Warwick-Duke Humanities Project
Warwick University Workshop Participants
6-7 August 2009
Participant biographies – Please note that I have borrowed from your
biographies on web sites.
We have invited a diverse group of participants who represent the humanities, the
arts, the academy, and the sciences.
Glenn Adamson
Head of Graduate Studies and Deputy Head of Research
Victoria & Albert Museum
g.adamson@vam.ac.uk
Dr. Adamson is Head of Graduate Studies and Deputy Head of Research at the
Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In that capacity, he teaches on the History of
Design graduate course run collaboratively with the Royal College of Art. His
research ranges from modern craft and industrial design to English and American
decorative arts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (Milwaukee Art
Museum/MIT Press). His monograph Thinking Through Craft (V&A
Publications/Berg Publishers) was published in October 2007. He also co-edits the
new Journal of Modern Craft (Berg Publishers), with Tanya Harrod and Edward S.
Cooke, Jr. Currently he is at work on a project about Postmodernism for the V&A, to
be on view in 2011.
Eleonora Belfiore (Principal Investigator)
Assistant Professor
Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick
E.Belfiore@warwick.ac.uk
Dr. Belfiore is an Assistant Professor at the Centre and, since 2004, has been working
on a 3-year research project on the social impact of the arts, jointly funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England. The project’s main
objective is a critical reformulation of the claims made about the impacts that the arts
can have on the individual and society, with a view of investigating the possibility of
developing a rigorous framework and methodology for impact assessment. She also
teaches the European Cultural Policy 1 and 2 modules, the Cultural Theory module,
and contributes to the teaching of the Introductory module on British Arts
Administration, all on the MA in European Cultural Policy and Management.
Chris Bilton (Host and co-convenor)
Director, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
c.bilton@warwick.ac.uk
Dr. Bilton has published widely and presented papers on policy and management in
the creative industries at conferences in Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the UK.
He is the author of Creativity and Management, published by Blackwells in 2006, and
is currently at work on Creative Strategy, co-authored with Dr. Stephen Cummings of
Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand, due for publication in 2009. He is a
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member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Cultural Policy and has
edited a special edition on 'Creativity and Cultural Policy' this year. At the Centre, Dr.
Bilton has been the director of the MA in Creative and Media Enterprise since its
inception in 1999. He worked in the cultural sector for ten years before coming to
Warwick, touring Britain and Europe as a writer, performer and manager with
Balloonatics Theatre Company and working as Arts Development Officer for City of
Westminster Arts Council in London. Dr. Bilton has run workshops on management
and creativity for managers at Warwick Business School and Copenhagen Business
School.
Egil Bjornsen
Programme Director, MA in European Cultural Policy Management
PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
Egil.Bjornsen@warwick.ac.uk
Prior to joining the Centre in 2002, Mr. Bjornsen held a number of managerial posts
in the cultural sector both in Norway and the UK, including the National Theatre of
Norway, the British Council in Oslo and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He takes a
lead in cultivating the Centre’s engagement with the subsidised cultural sector and
governmental cultural policy making bodies. He also takes a leading role in curricular
development within the field of cultural policy and cultural management, which
involves developing new teaching initiatives and delivery methods for both existing
and potentially new student-segments. His research interests are Nordic (and
particularly Norwegian) and British cultural policy, the relationship of cultural theory
to cultural policy, the bildung-rationale behind cultural policy, cultural industries,
audiences, audience research and audience development. He has presented his work at
a range of international conferences and is an editorial board member of the Nordic
Journal of Cultural Policy.
Priscilla Bratcher
Director of Development, Office of the Executive Director for the Arts
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Priscilla_bratcher@unc.edu
Ms. Bratcher joined the newly created Office of the Executive Director for the Arts at
the UNC in 2005, returning to the university after working with the Royal
Shakespeare Company. To the position she brought over 20 years of fundraising
experience, beginning with the UNC Center for Public Television. During her five
years there, she led a team to its first national PBS award for on-air fundraising. From
1990-94, she served as Vice President for Development of the American Social
Health Association and in 1994, moved to Capital Consortium where she worked with
clients in three states to design and implement multi-million dollar capital campaigns.
