Meet some of the Faculty for the 2016 programme; they have been carefully curated to include senior cultural sector leaders and commentators, business school experts and industry authorities.
Silke Ackermann, Director, Museum of the History of Science
Silke Ackermann is Director of the Museum of the History of Science, the first ever female director of a university museum in Oxford since the founding in 1683.
Silke is a medievalist and orientalist by training with a particular interest in the transfer of knowledge between the Islamic World and Europe. She worked for 16 years in different roles at the British Museum before taking up a professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Schwerin (Germany) where she was later appointed president.
In March 2014 she returned to the UK to take up her present position in Oxford. Silke takes a particular interest in leadership in the cultural sector and acts as coach and mentor to colleagues in the UK and other parts of Europe.
Janet Barnes, Consultant and former Chief Executive, York Museums Trust
Dr Janet Barnes, CBE, was the Chief Executive of York Museums Trust from 2001-2015, an independent charity set up in 2002 by the City of York Council to manage the York Castle Museum, the Yorkshire Museum, York Art Gallery and the Museum Gardens. Janet has spent 37 years in the museums and galleries sector with experience in both the public and charity sectors successfully leading three organisations through major constitutional change. Governance, implementing cultural change within creative organisations and fundraising are areas of particular interest to Janet.
Janet was the Director of Crafts Council from 1999-2002 and before that had a variety of curatorial and management roles in Sheffield Galleries and Museums from 1977-1999. From 2004-2013 she was the chairman of Arts Council England, Yorkshire and a member of the National Council.
Janet is also on the board of ICOM UK and the Panel of the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
Tracey Camilleri, Associate Fellow, Said Business School
Tracey Camilleri is an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School and Director of the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme.
At the business school, she specialises in learning design and pedagogic innovation. She also designs and directs customised leadership programmes for clients. Her programmes draw widely from across the University faculty, particularly from the arts and humanities departments where she believes the great case studies of leadership reside. She has worked for several years with The Ashmolean developing leadership sessions using objects from their collection.
Dr Oliver Cox, Knowledge Exchange Fellow, TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
Dr Oliver Cox created the Thames Valley Country House Partnership in October 2013 as a way of linking entrepreneurial ideas in the heritage sector with researchers in the University of Oxford. He works regionally with twenty houses - including Blenheim Palace, Stowe and Waddesdon Manor - who attract over 1.5 million visitors per year, and as a national strategic level with the National Trust.
He is a historian by training, and received his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. Oliver has published widely on Gothic Revival architecture, landscape gardening, patriotism, and is currently writing From Addison to Austen: The Connell Guide to Eighteenth Century Britain.
Oliver is a Fellow at the RSA, an honorary member of the National Trust's Visitor Experience Board in London and the South East, and an academic advisor to Stowe House Preservation Trust on their Enlightenment for All project.
Maurice Davies, Head of Collections, Royal Academy of Arts
Maurice is head of collections at the Royal Academy of Arts, an independent organisation run by artists that organises major international exhibitions, runs a free postgraduate art school and has a collection of art, books and archives that has been developed continuously for 250 years. The RA has no regular public funding; it is in the middle of a £50m redevelopment. Alongside this, when he can, Maurice advises and researches museums and galleries in the UK and internationally. He is a partner in The Museum Consultancy, a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University and a senior research fellow in the department of management at King's College London, as part of Creativeworks London, which builds partnerships between London's cultural and creative industries and higher education.
He's spent almost 30 years working for museums and galleries. He's been a curator at Manchester Art Gallery and Tate, editor of the Museums Journal and deputy director of the Museums Association. He's taught at Imperial College and been a research fellow at the University of East Anglia. He's advised government ministers, House of Commons Select Committees and numerous policy makers and funding bodies about issues including: combating the illicit trade in cultural material, repatriation and human remains, touring exhibitions, collections disposal, acquisition, museum funding, diversity and participatory work. In addition, he's done substantial pieces of work on workforce entry and diversity, sustainability and museums, London museum attendance patterns and museum impact.
His current interests include action research to develop alternatives to conventional summative evaluation and investigating how the demographics of London museum audiences have (or haven't) changed from New Labour to now. With the Museum Consultancy he's helped museums of all types and sizes from tiny volunteer-run local museums to large national museums. He's also recently advised museums in Canada, Norway and Denmark.
