been on grant applications, project managing successful bids, and publishing and disseminating research via conference attendance. This year, I have been focusing mainly on my European projects concerned with improving health and social care for frail older people and hope to make an impact on policy and practice. There are many challenges now with research funding so, in the coming year, I will be making sure that the Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS) is well positioned to take advantage of the funding streams in health, and working with colleagues in Kent and across Europe to develop innovative ideas to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable groups.

Adam Burgess (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) The focus of my research is risk and society; how the modern world understands and manages uncertainty. My work is concerned, firstly, with social practices of risk. A recent example is research on the ‘risk ritual’ of flu mask wearing in Japan, now curiously worn to protect against radiation.

Secondly, I’m interested in changing languages of risk and their differing impacts. An example is representation of last year’s volcanic ash cloud, and how framing it as an ‘act of God’ limited the usual search for blame. I’m also interested in institutions of risk, most recently by examining the evolution of major public inquiries, a mechanism that routinises how we think about exceptional experiences. My work has always included a strong comparative component – trying to understand the very different responses to similar risk in different societies – and I hope to develop this aspect in the future.

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Helen Carr (Kent Law School) In 2010, I became Director of Learning and Teaching for the Law School, stepping into Alan Thomson’s not inconsiderable shoes. With 2012 approaching fast, my focus has been on working with academics, administrators and students to ensure that our undergraduate provision is rigorous and meets student expectations. We made a successful bid to the Higher Education Authority Change Academy on promoting change in teaching within the Social Sciences faculty. As a result, we spent four days at Sunningdale working on ideas to promote student engagement which we hope will lead to new initiatives. At the same time, my research interests in housing and social welfare law have become increasingly acute as a result of coalition policies and public spending cuts. This year, I intend to focus on the consequences of housing benefit cuts and the problems of the single homeless. My academic work is complemented by professional legal work – I chair a Residential Property Tribunal, considering rents, service charges and the legal regulation of housing conditions.

Karen Douglas (School of Psychology) My research over the past year has focused primarily on the social psychology of conspiracy theories. In particular, I am interested in why so many people are drawn to conspiracy theories and what features make them convincing and popular. Over the past year, I have also been busy teaching, co-authoring a social psychology undergraduate text, co-editing a book on the psychology of feedback and acting as associate editor for two social psychology journals. I think that one key challenge for the future will be to maintain and build upon our high-quality teaching and research with significant cuts to higher education and decreasing funds available from the research councils.

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Maria Drakopoulou (Kent Law School) Over the past 12 months, I have focussed my intellectual efforts primarily on research. I have progressed personal projects on legal theory – most notably, the development of a genealogy of feminist legal thought – and continued to nurture KLS’s graduate researchers in my role as Director of Postgraduate Research. My own work led to visits and collaborative projects with the University of Umea, Sweden and Melbourne Law School, Australia.

My support for our postgraduate research community continued the KLS tradition of treating our students as ‘scholars in the making’ and integrating them as part of our vibrant, high-quality research community. To me, the important challenge ahead is to strengthen research that critically engages with knowledge and ideas – which defines the School – in the context of an increasingly difficult economic climate.

Michael Forrester (School of Psychology) The primary focus of my research is understanding the emergence of young children’s skills and abilities. I am interested in examining, documenting and explaining children’s conversational skills, as well as understanding early expressions of their musicality. An example is my collaboration in a largescale cross-cultural study establishing and documenting young children’s singing skills across countries such as Japan, Canada, Brazil, France, Kenya, Estonia (see http://www.airsplace.ca/). My research is inflected with, and informed by, the discursive and critical orientation found in social psychology, developmental psychology and childhood studies. In the coming years, the difficulty of securing research funding for basic research in these areas is likely to increase. At the same time, internet-oriented technological innovations, and an increased awareness of diverse methodological approaches, will open up new prospects.

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Mark Howard (School of Biosciences) My research concentrates on the applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in biology. NMR spectroscopy is ideal for examining the molecular make-up of biological molecules and has a key role in determining their three-dimensional structure. NMR’s real strength lies in the studies of metabolite composition, biomolecular interactions and molecular motions that influence cellular function and disease. My group uses these strengths to study biological systems with a widespread interest from cellular biochemistry to enzymology, molecular processing and cancer tumour imaging and therapy. Challenges are found in the continual development of novel NMR methodologies to answer biological questions.

