Máiréad Nic Craith joined the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies as Professor of European Culture and Heritage in September 2012. She previously held a Chair in the School of Social Sciences and Applied Social Studies at the University of Ulster. Máiréad has held an honorary professorship at the University of Exeter as well as a DAAD guest professorship at the University of Göttingen. She has held other academic positions at the Universities of Liverpool, Dublin and Cork. She has received many accolades for her publications, including the Ruth Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff research prize for folklife (joint winner), which was awarded at the University of Edinburgh in 2004. Two years later she was awarded a Senior Distinguished Research Fellowship at the University of Ulster. In 2009 she was elected to the Royal Irish Academy, the highest academic honour in Ireland. Máiréad has served on numerous research evaluation panels in Europe and in Canada. She has recently been appointed assessor to the Australian Research Council. Máiréad’s research focuses on different aspects of living heritage including literary heritage (from the Great Blasket Island), intercultural heritage (Cork), World Heritage sites (Skellig Michael), heritage and conflict (Northern Ireland) and heritage and law in a European context. Her recent publications include an exploration of the role of heritage in the Derry/Londonderry (the first UK City of Culture). Máiréad has published a number of edited volumes on heritage including Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions (2007 with Ullrich Kockel) and Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights (2010 with William Logan and Michele Langfeld). She is currently co-editing the Blackwell Companion to Heritage (due for publication in 2014). In 2011, she was invited by the United Nations as an expert on access to heritage as a human right. Language, power and cultural policy in European society have also been a sustained focus of interest throughout Máiréad's academic career. In 2009 Máiréad held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship examining the sense of dislocation that is experienced by bilingual authors living ‘in-between’ two cultures and two languages. She has explored key questions, such as the impact of political boundaries on the concept of language and the significance of language for citizenship. Máiréad has examined the quest for recognition and legitimacy among speakers of minority and contested languages and queried the non-recognition of migrant, non-European languages in the public space. In 2013, she was invited by the European Centre on Minority Issues as an expert on (linguistic) minorities.
Peter Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University and works in CUSP which has 95 PhD students working on all aspects of the green economy. Peter has worked in local government as an elected councillor, an advisor to three WA State Premiers and was on the Board of Infrastructure Australia from 2010 to 2014. He was a Lead Author for Transport on the IPCC. He has written 17 books and 286 refereed articles. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy 'Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence' was launched in the White House in 1999 and their most recent book is 'The End of Automobile Dependence'. In 2001-3 Peter directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, the first state sustainability strategy in the world. In 2004-5 he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney advising the government on planning issues. In 2006/7 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville. In 2014 Peter was awarded an AO for contributions to urban design and sustainable transport, particularly related to the saving and rebuilding of Perth’s rail system.
Peter Levine is the Associate Dean for Research and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. He has a secondary appointment in the Tufts philosophy department. He was the founding deputy director (2001-6) and then the second director (2006-15) of Tisch College’s CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which he continues to oversee as an associate dean. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a member of the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. During the late 1990s, he was also Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.
Dr Parveen Akhtar joined the University of Bradford as a lecturer in January 2014. Prior to this she was awarded a British Academy Research Fellowship, held at the University of Bristol (2011-2013). In 2010 she was a visiting scholar at Lahore University of Management Sciences before which she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol (2008-2009). Dr Akhtar completed her ESRC funded PhD at the University of Birmingham (2008) during which time she held research positions at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (2007); the Institute for Migraiton and Ethnic Studies, Amsterdam (2006); Sciences Po, Paris (2006) and the School for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Research on Interculturalism and Transnationalism, Aalborg (2005). Dr Akhtar has published widely on Political Participation, Islam, Migration and Social Change in journals including; the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the Political Quarterly and European Political Science. Her monograph, British Muslims Politics, was published by Palgrave in 2013. Dr Akhtar’s work has an international audience and she has presented her research in over 40 conferences in 15 countries. She makes regular contributions to public and media debates.
I hold degrees in Music and Psychology from the University of New South Wales in Australia. I am currently Professor of Cognitive Science and leader of the ‘Music Cognition and Action’ research program in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University. I conduct research aimed at understanding the behavioural and brain bases of human interaction in musical contexts.
Research Professor: Energy Institute, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town; Fellow: SA Acad of Engineering ; Fellow & Past President, SA Institution of Chemical Engineers; Fellow, SA Institute of Mining & Metallurgy; Fellow: SA Chemical Institute (SACI);