From 1998-2003, she served as Director of Principal Gifts at UNC, managing $1M+
prospects for the university's Carolina First capital campaign, while raising $5M for
the renovation of Memorial Hall, one of the university’s signature historic buildings
and home to the new Carolina Performing Arts Series. In 2003, she was appointed
first managing director of the Royal Shakespeare Company America, the British
theatre company’s U.S. fundraising office. She holds an M.F.A. in Arts Management
from the University of Iowa. Her numerous speaking engagements have taken her
from London to Mexico City.
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Catherine Bunting
Director of Research
Arts Council England
Catherine.Bunting@artscouncil.org.uk
Ms. Bunting is Director of Research at Arts Council England, where she leads a team
of researchers to explore the role of the arts in national life and the opportunities and
challenges for public funding of the arts. Catherine led the arts debate, the Arts
Council’s first public value inquiry, and is an active member of the project group for
Taking Part, a national survey of cultural participation led by the Department for
Culture, Media and Sport. Prior to joining the Arts Council, Catherine established the
research department at Arts & Business and developed a programme of work to
explore the relationship between the arts and the private sector. She spent a number
of years overseas and has worked as a researcher for the Australia Business Arts
Foundation. She has a Master's in Applied Statistics and began her career as a
statistician in a software development company.
Stephen Bury (Presenter)
Head of European and American Collections
The British Library
stephen.bury@bl.uk
Dr. Bury studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, where he won the
H.W.C. Davis University History Prize. He was Librarian of Chelsea School of Art
1985-2000 and became Head of Modern English Collections at the British Library in
2000 and Head of European and American collections in 2002. Current
responsibilities at the British Library include Research and Web Archiving. He has
published widely on twentieth and twenty-first century art, including Artists' Books
(1995) and Artists' Multiples (2001), contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (2004) and has written regularly for Art Monthly since 1997. Whilst at
Chelsea School of Art, he taught on the MA History and Theory of Modern Art and
he continues to supervise PhD students. He is Chair of the Board of Book Works and
on the Board of Matt's Gallery, London.
Boyun Choe
PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick
Ms. Choe’s thesis is entitled ‘Comparative Studies on Creative and Cultural
Education Policies between England and South Korea’.
David Looseley
Professor of Contemporary French Culture
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Leeds
d.looseley@leeds.ac.uk
Professor Looseley is founder and director of the Popular Cultures Research Network,
an international, interdisciplinary community of some 90 researchers, postgraduates,
and arts practitioners. His research concerns the contemporary history of cultural
practices, policies, and institutions, in particular popular culture. Interdisciplinary in
scope, it combines historical and political perspectives with an interest in the
discourses and cultural debates such practices, policies, and institutions engender. He
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has written extensively in these fields, including The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy
and Debate in Contemporary France (Berg, 1995), Popular Music in Contemporary
France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (Berg, 2003), and ‘The Return of the Social:
Thinking Postcolonially about French Cultural Policy’, International Journal of Cultural
Policy (July 2005). He is currently co-editing a monograph for Manchester University
Press (due 2010) on constructions of the popular in contemporary French culture. He
is also working on a comparative study of discourses of the popular in French and UK
cultural policies and has written in French on UK cultural policy for the French
Ministry of Culture’s volume commemorating its fiftieth anniversary. He is on the
editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Policy and the advisory boards
of French Cultural Studies and the French popular music journal Volume Copyright.
He was recently made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French
Ministry of Education.