Richard Evans, Director, Beamish, the Living Museum of the North
Richard has been the Director of Beamish since 2008. He leads a team of more than 360 staff, supported by 450 volunteers as well as more than 2,000 Friends and business partners. Over the past six years visitor numbers have nearly doubled, turnover has increased to £9m and Beamish has created more than 180 jobs and apprenticeships from engineers to curatorial trainees. Beamish is now self-sufficient in revenue terms and it is the most visited visitor attraction in the North East region. Beamish also leads a consortium with The Bowes Museum and is one of 16 Major Partner Museums supported by Arts Council England.
Richard is a member of the National Museum Directors Council and is on the Boards of the North East Cultural Partnership and Visit County Durham. Prior to joining Beamish Richard was Director of Wentworth Castle Trust where he led the Civic Trust award-winning phase one restoration costing £17 million, with support from the HLF. From 1999 to 2003 he was Development Officer at New Lanark, during the period that Robert Owen’s utopian village was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
Dr Pegram Harrison, Fellow in Entrepreneurship, Said Business School
Dr Pegram Harrison is a Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and is a member of the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Pegram's research and teaching concern entrepreneurship and leadership in an entrepreneurship context. He teaches entrepreneurship (pre-start-up), opportunity recognition and business planning) and leadership (especially in entrepreneurship contexts) to executives and Diploma students, as well as on the MBA and undergraduate programmes. He also conducts research at the intersection of business and social issues, and on projects relating to business education.
Pegram is a key member of the Engaging with the Humanities programme of research, teaching at the Saïd Business School and in the wider University, helped to state the Oxford Cultural Heritage Programme, and is a member of the University's Themes Valley Country House Partnership Project; both networks link researchers with the region's cultural institutions, developing agencies, digital technology providers and tourism officials. Beyond Oxford, he is working in conjunction with the Art Fund on a large scale research project into aggregated ticketing for museums, as well as several conferences and initiatives exploring new business models for enhancing museum engagement.
Piers Ibbotson, Founder, Directing Creativity
Piers Ibbotson runs Direct Creativity, which provides management development and training for organisations using techniques and approaches from the world of theatre, with the objective of both enhancing business performance and developing closer links between industry and the arts. His principal interests are in creative leadership, innovation and group creativity.
Piers trained as a scientist and worked in the oil industry for a number of years before entering the theatre in 1980. After a successful career as a performer at the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), as well as in TV and film, he became an Assistant Director with the RSC. This experience provided the opportunity to observe the techniques and approaches of directors working to tight deadlines with dynamic and creative groups. This stimulated his interested in transferring skills from the arts to business.
He is a regular contributor to senior management development programmes at London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, Ashridge Business School, and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is also a visiting fellow at the University of Kingston where he teaches Creative Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems. He has contributed to senior development programmes for international companies throughout the world.
In 2008, he published The Illusion of Leadership: Directing Creativity in Business and the Arts. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Organisational Aesthetics. He has a BSc (Hons) from the University of Reading and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
Diane Lees, Director General, Imperial War Museums
Diane Lees is the Director-General of Imperial War Museums, the cultural lead for the Centenary of the FWW. Diane is a Trustee of the IWM Development Trust and a Director of the IWM Trading Co. She is a trustee of The Gerry Holdsworth Special Forces Trust, and the Army Museums Ogilby Trust, and a judge of the Museum and Heritage Awards.
She currently chairs the National Museums Directors' Council, and in February 2014 was appointed to David Cameron's Holocaust Commission’s Commemoration Expert Group Committee. In April 2014, Diane was appointed to the University of Lincoln's Board of Governors.
Jonathan Lloyd, Artistic Director and CEO, Pegasus Theatre
Jonathan started off his career as an Assistant Director at the Bush Theatre, and was Associate Director at Soho Theatre for nine years, where he set up and run the company's education and outreach programme. He was Artistic Director at Polka Theatre, one of the few theatres in the UK dedicated to work for children and young people, from 2007-2013. He is now Artistic Director and CEO at Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, which runs an exemplary programme of creative learning, participation and training for young people at the heart of a thriving professional theatre.
As a theatre director, he directed 11 plays at Polka Theatre and many new plays at Soho Theatre and others including freelance work at the Bush, Donmar Warehouse, Barbican Pit, Birmingham Rep and Gate House.
Jonathan was a fellow with the Clore Leadership Programme, 2005/06 and a Board member of Deafinitely Theatre, the Merton Strategic Partnership and is currently a governor at East Oxford Primary School.
Daniela Papi-Thornton, Deputy Director, Skoll Centre for Social Entrpreneurship at Oxford's Said Business School
Daniela is the Deputy Director at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Said Business School where she also previously received her MBA as a Skoll Scholar. Her work at the Skoll Centre has included designing and directing the Leading for Impact Programme, a nine-month personal development program for students interested in social impact careers, designing the LAUNCH Social Impact Careers Conference, and teaching an MBA course on high-impact entrepreneurs.
