Four new appointments

Andy Pratt will join the Centre in October 2009 as Professor of Culture, Media and Economy. He was previously Reader in Urban Cultural Economy at the London School of Economics, and Director of the LSE Urban Research Centre, and has a background as a social scientist in Geography and Urban Planning. His current research interests concern all aspects of the cultural economy in both international and urban contexts. Andy has written extensively on cultural and creative industries and policy (some 90 academic articles and chapters), and has advised UNESCO and UNCTAD on policy, as well as many national and urban governments. He is interested in how the cultural and creative industries are organised, what it is like to work in them, and how they are governed; and, what the impacts are on the rest of economy and society of their growth. For further information, please see Andy's website.

Rosalind Gill will start at CMCI in January 2010 as Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis. She is currently Professor of Subjectivity and Cultural Theory at the Open University; before that she spent 10 years working in the LSE’s interdisciplinary Gender Institute. She is known for her work on gender, media, cultural industries and new technologies as well as for longstanding interests in discourse and narrative analysis and visual methods. Underlying all her interests is a concern with theorizing the relationship between culture, subjectivity and change. She is the author of 4 books and more than 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, and her work has been translated into several languages. She is currently writing a book about ‘mediated intimacy’ and another about ‘creatives’. Her latest book (with Roisin Ryan Flood) is published by Routledge in October, entitled Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process.She has had grants from the AHRC, British Academy, ESRC, and the European Commission, and has worked with a variety of organisations including the Arts Council, the BBC and UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. She sits on the international editorial boards of Subjectivity; Feminist Media Studies; Feminism and Psychology and Communication, Culture & Critique, and is currently involved in discussions to help set up a new journal about Cultural Labour. She is passionate about nurturing and supporting new scholars she has supervised numerous PhD students and examined more than 30 PhD theses. Ros is also a committed ‘public intellectual’ who has made 3 documentaries, and regularly contributes to the media.

Nick Wilson will join CMCI in September 2009 as Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries. He was previously Principal Lecturer in Strategy, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at University of Kingston, and Course Director of the Programme of Master's courses in the Creative Economy. He studied music at Clare College, Cambridge and went on to train as a singer at the Royal College of Music, London and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, before moving into music management, working for a leading artist management and concert promotions company. After completing his MBA, he joined the Small Business Research Centre, Kingston University, as a researcher and lecturer, subsequently completing his doctoral thesis on the emergence of the early music performance labour market in the UK. His current research interests focus on exploring the boundaries of the creative economy, the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship, the need for a new discipline of social creativity, and the role of multi-disciplinary learning in creativity, arts and management.

Fernanda Fain-Binda is starting at CMCI in August 2009 as Sector Liaison Officer, with responsibility for managing the MA Cultural and Creative Industries internship programme, and cultivating further links between King's College London and the arts and media sectors. Fernanda was previously Administrative Assistant for London Region, English Heritage, Kenwood House, London (a national organisation for the preservation and promotion of the built environment), and has also worked as Coordinator for Latin American Regions, MRM WORLDWIDE (McCann Relationship Marketing), Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is completing an MA in Arts Policy and Management, Birkbeck College, University of London, and has a BA in MILARS (Modern Iberian and Latin American Regional Studies), University College London.