Patrick McGeer
Master Scientist
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California
Rick.mcgeer@hp.com
Dr. McGeer received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California
at Berkeley in 1989. He was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science
Department at the University of British Columbia, until returning to UC-Berkeley as a
Research Engineer in 1991. In 1993, together with three collaborators, he founded the
Cadence Berkeley Laboratories. In 1998, with Alex Saldanha, he founded Softface,
Inc., the world leader in automated content classification and spend analysis, where he
remained as Chief Scientist until 2003. In 2003 he joined Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories. Dr. McGeer holds seven patents in the fields of programming
languages, circuit design, and natural-language processing. He is author of over 50
papers and one book in the fields of Computer-Aided Design, circuit theory,
programming languages, and information system design. His research interests
include logic synthesis, timing analysis, formal verification, circuit simulation,
programming languages, and wide-area distributed systems.
Jim McGuigan
Professor of Cultural Analysis and Sociology
Loughborough University
j.t.mcguigan@lboro.ac.uk
Professor McGuigan’s research interests cover the following: contemporary social
theory, cultural studies and policy, and television and representation. He has
published a number of books, his best known being Cultural Populism, which came
out in 1992. Since then, he has published Culture and the Public Sphere (1996),
Cultural Methodologies (1997), Modernity and Postmodern Culture (1999, 2nd edn
2006), and Rethinking Cultural Policy (2004); and he has co-edited Studying Culture
(1993 and 1997) with Ann Gray and Technocities (1999) with John Downey. As well
as several chapters in edited collections, he has published articles in Anglo-Saxonica,
Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, Cultural Studiesß>Critical Methodologies,
European Journal of Cultural Studies, Flow, Guaraguao - Revista de Cultura
Latinamericana, Human Technology, International Journal of Cultural Policy, The
Leveller, Media International Australia, New Left Review, New Socialist, New
Statesman, Poetics, Sociological Review and Sociology. His work has been translated
into a number of languages, including Chinese. His most recent empirical research
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project was on the Millennium Dome, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board. He is also a Visiting Fellow in Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, a
Panel Member and College Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council
and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He serves on five editorial boards and
has various links with universities around the world where he has been a visiting
professor. Currently, he is working on two main research themes: ‘cool capitalism’
and ‘funny politics’.
Paola Merli
Lecturer in Cultural Studies
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Nottingham
Paola.Merli@nottingham.ac.uk
Dr. Merli’s research interests are in the relationship between politics and the arts; in
the history of, and current developments in, cultural policy, politics and institutions;
in representations of artists and the arts in documentaries, film and other media; and
in cultural theory (particularly the work of Antonio Gramsci). She has published an
influential methodological critique of approaches to the evaluation of the social
impact of the arts in the International Journal of Cultural Policy (2002), articles in
the International Journal of the Humanities (2005/6) and the International Journal of
the Arts in Society (2007), and a scholarly introduction to a book on Italian theatre
institutions (Mondadori Electa, 2006). She is currently preparing a monograph titled
The Battle for la Scala: The Opera House and Cultural Policy. Other forthcoming
work includes journal articles on Gramsci and cultural policy; on the cultural politics
of the Royal Opera House in the 1950s and 1960s; and on representations of the opera
house in the media in the 1990s. She is book reviews editor for the journal Cultural
Trends.
Jonothan Neelands
Chair of Drama and Theatre Education and Director of Teaching and Learning,
Institute of Education
University of Warwick
J.Neelands@warwick.ac.uk
Professor Neelands is an associate of the CAPITAL Centre for creativity and
performance in teaching and learning, which is a joint initiative between the
University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is closely involved
in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Time For Change campaign to improve the
quality of Shakespeare teaching at secondary and higher education levels. Professor
Neelands has advised government on the identification and training of talented young
performers and is Research Consultant for the National Council of Drama Training
and a member of the RSC Education Advisory Group. He has trained teaching artists
at the New Victory Theater in New York since 2005. Recent research projects have
been in partnership with Birmingham Royal Ballet, RSC and the National Association
of Youth Theatres amongst others. Professor Neelands is the author of several texts
for teachers and students, which have influenced the development of drama in recent
years including Structuring Drama Work, Beginning Drama 11-14, Key Shakespeare
1 and 2 and Drama and Theatre Studies at A/S and A level. His latest publication is
Improving Your Primary School Through Drama. Research interests include cultural
and creative learning, the politics of cultural and education policy-making, teaching in
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urban settings, the sociology of educational disadvantage and the articulation of a prosocial pedagogy of arts education.
