Message from the Vice-President and Dean
10 Jan 2025
This week, Fiona celebrates colleagues’ honours and funding success, looks forward to AMBS’s 60th anniversary and provides an update on Canvas.
Dear All
Happy New Year. I hope you had a good break over the festive season and return relaxed and refreshed. I had a restful time with friends in Boston, Mass. Alongside some fresh walks in the cold sunshine, there was some time for reading at leisure. I highly recommend Samantha Harvey’s Orbital which won the Booker Prize last year.
Honours and awards success
Many congratulations to Yaojun Li, who has been recognised with an OBE in the King’s 2025 NewYear Honours List. Professor Li has been awarded the honour for his exceptional services to the advancement of knowledge in social mobility and to ethnic integration. It is wonderful that he has received such prominent recognition for his crucial work in research and education as a Professor of Sociology.
I am delighted that another of our Sociology Professors, Gary Younge, has received the prestigious Robert B Silvers Award for his outstanding contribution to the field of journalism. Since joining the University in 2020, Gary has used his huge experience over a celebrated career, covering topics from political movements and racial inequality to gun violence and migration, to engage with the public and inspire our students, and he has continued to write and speak regularly.
I am pleased that the excellent research of colleagues has been recognised with some impressive new awards and fellowships.
A team led by Dr Jonathan Ritson (SEED) has received a high-profile Bezos Earth Fund Greenhouse Gas Removal Ideation Prize for its research into improving carbon capture and reducing methane emissions through peatland restoration using sphagnum moss. Former Head of SEED Martin Evans and Dr Chris Field of Manchester Metropolitan University are the other members of the team, which aims to reverse the decline of sphagnum in many areas through cultivating ‘super’ strains of the moss.
The British Academy has awarded Dr Charis Ennis (SEED) an ODA (Official Development Assistance) Global Innovation Fellowship for her project ‘Establishing an Association for Evidence on Nature, Carbon and Pastoralists' Rights’.
From AMBS, Dr Mercedes Bleda and Professor Kieron Flanagan have received substantial ESRC research grants for their ‘Governance of Risks in Innovation Policy’ and ‘Investigating The Relationship Between Science Diplomacy And Global DGT: The Role Of Inclusive MetaScience Observatories’ projects respectively.
In SALC, Dr Antoine Burgard has secured an ESRC New Investigator Grant for the ‘Who is a child? Determining age in 20-21 centuries British and French border policing (DeterAge)’ study, while Professor Rebecca Herissone has received a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project on ‘Inventing Purcell: Reception and the Agency of the Edition’.
Canvas is coming!
Preparations for the move from Blackboard to Canvas as the new central learning environment (CLE) across the University continue at pace. Our Faculty eLearning team is working hard on the next phase of the project, working closely with School and University colleagues.
Between now and February, the eLearning team will be in touch with everyone who currently uses Blackboard to confirm when they will be able to start using Canvas. Users will initially have access to a ‘sandbox’ space to get used to using the new system.
Data for 2024/25 academic year Semester 1 courses, and selected full-year courses, are due to be migrated between February and March, with the second release for Semester 2 and remaining full-year courses due in June. The last three years of Blackboard courses, without student data, will also be migrated and students will be enrolled to these spaces so they can review what they have previously been taught. Community spaces will also be migrated as part of the same process, with a schedule established to take into account how communities are used throughout the academic year.
All staff who work with Blackboard are invited to attend an open meeting on Teams on Thursday, 23 January at 12.00pm. The Canvas project team will be joined by Faculty eLearning colleagues to give updates on the transition and answer questions. For further details, and to register for the meeting and submit a question, read the StaffNet news story.
For more news from the Humanities eLearning team on Canvas, please visit the Humanities Teaching Academy Canvas page. You can also find out more from the main Canvas project page on StaffNet. We want to help everyone make this move to a new CLE as easy and simple as possible. It is very important that you give this move your attention too.
Compulsory training courses
Hopefully you will have already heard about the new essential training courses launched in December. They cover a range of important topics, including health and safety, data protection and cyber security, and diversity in the workplace, and are compulsory for all staff, even if you have completed similar training before.
The deadline for completing the modules is Friday, 28 February. To find out more and to access the training courses, see the StaffNet message from Ele Morrissey, Executive Director of People. I put aside time this week to get them done and dusted.
Happy 60th birthday, AMBS!
With our bicentenary year having just passed, it is fantastic that the new year brings the opportunity to join our AMBS colleagues in celebrating another important anniversary, the foundation of the Business School 60 years ago.
The School has a great programme of events and activities lined up to celebrate its 60th anniversary, and I look forward to joining colleagues at many of them this year. Please check out the 60 Years of AMBS page for further information on this exciting year.
Our wellbeing
Finally, I hope you all noted Duncan’s new year message to take care of your wellbeing. I certainly need to grab some fresh air during the day when I am on campus and stop eating lunch at my desk. In addition, I have started to go swimming again. Swimming makes me happy! I hope you have time in your day and week to focus on what gives you joy. See you soon.
Regards Fiona
Professor Fiona Devine, Vice-President and Dean, Faculty of Humanities