Professor Robert Mayhew appointed as next Senior Tutor
Pembroke College is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Robert Mayhew as its next Senior Tutor, succeeding Dr Dan Tucker.
Robert Mayhew is currently Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at the University of Bristol and will take up his new post on 1 September 2021.
Dan Tucker will remain a Fellow and Director of Studies at Pembroke and focus on his research in the control of infectious diseases, primarily of pigs, that threaten food chain security.
Lord Smith, Master of Pembroke, said, "I'm delighted that Professor Mayhew will be joining us in September as our Senior Tutor. He brings with him a wealth of academic and tutorial experience; and he has a profound understanding of the importance of nurturing our College as an inclusive and welcoming community, as well as a place of successful study. This is of course all the more important after the year and a half we've just lived through. Our retiring Senior Tutor Dr Dan Tucker has served Pembroke and indeed the University brilliantly through that period; and I'm sure that Robert Mayhew will carry forward that tradition."
"Pembroke seems to be an incredibly lovely place. Everybody I've talked to has been engaged and friendly", said Professor Mayhew. "The Master framed the college’s atmosphere for me in the phrase that 'Pembroke is great, not grand' and I like that because it does feel that Pembroke is a college that takes itself seriously, but that doesn't do it in a way that's standoffish or haughty. It's a very humane environment, and actually building relations with individuals and treating them as if they matter seems to be central. That is something I really value so far.
"What I find exciting about a role like Senior Tutor is that you can help individuals, you can help cohorts, you can find out what the issues are, and change them to make them better. With a community of around 750 people, there's enough capacity to build a community in the ways that everybody needs, Fellows and students. Colleges work at a human scale that I find really empowering and interesting."
The role of Senior Tutor is one of the most senior offices of the College and oversees the strategic planning and practical operation of the College's academic activities. Traditionally, the post-holder has been able to continue their academic activities alongside these duties. However, over the past two decades, the responsibilities and time commitment of the role have increased, and Professor Mayhew will be the College's first full-time Senior Tutor.
This is also the first time that Pembroke has made an external appointment as Senior Tutor. Professor Mayhew has undertaken a number of pastoral and strategic roles during his career, including acting as Warden of a Hall of Residence for a decade at the University of Bristol, and being variously Senior Tutor, Chair of Admissions, Chair of Exams, and Deputy Head of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences.
Professor Mayhew did his undergraduate degree and DPhil at Oxford before moving to Cambridge to take up a British Academy Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College. In 1999 he moved to a lectureship at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, then to the University of Bristol in 2005, to become a Reader in Historical Geography. In 2008 he was made Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at Bristol.
His research interests have included the way landscape has been represented in English literature, especially by authors in the "long" eighteenth century, the history of geography in early modern England, and the intellectual history of Thomas Malthus.
His two most recent projects have focused on the intellectual history of British attitudes to migration from 1793 to the present day, supported by the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship; and the life and ideas of Robert Wallace, a major but neglected thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, work which has been funded by the British Academy and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
Professor Mayhew has written three books (Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 2000; Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description, 2004; Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet, 2014), edited four books and produced 67 chapters and articles.
Listen to Robert Mayhew talk about Thomas Malthus on this History Extra podcast.
Image: Professor Robert Mayhew
Credit: University of Bristol