Mark O’Neill (Presenter)
Head of Arts and Museums
Cultural and Leisure Services
Glasgow City Council
Mark.o’neill@cls.glasgow.gov.uk
Mr. O’Neill was appointed Head of Glasgow Museums in 1998, the largest civic
museum service in the United Kingdom. He began his museum career in Glasgow in
1986, working for a local trust to establish a museum in Springburn. In 1990 he was
appointed Keeper of Social History in Glasgow City Council's museum service. His
major projects since then include setting up the Open Museum, Glasgow's awardwinning outreach service, the St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, one of
only four museums of religion in the world, and the redisplay of the People’s Palace.
For the past ten years he has been working on the philosophy and funding for the
restoration and redisplay of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the most visited
museum in Britain outside London. In 2005 he was appointed Head of Arts and
Museums for Glasgow City Council.
Michael Parker Pearson (Presenter)
Professor of Archaeology
University of Sheffield
M.Parker-Pearson@Sheffield.ac.uk
Professor Pearson is an internationally renowned expert in the archaeology of death
and also specialises in the later prehistory of Britain and Northern Europe and the
archaeology of Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean. He has published more
than 10 books and over 100 academic papers, on topics that range from architecture,
food and warfare to ethnoarchaeology, archaeological theory and heritage
management. He has worked on archaeological excavations in Britain, Denmark,
Germany, Greece, Madagascar, Syria and the United States, and currently directs field
projects in the Outer Hebrides, Madagascar and the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.
He has been a Member of the Institute of Field Archaeologists (MIFA) since 1989 and
a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries since 1991. He has been on the council of the
Prehistoric Society since 1999 and is currently the Society's conservation coordinator.
Jan Parker (Presenter)
Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University
Jan.parker@open.ac.uk
Dr. Parker is Chair of the Humanities Higher Education Research Group, Editor-inChief of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, and a series editor of books in the
SAGE series “Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education’. She is
UK institutional leader of a programme of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning, and Research Associate of the Cornell Centre for Writing
in the Disciplines. She researches and publishes on disciplinarity and academic
writing, as well as in her discipline of Classics. She has published extensively. Two
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co-edited books on ‘Translation: The Classic and the Modern’ were in press in the
USA and UK in 2008.
Anna Upchurch (Project coordinator)
Teaching Fellow, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Anna.upchurch@warwick.ac.uk
Dr. Upchurch holds a PhD in Cultural Policy Studies from the University of Warwick.
She is a former marketing communications practitioner who worked extensively with
arts and cultural institutions over two decades in North Carolina. She is interested in
the history of ideas about the arts in society and in the position of creative individuals
and organizations in market economies. She also holds an M.A. in Liberal Studies
from Duke University.
Donna Zapf (Co-convenor and Presenter)
Director, Graduate Liberal Studies program
Duke University
dzapf@duke.edu
Dr. Zapf is trained in classical music, plays clarinet, and has academic degrees in
musicology. Her teaching interests have focused on interdisciplinary and contextual
approaches to the histories and theories of the fine and performing arts. Her research
interests include contemporary music and opera, multiculturalism, cultural policy, and
the arts in Canada. Prior to her appointment at Duke, she directed the Graduate
Liberal Studies program at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada,
and chaired the MFA program and taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts
there.
Jonathan Breckon (Observer)
Director of Policy and Public Affairs
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Professor Shearer West (Observer)
Director of Research
Arts and Humanities Research Council
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