Conference 2021: Speakers Biographies
The Eastern Arc Conference 2021 brings together 16 speakers and contributors to assess where we are in the post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-Covid world, and to provide informed and engaged analysis of where we go from here. The full conference programme is available here.
The speakers on each day of the conference are listed under each drop-down tab, below.
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Vanessa Cuthill (Director of Research, British Academy)
Vanessa joined the British Academy in November 2019. She was previously Director of Research and Enterprise at the University of Essex, where she also led a £4.7 million Industrial Strategy Connecting Capability Fund award from Research England to enable east of England universities to engage with business.
Vanessa formerly held senior positions at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), during which time she led on commissioning and funding social science data resources and initiatives.
She has also worked at the University of Bath, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in its founding years. Vanessa is currently a member of the UK Statistics Authority’s National Statisticians Data Ethics Committee.
Click here for more information on Vanessa and the senior management team at the BA.
Professor Fiona Lettice (Pro-Vice-Chancellor R&I, UEA)
Fiona is Professor of Innovation Management in the Norwich Business School, UEA and Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation). She is a Visiting Research Fellow at Cranfield University. Prior to her academic career, she worked in industry as a project manager for Centrica and a change consultant within design and engineering for BMW/Rover.
She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). She is a co-organiser for SyncNorwich and on the Board of TechEast and a member of the New Anglia LEP Innovation Board.
Phil Ward (Director of Eastern Arc)
Phil Ward is Director of the Eastern Arc Academic Research Consortium (Arc). Eastern Arc brings together the universities of East Anglia, Essex and Kent to facilitate collaboration, the sharing of equipment, resources and other skills and knowledge.
Previously, he was Deputy Director of Research Services at the University of Kent, and was responsible for the research development team. He worked strategically to maximise the University’s research income and its research culture more broadly. Prior to that he worked for a funder, the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
He continues to engage widely within the sector, including leading conference sessions at ARMA and EARMA, and workshops put on by individual universities. He hosts and writes for the award-winning blog Research Fundermentals and undertook a secondment as an editor for Research Professional between 2017-18.
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Glenn Anderson (Managing Partner, Dillington Hall Estate)
Glenn has been in farming all his life having grown up on a livestock farm in Cambridgeshire. He moved to Norfolk in 1999 and has over 20 years’ experience in farm conservation through agri-environment and woodland schemes. Glenn is a lead landowner on the Wendling Beck Exemplar Project (WBEP), a Landscape scale natural capital project covering almost 2000 acres North of Dereham. It brings together 4 farms, Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Norfolk County Council and will deliver biodiversity net gain, carbon offsetting, flood mitigation, nutrient balancing and water services alongside regenerative agriculture.
Glenn also works as a consultant advising global blue-chip organisations on real-estate strategies. He is passionate about the contribution UK farming could play in helping to combat climate change, reverse biodiversity loss and the potential to deliver social impact and wellbeing through public access and education.
Click here for more information on Glenn, and here for more on the Dillington Hall Estate.
Andrew Clark (Director of Policy, National Farmers Union)
Andrew is the NFU’s Director of Policy, based at NFU HQ, Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire.
He manages the NFU’s policy development teams which span key commodity, food chain, animal health and cross-cutting policy and professional service teams. Andrew was appointed to his current post in July 2014.
He joined the NFU headquarters in January 1993 from Hertfordshire County Council and has filled a variety of roles including Chief Environment Adviser and, prior to his current role, Head of Policy Services.
Andrew lives with his family in Worcestershire where he grew up on a hop and fruit farm. He has a PhD in Environment Science from the University of East Anglia and is a Chartered Landscape Architect.
Martin Lines (UK Steering Group Chair, Nature Friendly Farming Network)
Martin is a farmer and contractor in South Cambridgeshire, growing mainly arable crops on his family farm and rented land. He has a special interest in farm conservation management, currently running an ELS and HLS agreement and has Countryside Stewardship schemes on land he rents and manages. He also supports the delivery of Stewardship schemes for a number of other farmers.
Martin is the NFFN UK Steering Group Chair and hopes to see the network grow with like-minded farmers and land managers who will work together, sharing best practices and demonstrating what can be accomplished for nature and the environment while producing great produce.
Archie Ruggles-Brise (Owner and Manager, Spains Hall Estate, Essex)
Archie is owner and manager of the 800 hectare Spains Hall Estate in north Essex, UK. With a mix of let arable farming, in hand woodlands, grassland and tourism businesses a holistic approach is increasingly the cornerstone of the Estate’s operations. Nature-based solutions have been pioneered with beavers and man-made leaky dams addressing localised flood risk in the downstream village.
A recent Natural Capital appraisal highlighted the risks and opportunities arising from current land use choices, as well as providing an insight into metrics and outcomes based contracting opportunities. Archie is a Chartered Water and Environment Manager, member of the CIWEM Natural Capital Specialist Panel, CLA Policy and Environment Committees, advisor to the Essex Climate Action Commission’s Land Use and Green Infrastructure Special Interest Group, member of Water Resources East and member of the Braintree District Council Climate Change Working Group.
Click here for more information on Archie, and here for more information on the Spains Hall Estate.
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Mark Richards (Director, Metal Culture, Peterborough)
Mark joined Metal Culture in May 2013, after eight years at Arts Council England based in Cambridge. Through his various senior management roles for ACE, he has developed a very strong understanding of the east region, its strengths and challenges.
He has also worked within local government, arts venues of varying scales, as a Higher Education tutor and a practising visual artist. He has an MA in European Cultural Planning.
Click here for more information on Mark and the team behind Metal.
