Author Archives: ubiard001

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Philip Dewe, Vice-Master

Professor Philip Dewe was Professor of Organisational Behaviour in the Department of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck. Having joined the College from Massey University in his native New Zealand in 2000, for 11 years Professor Dewe also gave outstanding service to Birkbeck as Vice-Master, stepping down from the role in summer 2014. 

Philip was a much-loved member of the Birkbeck community for many years.  He drove the Stratford project while also acting for many years as head of department for Organizational Psychology.  Despite his busy role, Philip made time for everyone, and greatly inspired those who knew or worked with him. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Peter Goodrich, Co-founder of Birkbeck law school

Peter Goodrich was one of the founding members of the law school. His work in setting up the school and establishing its reputation is only one of the claims that could be made of his contribution to the Birkbeck effect. Peter is one of the most important figures in contemporary legal theory – with an international reputation. He is presently professor of law at Benjamin Cardozo law school in New York, and he remains a friend and supporter of Birkbeck. His intellectual legacy extends into critical legal theory, law and literature, legal history, law and aesthetics and law and visual culture. A pioneer in his field, an intellectual champion of sophisticated and joyous critical thinking, Peter’s name should be in any list of those who exemplify the spirit of Birkbeck. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Paul Hirst, Politics Lecturer

In the 1970s, when Hirst joined the fledgling Department of Politics and Sociology, he was an “uncompromising Althusserian” known for his “unbending theoretical rigour”. He co-founded the Althusserian journal Theoretical Practice, which attacked empiricism and positivism, while defending the scientific study of Marxism. It took an anti-historical, anti-humanist, and structuralist approach that generated a furious backlash, accused of creating a “self-generating conceptual universe” that “imposes its own identity upon the phenomenon of material and social existence, rather than engaging in a continual dialogue with them”. By the early 1990s, however, Hirst had recanted dogmatism, choosing a more heterodox position. He was later to denounce the “ideologisation of political studies” in the 1970s, which led to “so much energy” being “consumed in infighting between Marxist sects”. He argued against the “if you are not for us, you are against us” mentality, maintaining that it was “lethal to the scepticism and objectivity needed both for scientific work and credible political action”. In this he was able to attack dogmatic “left” and “right” ideologies. Who could dispute, he suggested, that “cosmopolitan idealism, neo imperialism and revived revolutionary leftism” were all failed forms of twentieth century politics? Twenty-first century crises needed real solutions, grounded in a deep scrutiny of politics, publics, and economic patterns. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Paul Dienes, Professor of mathematics

Hungarian-born mathematician Dienes has already been mentioned in the previous chapter. He had been forced to flee Hungary after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. As a supporter of Béla Kun, leader of the Republic, Dienes had been responsible for reorganising Hungarian universities with the aim of welcoming working-class students. This was not looked upon favourably during the “white terror”, when communist supporters were hunted down; large numbers, executed. Diene fled, bribing a captain of a river boat on the Danube to smuggle him out of the country, hiding in a wine barrel. He was unceremoniously decanted in Vienna, with nothing but the clothes on his back. After time in Vienna, Paris, Aberystwyth, and Swansea, Dienes joined Birkbeck’s Mathematics Department in 1929 and stayed until he retired in 1948, immersing himself in function theory, relativity, tensors, infinite matrices, axiomatics, and mathematical logic.  

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Physicist and Nobel laureate

Patrick Blackett was an accomplished British scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. He joined Birkbeck to head the physics department and to run his own laboratory.  

Although he was only at Birkbeck between 1933 and 1937 (when he left for a Chair at the University of Manchester), these were important years for him as a scientist and a leftist commentator. For Birkbeck, Blackett’s appointment would have been a major coup, especially since he brought with him a sizable grant from The Royal Society part of which was used to design an electromagnet. The largest magnet in the UK, “Josephine” weighed 11,000 kilos and was originally used to “study the energy spectrum of the cosmic rays”. It was so unwieldy that a wooden hut had to be constructed on the land set aside for building Malet Street.  

