Four Caius Fellows elected to British Academy

16 July 2015

Four Fellows of Gonville & Caius have been elected Fellows of the British Academy – an exceptionally high number elected to the world-renowned institution from one college at one time.

Professors Cyprian Broodbank, Robert Gordon, Peter Mandler and Joachim Whaley are among 42 highly distinguished UK academics elected to the Academy in recognition of their outstanding research. The Academy is the UK's expert body that supports and speaks for the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Sir Alan Fersht, Master of Gonville & Caius, warmly congratulated the four academics. He said: “It must surely be a record that a college has had four fellows elected to the British Academy at the same time. It is an immense achievement and personal satisfaction for each of our distinguished scholars to be so honoured.

“And it establishes the Caius fellowship in the arts and sciences to be at the pinnacle of Oxbridge and elsewhere.”

The achievement comes in the same year that two Caius scientists, Professor Anthony Edwards and Dr K.J. Patel were elected Fellows of the Royal Society, the UK’s scientific academy whose Fellowship includes many of the world’s most eminent scientists.

New BA Fellow Prof Mandler was also honoured earlier this year with election to the American Academy of Arts and Scientists.

The new British Academy Fellows

Professor Cyprian Broodbank is John Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He is Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow at Caius. Professor Broodbank’s specialisms include comparative world archaeology and deep history; the archaeology of the Mediterranean; Aegean prehistory; the archaeology of islands; the emergence of connectivity, particularly maritime; and landscape archaeology. In 2014, he was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History for his book The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Thames and Hudson. 2013).
Professor Robert S C Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville & Caius. He specialises in the cultural history, cinema, and literature of modern Italy; Holocaust literature (Primo Levi); postwar memory and culture of the Holocaust. Professor Gordon is the author or editor of several books on the work of Primo Levi, including Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report and The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. His work on cinema includes the books Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity and Bicycle Thieves, DVD and blu-ray audio commentaries on Pasolini's Teorema and Bicycle Thieves, and articles and essays on Holocaust cinema, early film and literature, 'Hollywood on the Tiber', and censorship.
Professor Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville & Caius. His research interests include Modern British history, especially cultural, intellectual and social history; the histories of the humanities and social sciences in Britain and America; concepts and methods in cultural history; and educational history and policy. His most recent book, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, tells the story of the 'national character' studies through which Mead and her closest associates such as Ruth Benedict and Geoffrey Gorer sought to apply anthropological and psychological methods to international relations at a time of rapid globalization.
Professor Joachim Whaley is Professor of German History and Thought at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville & Caius. His specialisms include the Holy Roman Empire in its European context from the fifteenth century to 1806, and the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire in German-speaking central Europe from 1806 to the present. He is the author of Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529-1819 (Cambridge, 1985) and the editor of Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London, 1981; reissued as a Routledge Revival in 2011). He has also published numerous articles, reviews and contributions to handbooks and lexicons of German history and literature. His latest book is Germany and the Holy Roman Empire 1493-1806, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently writing a history of Austria and German-speaking Europe from the later Middle Ages to the present day.

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