Moya Stirrup (Head of Communications, Turner Contemporary)
Moya is a marketing and communications professional with six years experience in the arts and cultural sector, currently working at Turner Contemporary with a focus on the marketing campaign and audience development for the Turner Prize as well as leading the gallery’s Digital Transformation Programme 2018-22. She also advises early stage start-ups on marketing and business development.
Alongside this she is undertaking a masters in creative writing at Downing College, Cambridge, and is currently working on transforming an oral history project, Conversations with Margate, from blog to book.
Ghislaine Wood (Acting Director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts)
Ghislaine Wood is Acting Director of the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. She is a specialist in 20th Century art and design and a Fellow of the Research Department of the V&A.
She has curated many international exhibitions including the Sainsbury Centre’s Art Deco by the Sea, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, the inaugural exhibition for V&A Dundee, British Design 1948-2012 (2012), Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design (2007) and Art Deco 1910-1939 (2003) at the V&A. She has produced many publications to accompany these exhibitions.
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Professor Alan Finlayson (Professor of Political & Social Theory, University of East Anglia)
Alan is currently the principal investigator on a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council entitled Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right’. This is a three-year research project examining how new technologies are transfoming the ways in which political ideas are formed and circulated and how this affects our relationship with our political beliefs and with their argumentative expression.
More broadly, his research combines contributions to the development of democratic political and cultural theory with the theoretical and historical analysis and interpretation of the ideologies that shape British political culture, political economy and ‘governmentality’.
Alan is an associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory; Chair of the Editorial Board of Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy; co-editor of the Palgrave book series Rhetoric, Politics and Society; co-founder and Treasurer of the Rhetoric and Politics Group of the UK Political Studies Association and a member of the International Task Force of the Rhetoric Society of America. He has contributed political commentary and analysis for print, broadcast and online media including The Guardian, Open Democracy and The London Review of Books.
Dr Gareth Mott (Lecturer in Security and Intelligence, University of Kent)
Dr Gareth Mott graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a PhD in International Security (2015-2018). Before that, he received an MA in International Security and BA in International Relations and Modern History at the University of East Anglia (2010-2014). Between January 2018 and the summer of 2019, he was a lecturer in International Relations at Nottingham Trent University.
As a lecturer in Security and Intelligence at the University of Kent, Gareth is based at both the department of Politics and International Relations and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Cyber Security (SoCyETAL). He is particularly interested in the ‘Politics of Cyber Security’, ‘Critical Security Studies’ and ‘Critical Terrorism Studies’.
He has published on, and is proactively researching: the discursive construction of threatening and protective identities in cyberspace; the security and wider implications of Blockchain and other peer-to-peer technologies; and the governance architectures of 21st century communicative technologies.
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Professor David Croisdale-Appleby OBE (Chair of Royal College of Physicians and Dementia UK)
Professor David Croisdale-Appleby has held and holds numerous ministerial appointments and professorships that have spanned sectors as diverse as health and social care, forensic science, disability sport, policing, criminal and civil law, medical education, research ethics, social work, mental health, dementia, drug and alcohol misuse, learning disability and social housing. He has devoted his life to representing the interests of vulnerable, disadvantaged and disabled people across the world. He has led many charities in this context, and is a major player in the development of the government’s strategy in health and social care around the integration of health and social care.
He is the Chair of the Royal College of Physicians, the first non-clinician to hold that post in its 500 year history, and is Chair of Dementia UK. At NICE he chairs the Public Health Advisory Committee and the Social Care Advisory Committee, and leads the creation of national guidelines across many clinical, public health and social care fields in which NICE operates. He held responsibility at Health Education England for medical education, clinical education, educational quality and relationships with HEIs. He was the General Medical Council’s (GMC) longest serving Educational Visitor, and the former Chair of the Science Council, the Forensic Science Regulator and Skills for Care.
David’s national awards include an OBE in 2009, the Sunday Times Non-Executive Director of the Year in 2016, and the National Charity Governance Award in 2019. An academic polymath, David holds honorary doctorates and visiting and honorary professorships at a number of UK universities in medical education and other fields, and was awarded honorary fellowships from the Academy of Medical Educators and from the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences, and is an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health. He was elected an academician and fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2016.
Dr Abasiama (Sema) Etuknwa (Research Project Coordinator for the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between University of Huddersfield and Swiss Re)
Sema is currently the Research Project Coordinator (KTP Associate) for the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between University of Huddersfield and Swiss Re. She holds a PhD in Business and Management. Her research interests are within the areas of work, health and disability. She is particularly interested in determining practical solutions to reducing work-related risk to health, sickness absence and helping employees on sick leave return to work sustainably.
Dr Antonina Semkina (Lecturer in Human Resources Management, University of Kent)
Antonina is a Doctor of Philosophy in Business and Management. She received her PhD from the University of East Anglia in July 2020. She also holds and MSc in Human Resource Management and Organisational Analysis from King’s College London.
Her work looks specifically at the phenomena of an empowered, self-actualizing and thriving employee and to create an algorithm for attaining that.
Dr Lisa Smith (Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Essex)
Lisa studied history at the University of Alberta and the University of Essex. From 2002 to 2015, She was a member of the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. In September 2015, she returned to the University of Essex.
Her long-standing interests are on gender, health, the household, and the body–particularly, pain, illness experience, reproduction/infertility and domestic medicine. In addition to a BA-funded project on European Cuisine and British Identity in an Age of Nationalism (with Rachel Rich at Leeds Beckett and Adam Crymble at UCL), she is developing an online database of Sir Hans Sloane’s correspondence (c. 1685-1750) and is a co-investigator on a crowd-sourcing recipes transcription project (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective).
In addition, she is a founding editor for The Recipes Project blog and has written about her research at The Conversation and elsewhere.