Prior to her MBA, Daniela spent a decade working in Asia where she founded and grew a hybrid social venture in Cambodia, PEPY: a non-profit youth leadership organisation, a for-profit development education travel company, and an advocacy organisation. PEPY and PEPY Tours in Cambodia recently celebrated their 10 year anniversaries. Daniela has worked as a consultant to a number of social ventures, from a customer insights study for a solar energy company in Tanzania to helping corporations and travel companies design their CSR programmes.
She is co-authoring a book on rethinking volunteer travel, looking to put the learning first in international service. She has written articles for a range of media outlets, such as BBC, Huffington Post, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, and is a regular speaker about social entrepreneurship, volunteer travel, and leadership. Daniela is currently part of the Clore Social Leadership Programme.
Dr Keith Ruddle, Associate Fellow, Said Business School
Keith teaches, advises and works with top management teams from private and public sector organisations on the leadership of strategic and organisation change. Based at Oxford University since 1994 he has taught on many of the flagship top leadership courses including the Advanced Management and Leadership Programme, the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme, and Consulting and Coaching for Change, as well as on many of the custom company courses. Keith's research interests include leadership of transformational change, strategic renewal, large-scale change, collaborative and complex change, and public service reform. He has taken a particular interest in recent years in working with politicians, central and local government on change and reform. This included a secondment to the UK Cabinet Office looking at leadership in the public sector. Keith has an MA from Cambridge University, an MBA from Harvard Business School and a DPhil in Management Studies from Oxford University. In his early career he ran the strategy practice at a major international consultancy. He lives in Chipping Norton and has been very involved locally including for many years as chair of the Chipping Norton Theatre, a thriving successful culture and performing arts centre and is joint editor of the local town newspaper.
Alan Rusbridger, Principal, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
Alan has recently joined Lady Margaret Hall after a life in journalism, with just over 20 years as editor in chief of the Guardian. After reading English at Cambridge he moved across the city to work on the local evening newspaper where he learned the craft of reporting before moving to the Guardian in 1979.
Alan had two spells at the Guardian: firstly as a reporter, columnist and feature writer. He was then invited to move to the Observer to take over from Clive James and Julian Barnes as the paper's television critic. After discovering that he didn't much enjoy writing about television he took an offer to work in America but when the paper he was working for closed he then began his second spell at the Guardian moving into editing, and launching the weekend magazine and the G2 section. He was appointed editor in 1995.
A large part of his editorship was preoccupied with making that the Guardian would have a thriving digital incarnation, while also maintaining the print edition. When he left the Guardian, not only had the international readership grown substantially, but the paper was the 9th biggest in the UK and had become the largest serious English language newspaper in the world. The Guardian is now read by more than 8m unique browsers a day.
Under his editorship the paper also won a global reputation for its investigative reporting, culminating in the Wikileaks, phone hacking and Snowden revelations. The last story won the Guardian a Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism.
In late 2014 the Scott Trust - the independent body that has owned the Guardian since 1936 - asked if he would become the next Chair - succeeding Dame Liz Forgan in September 2016. At around the same time the Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall elected him to be their Principal, succeeding Dr Frances Lannon, and starting in October 2015.
Away from journalist, Alan is a keen amateur musician and wort a Book, 'Play it Again', about learning an impossibly difficult piece of Chopin in the middle of journalistic storms. He was Chair of the National Youth Orchestra for eight years and plays the clarinet and is also a former Chair of the Photographer's Gallery in London.
Alan has been a visiting professor or fellow at Queen Mary's College, London; Cardiff University; the Asian College of Journalism; and Nuffield College, Oxford. He has honours from the University of Oslo; Harvard University; Columbia Journalism School; Kingston University; Lincoln University and City University of New York. In 2014 he received the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm and the Ortega y Gasset Award in Madrid.
Lucy Shaw, Programme Director, Oxford Cultural Leaders & Head of Oxford University Museums Partnership
Oxford University Museums Partnership is an Arts Council funded Major Partner Museum consortium (Ashmolean Museum, Museum of the History of Science, Pitt Rivers Museum and Museum of Natural History). Lucy manages the partnership and works with the wider museum sector to deliver a programme of wide-ranging projects and activities from audience development, education and outreach, to collections management, conservation, and leadership and skills and knowledge sharing. A major strand of her current work has been in developing Oxford Cultural Leaders, an international programme for museums, heritage and the arts, in partnership with the Saïd Business School.
