How long have you worked at the Uni? What does your role involve?
I have worked for the university for nine years, since September 2010.
My role is, firstly, Dean of Humanities and Social sciences, but I’m also a Professor of International Security. I don't really teach very much any longer, as you would imagine as Dean, but I still have PhD students, I do research and try to continue to write. I also do impact work like policy groups and policy recommendations. But mostly Monday through Friday, if not on the weekends, I’m the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.
What would you most like to achieve while at the University?
I think that the key thing I want for students is for them to be prepared for a changing society. Whether that's employment, or what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. I think that the way that we do curriculum, the way that our programmes look, the way that we do the experience of our units, all need to speak to the type of futures that our students will have. I think the biggest challenge that we have is actually moving from a system where we knew what the futures were going to be for our students, to perhaps a much more uncertain future, such as whether you will become more mobile than previous generations in order to join the gig economy, or similar.
I'm also responsible for over 400 members of staff and the key thing for me is to give them the best possible opportunity to do the things that they came to the University to do. So our academic staff are keen to support our students and to teach. But they also want to learn from their students and continue to write, do research, and to do science. The second thing is, our administrative staff are absolutely fantastic, and they really are a professional service. I really hope that what they're able to do is not only to understand themselves as supporting both academic staff and students, but seeing themselves as a professional service too. The more that we understand why people come to work enables us to help them.
Name one thing that makes you feel proud to work at the University of Bath?
The University is a great example of how interdisciplinary work can happen. This is written into the DNA of the institution, in terms of what it was trying to do at the beginning - trying to teach the languages to engineers, or business competence to engineers.
I think that what I'm really impressed by is not only our ability to do the types of disciplines that we do, but how we're able to talk across the University. When I talk to other people, on delegations abroad or people who are interviewing here, they're really quite astounded by our ability to talk across these disciplines. That our people in health can work with people in biology and biochemistry and in pharmacy and pharmacology, and our people in psychology can work with mechanical engineering or computer science. I think that's what I'm proudest of.
What piece of advice would you like to give to a student?
I think that the advice that I would give to a student is that the university experience is a unique experience. It's not supposed to set you set you up for employment and it's not supposed to set you up to be a citizen. But it's supposed to give you the ability to have options, and to have more agency in life, and actually understanding and appreciating that agency, rather than anticipating a fix.
Who was your most influential teacher/educator, and why?
I had lots of excellent teachers over the years, but I think the most impactful would be Professor Rex Enoch, who was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Memphis, where I did my BA and MA in political science. What was great about Rex - and you'll see a theme here - was that he understood that to understand international relations or international politics, you had to have a multidisciplinary understanding. You had to understand how politics interacted with economics, and how politics and economics engaged with history. Then the way that those things engaged with a broad social understanding about why people made the decisions that they made, both domestically and internationally, and how they impacted on war, how they impacted on economic development, and how they impacted on public health. And I think that really understanding that you need a broad church to understand how to, not only understand the world, but to change it, is key.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a professor, without a doubt. I was probably more interested in being a professor of something like history or archaeology, but I was always distinctly interested in politics as part of that. I've always been interested in political history, so I'm not surprised where I've ended up.
What was your first job?
I've been working since I was an early teenager. So I think that probably my first job was laying grass for landscaping. I used to play American football, and my football coach was a gardener in the offseason. We would work for him to keep us fit during the summer. If somebody wanted grass laid we would till up the earth, lay a new path and things like that. And it was very hard, hot work. But since that time, I've had lots of jobs - I've worked for supermarket stacking shelves and collecting trolleys, I used to sell men's suits, I used to pack trucks for RPS. Then I transitioned to packing airplanes for FedEx, where I worked for five years as a ramp agent doing weight and balance for large body aircraft flying to the west coast. I've worked as a law librarian, and I eventually transitioned into being a researcher.
If you could start your own dream business, what would it be?
It would definitely have something to do with books and coffee. That's probably not an unusual answer to receive from an academic, I imagine! But I love books, I love reading, and I love coffee and how it is done around the world. For instance in South Korea (which you wouldn't expect to be a big coffee nation, but in fact it's hugely important there), coffee houses have a great vibe and feel about them, in terms of homeliness. I think it'd be great to reproduce that. Problem is that I live in Frome, and Frome has a lot of those, so I'd have to move!
Where is your favourite holiday destination and why?
I don't have a favourite holiday destination. That's partly because over the years, I have not gone on holiday very much. But I think that there's certain places that I really love, like the Lake District. And my wife is from the Netherlands, so I really like going back in the summer with the kids just to experience the Dutch way of life - riding bicycles and eating pancakes and things like that. I love going on camping holidays in France and in northern Spain as well. That's probably a broad kind of European understanding of holiday. But I think even though I've travelled around the world, those are the places I think about as holiday destinations.
What is your favourite book?
I prepared for this one! My favourite book is Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami. One of the things that I really like about his work, especially his early work, is actually that it isn't traditionally structured in a hero narrative. But it was a much more kind of loose understanding about what the protagonist was supposed to do and understanding the experience they went through.
Dance Dance Dance is a great example of a middle aged man who has come to this point in his life where he thinks that writing for a travel magazine is much like shovelling snow. This notion of ‘shovelling snow’ is a metaphor that I use all the time. Then this man sets out to do something different, and that something different, in a very typical Haruki Murakami way, is a bit of a strange thing. But, I totally recommend Dance Dance Dance and probably Wild Sheep Chase too. They're connected.
If you could meet anyone in the world dead or alive, who would it be?
I would probably be most interested in meeting my maternal grandmother. I never met her because she died when my mother was two years old. She was from Germany, and a bride of a US Air Force pilot. I've never really understood that part of my background. As someone who died in the early 1950s, and experienced the Second World War from the German perspective, it would be very interesting and quite heartbreaking I would imagine.
What might people be surprised to learn about you?
I think that I'm a pretty open book. But I do lots of sport: climbing, CrossFit, and have always been a long-time runner.
I think probably the biggest thing is that I studied languages - I went to a specialist linguistic secondary school in Memphis, Tennessee where I was able to learn quite a few languages. I did German and Russian. I went on to spend time in Russia in 1992, right after the end of the Soviet Union. Independent Russia made everybody feel very optimistic about the future. I did a degree in Russian language and political science and even went on to study business Russian. I also learnt a great deal of Latvian. I am able to speak conversational Dutch and I went to an Estonian language summer school for three years.
I also have this kind of fantastic knack of being able to memorize the most frequently used 100 phrases in Spanish or French or Italian, or most recently Afrikaans (very close to Dutch, so it's a bit like cheating). It helps to ease the tourist experience, or conference experience as it is in many cases.
Tell us your favourite joke.
I'm really terrible at remembering jokes, but the one that used to crack me up when my kids were little was the interrupting sheep joke:
Knock knock
Who’s there?
The interrupting sheep
The interrup- Baaaa!