York’s Deputy VC joins board of new Research Council

Notes to editors:

• The AHRB was created in 1998 as an interim and transitional body, pending a decision by Government on the recommendation in the 1997 Dearing Report that a research council for the arts and humanities be established. The Higher Education Bill will now make this a reality. It is expected that the new Arts and Humanities Research Council will come into being in April 2005. As with the other research councils, the AHRC will operate on a UK-wide basis through a Royal Charter and be funded by the Office of Science and Technology (OST).
• Each year the AHRB provides approximately £70 million to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. In any one year, the AHRB makes approximately 600 research awards and almost 2,000 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 nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector.
• Members of the Board of Management are drawn from the academic community and also from other groups that have an interest in the role of the AHRB. Members should be able to reflect and express authoritatively the perspective and views of their respective communities, while contributing collectively to the successful pursuit of the AHRB's mission.
• Professor Felicity Riddy, BA (NZ), MA (Auckland), BPhil (Oxon), FRSE, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English, University of York has wide interests in late-medieval literature and culture. She is the author of Sir Thomas Malory (1987), was co-editor (with J. P. Carley) of the annual Arthurian Literature (1993-8), and has published numerous articles on the Gawain-poet, Malory and other Arthurian writings. She also has a long-standing interest in medieval Scottish literature, and has co-edited (with R. J. Lyall) a volume of conference proceedings (1981), an anthology of Longer Scottish Poems, 1375-1650 (1987) and Selected Poems of Henryson and Dunbar (1992) (both with P. Bawcutt). Her latest publication in this area is a feminist reading of Henryson's 'Testament of Cresseid' (1997, repr. 1999). She has, more generally, edited Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (1991), Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (2000), (with M. J. Alexander), Macmillan Literary Anthologies, I, Old and Middle English Literature (London, 1989), and (with P. J. P. Goldberg) Youth in the Middle Ages (2004). Recently her interest in urban culture (stimulated by the Centre for Medieval Studies interdisciplinary urban household research group) has produced articles on urban courtesy texts, romances, devotional reading and domestic authority. She is director of an AHRB-funded research project on privately-owned urban manuscripts. She is working on a book on urban domesticity, which links with her publications on women's reading and writing, including Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.
• Other board members are:
  • Mr Nicholas Kenyon, CBE, Controller BBC Proms, Live Events and Television Classical Music
  • Mr Bahram Bekhradnia, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute
  • Professor John Caughie, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow
  • Professor April McMahon, Professor of English Language and Linguistics and Head of the School of English, University of Sheffield
  • Professor Martin White, Professor of Theatre and Provost of the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol
  • Dr Ivon Asquith, Former Managing Director, Oxford University Press