Lucy has over 20 years' experience of the museum sector and has worked with a wide variety of museums, galleries and related organisations, from voluntary run independents and local authority services to the nationals. She started her career as a social history curator in the East Midlands before moving to working at a strategic level with national and regional agencies, professional bodies, and course providers. Before joining the University of Oxford she was running a successful business as a consultant developing, leading and managing projects and programmes that focused on strategic development, organisational change and workforce diversity.
She is also a Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
Professor Paul Smith, Director, Museum of Natural History
Paul Smith is Director of Oxford University Museum of Natural History and is also the chair of the Oxford University Museums Partnership, which is funded as a ‘major partner museum’ by Arts Council England. Paul has worked in museums for over 25 years, an interest sparked during a research post at the Sedgwick Museum, University of Cambridge, which led in turn to a post at the national Geological Museum in Copenhagen and then to the Lapworth Museum of Geology at the University of Birmingham, where he spent much of his career as curator and then director. After a period as head of the multidisciplinary School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences in Birmingham, Paul moved to the University of Oxford in February 2012 to take up the directorship of the Museum of Natural History there. His research interests range from geology into zoology, particularly the origin of animal groups and the geology of arctic areas, and in the museums arena has a particular interest in the use of digital technologies and public engagement in science.
Jonathan Stebbings, Associate, Olivier Mythodrama
Jonathan is a leadership consultant and workshop leader focusing on the implementation of development and change initiatives. Jonathan also acts as an executive coach at CEO and Director Levels. He specialises in the areas of learning and development, individual and organisational communication, management and leadership, innovation and creativity.
Jonathan has an MA in English Literature and has taught Shakespeare extensively. He also has a broad commercial background, having worked as a commercial lawyer in London and Oxford, and for ICI. He holds a Post Graduate Certificate in Education and is a certified Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Over the past eight years, he has trained and worked with Olivier Mythodrama.
Dr Alexander Sturgis, Director, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford
In October 2014 Dr Alexander Sturgis became Director of the Ashmolean Museum having had a distinguished career as the Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath, since 2005. Whilst at the Holburne Dr Sturgis oversaw a renovation of the Museum that included a £13 million extension. Prior to becoming the Director of the Holburne Museum Dr Sturgis worked at the National Gallery, London, for 15 years, in various posts including Exhibitions and Programmes Curator from 1999-2005.
Dr Sturgis is an alumnus of University College, Oxford and the Courthauld Institute of Art, London.
Professor Anne Trefethen, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Academic Services and University Collections and Chief Information Officer, University of Oxford
Professor Anne E. Trefethen is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Academic Services and University Collections, responsible for Libraries, Museums, Botanic Garden and Arboretum. She is also the Chief Information Officer and a Professor of Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford, and a former director of the Oxford e-Research Centre.
Anne has worked for almost 20 years in industry and academia with a focus on numerical algorithms and software, computational science and high-performance computing and in recent years more broadly on digitally enabled research. Before joining Oxford, Anne was Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme, having been the Deputy Director for four years. The Core Programme focussed on the generic issues for collaborative IT enabled research applications and the development of research infrastructure in collaboration with UK industry.
In her industry roles Anne has led the design and development of software products as Thinking Machines Coorporation in the USA and NAG Ltd in the UK.
In academia she has been a researcher and educator as well as an administrator. She was a researcher in parallel computing at the Cornell Theory Centre, one of the NSF our USA national HPC facilities; where she later became the Associate Director for Computational Support and Software and developed on-line educational courses and technology. Anne joined Oxford University in 2005 to set up an interdisciplinary research centre - the Oxford e-Research Centre - to facilitate interdisciplinary IT enabled research.
Dr Laura Van Broekhoven, Director, Pitt Rivers Museum
Dr Van Broekhoven took up her position as Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in March 2016. Prior to this she was Head of the Curatorial Department and Curator of Middle and South America at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (encompassing the Tropenmuseum, Volkenkunde and Afrika Museum) in the Netherlands and Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Leiden University.
Her current museological interests include the postcolonial praxis and museum futures, while her academic interests include the economics and life histories of indigenous merchants.
Dr Van Broekhoven led the European Union RIME project, which aimed to establish a network of European Ethnographic Museums, and she has headed the Leiden Network, an international network to counter illicit traffic of archaeological objects. She is a founding member of the European Association of Maya Studies and a Board Member of the Dutch Royal Institute of Cultures and Languages.