Along with J. D. Bernal, Aldous Huxley, and Leonard Woolf, Blackett organised the “For Intellectual Liberty” group, a popular front movement aiming to publicize the difficulties experienced by German Jews. He also established with Bernal the Academic Assistance Council, which continues today under its new name of Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), aiming to assist academics fleeing tyrannical regimes. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Nazanin Derakhshan, professor of experimental psychopathology and founder of Centre for Building Resilience in Cancer

Birkbeck has been at the forefront of work to improve the quality of life for women with breast cancer through evidence-based research into the best ways to reduce anxiety and depression. 

Professor Nazanin Derakhshan led this work through Birkbeck’s Building Resilience in Breast Cancer (BRiC) Research Centre until recently, a centre she founded in 2015 after her own diagnosis of breast cancer. The Centre has helped many women who have been in direct contact with it to address some of the emotional challenges of breast cancer, and it has also reached thousands more indirectly through an ever-growing community of breast cancer survivors who have benefited from the Centre’s immensely influential research and continue to build their own mutually-supportive networks. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Miriam Zukis, professor of adult education

Miriam Zukas was the first Executive Dean of the School of Social Science, History and Philosophy from 2009 to 2016, and Birkbeck’s Public Engagement Champion between 2016 and 2018.  

She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2008 and a Fellowship of Birkbeck in November, 2016. Miriam’s research interests include academics and academic work and learning, professional workplace pedagogies, doctors’ learning in transition, professional learning in transitions, and adult higher education. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Mike Hough, co-founder and director of Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research

Professor Hough is the former (and co-founding) Director of the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), which is based in the School of Law at Birkbeck. Professor Hough was instrumental in bringing the Institute from King’s College London to Birkbeck in 2010 and directed it for more than 20 years. Before moving to academia in 1994, he was a senior researcher in the Home Office for twenty years, co-designing the British Crime Survey in 1981. He was President of the British Society of Criminology from 2008 until 2011.  

Professor Hough’s research interests have been many and varied, from policing and public perceptions of crime and punishment, crime measurement and crime trends, and drug-related crime; to sentencing, the rehabilitation of offenders, desistance theory, restorative justice and procedural justice theory. He has around 300 publications.

Professor Hough worked with the Prison Reform Trust on the growth of imprisonment, on sentencing and sentencing guidelines, on children in custody and on the unfairness of the indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection.

Among his many achievements is fostering collaboration between British and other European criminologists. 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Mike Bintley, lecturer and personal tutor in English

Mike Bintley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of creative arts, culture and communication. 

Mike’s teaching focuses on the literature, material culture, and archaeology of medieval England and Scandinavia, with research interests in landscape, environment, settlements, and plant-life. He joined Birkbeck in 2018, after teaching at UCL, Oxford, and Canterbury Christ Church University. 

One of his BA English Foundation students says: “I struggled a lot in school with bad health and it’s taken me a while to return to education, but Mike was always compassionate and patient and I can’t fault him in the slightest. He has also won the personal tutor of the year award. If I ever had any questions or concerns, Mike was more than happy to assist, and was attentive – he seems to care deeply for his students’ welfare. I seldom waited long for a response and always felt able to reach out. On top, he is clearly passionate about his subject and any student lucky enough have him as their personal tutor is extremely privileged. He is an immeasurable asset to the university, and I hope he is aware of the impact he has left on myself and other students.” 

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Michael O’Neill, Chair of Citigroup and CEO of Bank of Hawaii

Michael O’Neill is an experienced financial services executive who has led major financial institutions in the United States and elsewhere. He has a formidable reputation for turning around businesses that were experiencing difficulties and in need of restructuring.  According to bankdirector.com, O’Neill is “one of banking’s most successful turnaround artists”. 

He is also a former Birkbeck student, moving back to London in the mid 2000s juggling evening classes to study the history of Early Modern Europe. 

Career highlights include being Chief Financial Officer of the Continental Bank Corporation in Chicago (1993-1995), Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer of the Bank of America in San Francisco (1995-1998), Chief Executive Officer of Barclays PLC (1999), and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Bank of Hawaii Corporation in Honolulu (2000-2004).  

He joined the Board of Directors of Citigroup in New York to help lead Citigroup through the Great Financial Crisis. Citi is the leading global bank, with around 200 million customer accounts. It does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. From 2012 to 2018, O’Neill served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Citigroup.  

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