Eight Cambridge academics elected as Fellows of The British Academy

Thirty eight new Fellows have been elected members of The British Academy at its Annual General Meeting on 21 July, a list that includes eight from Cambridge.

The British Academy is a national academy for the promotion of the humanities and social sciences. It is the counterpart to the Royal Society, which exists to serve the natural sciences. The British Academy aims to inspire, recognise and support excellence and high achievement across the UK and internationally. Established by Royal Charter in 1902, it is an independent, self-governing body of more than 900 Fellows.

The newly elected Fellows of The British Academy are as follows:

Professor Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College and Professor of Education Emeritus at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on culture, pedagogy, curriculum, policy and development education, especially in the primary phase. His cross-cultural studies have won book prizes in both Britain and the USA. Since 2006 he has directed the independently-sponsored Cambridge Primary Review. Based at the Faculty of Education, this is the most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education since the 1960s.

Dr Neil Kenny is Reader in Early Modern French Literature and Thought in the Department of French. He is currently researching attitudes towards the dead, especially as they were expressed through tense and aspect. He is the author of The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany and of An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century French Literature and Thought among other publications. He is a co-editor of the journal French Studies.

Professor Nicholas de Lange, Fellow of Wolfson College, has been Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies since 2001. He is the principal investigator on both the projects:  'Medieval Hebrew inscriptions from the Byzantine Empire’ and 'Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire'. He is based in the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies.

Professor Robert Gordon is the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and a Professorial Fellow of St. Catharine's College. He has worked extensively on both Testaments, and has a special interest in the ancient translations of the Old Testament. He has published a number of books and has edited/co-edited several other volumes. He published a selection of his articles in 2006 under the title Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions. He is a member of the editorial board of Vetus Testamentum, the journal of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, and was its Book List editor from 1997 to 2010.

Professor Sylvia Huot, Fellow of Pembroke College, is Professor of Medieval French Literature at the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages.  She is the author of several internationally renowned books on Medieval French Literature and the leading expert on the manuscripts of Roman de la Rose, having published extensively on the text, its reception, and its manuscript tradition.

Professor Raymond Geuss is a Professor of Philosophy, who works primarily in the areas of political philosophy and the history of Continental Philosophy. Originally from Indiana in the US, Geuss arrived in Cambridge in 1993 as a lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, moving to the Faculty of Philosophy in 1997.  He has been an editor of the series of Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought since it began, and is also a published poet.

Professor Susan Owens is Professor of Environment and Policy, Head of the Department of Geography, and a Professorial Fellow of Newnham College. Her research lies in the field of environmental governance, with particular interests in land use, environment and sustainability, and in the role of knowledge, ideas and expertise in policy formation and change. She is currently a member of the Research Committee of ESRC, the Council of the Royal Geographical Society and the Advisory Group for the Royal Society’s Science Policy Centre; previously, she has served on the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and a number of other public bodies. She was appointed an OBE in 1998.

Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom, Fellow of Girton College, is Professor of Ecological and Developmental Criminology at the Institute of Criminology. He is the director of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+). Professor Wikström's main research interests are developing unified theory of the causes of crime (Situational Action Theory), its empirical testing and its application to devising knowledge-based prevention policies.

The British Academy’s President, Sir Adam Roberts, said of the election: “It is not only an honour, but also a beginning. I congratulate all the distinguished Fellows who have been elected to the Academy this year, on achieving this peer group recognition of the outstanding contribution they’ve made to scholarship and research in the humanities or social sciences. I look forward to their active participation in the life and work of the Academy.”