However, the future is very promising following our recent acquisition of a state-of-the-art Bruker Avance III NMR spectrometer with QCI cryoprobe that will allow us to push the boundaries of detection or shorten experimental time. This spectrometer, installed in the School of Biosciences in June 2011, was funded with a £460,000 grant from the Wellcome Trust.

Ben Hutchinson (School of European Culture and Languages) My main challenge over the past year has been to combine a busy schedule of research activities and administrative roles with the small matter of becoming a parent. Research leave in the autumn enabled me to complete my most recent book, Modernism and Style, as well to finish co-editing two volumes of essays (on the ‘Archive’ and on W.G. Sebald). I returned in the new year to take over as Head of German, as well as to continue as Director of the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH) and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature. Maintaining the balance between the three areas of research, teaching and administration will undoubtedly remain the key challenge ahead: whilst my own work becomes ever broader, the pool of languages students in the UK threatens

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to become ever smaller. Championing German and European literature, as well as the Humanities more generally, is thus of vital importance. We may have to look beyond the UK: in 2012, I will be co-organising the first ever ‘summer school’ for British postgraduates at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

Csaba La’da (School of European Culture and Languages) My main focus at Kent has been research into Greek and Egyptian papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt (332 BC–AD 641) and the social and cultural history of the period. Over the last year, I have made a number of research visits to the Vienna papyrus collection where I have ongoing projects.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these is publishing, together with Prof A Papathomas of Athens University, the earliest known administrative text in any European language to use the method of alphabetisation for data processing and arrangement. In addition to research and teaching, I have assumed increasingly senior administrative roles such as SECL Director of Graduate Studies for Research Programmes and acting Head of Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies. I have been focusing on postgraduate recruitment and conversion, as well as contributing to designing new programmes, in order to place the Department and School in a strong position for the challenges that lie ahead. I am pleased to report that the Department’s postgraduate recruitment has increased significantly this year.

Ellie Lee (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) 2011 saw the launch of a new research centre in SSPSSR, The Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/).

CPCS, which I direct, started life in 2007 with a conference, ‘Childrearing in

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the age of ‘intensive parenting’. The aim was to see if it was possible to initiate genuinely interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues here and other universities in the UK and internationally. Happily, experience has shown that it is; I have led an ESRC-funded seminar series; publication of two special issues of journals about parenting culture; and successful applications for new research on the moralisation of breastfeeding, risk consciousness and pregnancy, and welfare of child assessments in assisted conception clinics. As increasing claims are made about brain science’s impact on how we should raise our children, our main event of 2011 was ‘Science, evidence, experts and the new parenting culture’. Over the next year, CPCS will continue to focus on this topic. I will also be disseminating findings from our ‘welfare of the child’ study, as well as encouraging new PhD students to work with us on this exciting, important social research.

Ana de Medeiros (School of European Culture and Languages) If I wanted to express in one word what the primary focus has been over the past 12 months I would say ‘excellence’. Whether as lecturer, researcher, supervisor or acting Head of SECL, I always strive for excellent results – however apparently small or great the task at hand might be. I am proud of working at Kent and want to ensure that the students and colleagues I work with feel equally proud to share this wonderful opportunity. It is impossible to put a price on education and, although the discussion of tuition fees has rightly dominated the headlines in the past two years, I believe the focus in the next 12-24 months will return to the overall enrichment which education provides in ways which cannot be quantified. Recent studies show that the overall benefits of education far outweigh the increased earning potential associated with a good degree.

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Stewart Motha (Kent Law School) Throughout my time at Kent, I have focused on drawing on my research to inform my teaching. One aspect of my research looks at post-apartheid constitutionalism and politics in South Africa. I draw on conventional legal materials such as case law, but also aesthetic forms such as the novel and film. Recently, we drew on Peter Harris’s book Just Defiance to help students think about political violence – not only in South Africa, but also the violence used by the state when policing demonstrations and protests in London and elsewhere in the UK. The key challenge in the years ahead is to ensure that we are in a position to tackle the new funding regime in an innovative and creative way that does not compromise the pedagogical values we have fostered over many years. I believe Kent Law School and the University of Kent are in a very strong position to meet these challenges, providing we prioritise innovation over nostalgia for an idyllic past that never was.

Catherine Richardson (School of English) I am interested in how people lived in early modern England, particularly non-elite men and women who had little contact with the written word. That is why I work on the material culture which surrounded them and through which they understood their lives – for instance, possessions, clothes and houses. I have spent the last year researching and teaching one aspect of this experience – the way Shakespeare made objects work on the stage and in his audience’s imagination. I am looking forward to taking this research in a different direction with the aid of an AHRC Network Grant. I will be working with scientists, conservators, museum curators, heritage professionals and my students to explore how people experienced household interiors in early modern England. New technologies will allow us to construct digital environments to help with this work, and the results will feed into how we all look at historic properties in the present.

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Ebrahim Soltani (Kent Business School) My research interests include operations improvement, human resources issues that are relevant to quality management, and management attitude toward quality. In 2010, I was awarded a two-year ESRC-funded research project to explore the cause-effect relationships between contextual forces and conditions, management’s orientation and support, and the bottom-line impact of quality management practices. This research project is a response to the lack of informative research on the main barriers to ‘sustained improvement’ via quality management practices. This research is both timely and important given the current ‘credit crunch’ and the need to strengthen performance and capability in central and local government organisations, as well as privately-owned firms, through embracing quality and productivityfocused management interventions.

Robbie Sutton (School of Psychology) Over the last year, I have been working hard with PhD students to identify how social psychology can cast light on social problems. Much of our work has focused on gender. We have obtained results showing that women are liked more if they are afraid of crime, that sexism plays a role in the ‘bossy’ societal stance toward pregnant women, and that boys as young as six or seven years old fall prey to the (self-defeating) belief that they, compared to girls, are not only less well behaved and lower achieving, but also less intelligent. Through this work and the opening of cross-disciplinary centres in the University, I have enjoyed much greater dialogue with people from other fields such as law, sociology and geography. Looking ahead, the unfortunate increases in university fees and reductions in research funding at national level raise many uncertainties and pose challenges for everybody.

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Scarlett Thomas (School of English) As Director of Creative Writing, my main priorities over the last year have been recruiting new MA students, teaching on the MA and making sure the programme runs smoothly. I also supervise six research students. Our MA in Creative Writing is growing very well. This year, we will have over 30 students.

A key challenge for me now is to make the MA as international as possible.

We attract a good number of overseas students, but we would like more.

I am also planning to create a new MA in Travel Writing. I’m currently also working on two book-length projects: one novel and one book about writing.

Yu Zhu (School of Economics) I have been developing work in the field of labour economics, particularly the economics of education, since joining the University almost a decade ago. More recently, my primary focus, aided by a Nuffield Foundation grant, has been the differential returns by different degree subjects and on returns to independent education in the UK. One of the key challenges for my future research will be developing a better understanding of how different tiers of HE institutions in the UK adopt different strategies when facing the burgeoning global demand. I will also be looking at how the large inflow of foreign students to HE institutions in the UK affects the learning and labour market outcomes of native students.

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NEW SENIOR LECTURERS Donatella Alessandrini (Kent Law School) Maria Alfredsson (School of Physical Sciences) Albena Azmanova (Brussels School of International Studies) Thomas Baldwin (School of European Culture and Languages) Ruth Blakeley (School of Politics and International Relations) Ania Bobrowicz (School of Engineering and Digital Arts) David Byers Brown (School of Engineering and Digital Arts) Frank Camilleri (School of Arts) Pratik Chakrabarti (School of History) James Fowler (School of European Culture and Languages) Dirk Froebrich (School of Physical Sciences) Emily Grabham (Kent Law School) Frances Guerin (School of Arts) Elaine Heslop (Kent Law School) Peter Kenny (School of Computing) Anne Logan (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) Stephen Lowry (School of Physical Sciences) Vincent Miller (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) David Morelli (Kent Business School) Daniela Peluso (School of Anthropology and Conservation) Georgina Randsley de Moura (School of Psychology) Balihar Sanghera (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (School of European Culture and Languages) David Stirrup (School of English) Melissa Trimingham (School of Arts) Loba Van der Bijl (School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science) David Wilkinson (School of Psychology) John Wills (School of History) Jane Wood (School of Psychology)

INTERNAL PROMOTIONS – FIND OUT MORE

University of Kent, The Registry, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ T: +44 (0)1227 764000 E: information@kent.ac.uk www.kent.ac.uk

DPC 111952 10/11

Internal promotions are an important way of recognising the outstanding, ongoing performance of individual staff in support of the University.

Through these promotions, the University aims to encourage staff to improve their own performance while meeting nationally and internationallyrecognised standards of excellence. Details of how to apply, and when, for both academic and non-academic promotions, are available on the HR webpages www.kent.ac.uk/ hr-staffinformation/promotion-salaryreview/index.html