Professor Erica Burman co-founded, with Ian Parker, the Discourse Unit, a trans-institutional and trans-disciplinary research center and co-convenes the Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix, and the Manchester Feminist Theory Network. Her research covers a broad spectrum spanning development psychology, educational psychology, psychology of childhood, counselling and psychotherapy, human development, and qualitative and discursive research methods. Erica completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Manchester and lectured in the field of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University from September 1986 to March 2013. She became Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at MMU in 1998 and left this position to take the post of Professor of Education at the University of Manchester.
Emeritus Professor Alan Crossman originally qualified in Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Southampton. He joined the University of Manchester in 1974 as a Lecturer in Anatomy. He was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer, then Reader. In 1988 he was appointed to a Personal Chair in Anatomy for his contribution to research. Professor Crossman has devoted his research career to the study of movement disorders, such a Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, hemiballism, chorea and dystonia. He and his research team initially elucidated the basic neural mechanisms underlying hemiballism and chorea. They later made a major contribution to elucidation of the neural mechanisms underlying parkinsonism, including the first identification of the subthalamic nucleus as a key contributor to the production of motor symptoms. In collaboration with Tipu Aziz, now Professor of Neurosurgery at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, he demonstrated that lesioning of the subthalamic nucleus completely and permanently alleviated the motor symptoms of parkinsonism. This led directly to the introduction of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson’s disease patients - a procedure that has now been applied successfully to approximately 60,000 Parkinson’s sufferers.
Dr Peter Knight teaches American Studies in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC). He completed graduate work at the University of York, and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham. He has held a Fulbright fellowship at New York University and a Leverhulme fellowship at Harvard. He served as the Director for Postgraduate Education in the former School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, and is currently Director for Research Impact in SALC. He is the author of Conspiracy Culture (2001) and The Kennedy Assassination (2007), and is currently completing Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (for Johns Hopkins UP). He was the director of the Culture of the Market Network, and is curator of the exhibition “Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present.”
Dr Ian McGuire has been at The University of Manchester since 1996, initially as a lecturer in American Literature and more recently as a lecturer in Creative Writing. He now co-directs the university's Centre for New Writing. Having completed his MA at the University of Sussex he received his PhD from the University of Virginia, where he specialised in nineteenth-century American Literature. Ian is both a fiction writer and a literary critic. He has published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and more recently, in the Manchester-based arts journal Corridor 8. He has written and published on Whitman, Melville and Howells, and is particularly interested in the American realist tradition from the 1880s to the present day. His first novel - the contemporary campus novel Incredible Bodies - was published by Bloomsbury in March 2006, and was described as "hugely entertaining" and "a 21st century Lucky Jim" by The Times. The Sunday Times found it "very funny and disconcertingly sad", while John Mullan in The New Statesman noted that Incredible Bodies - a "refreshingly low-minded campus novel" - was evidence that the genre had plenty of misanthropic life in it. His critical study of American novelist and short story writer Richard Ford "Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism" will be published by the University of Iowa Press in June 2015.
Professor Philip Withers obtained his PhD in Metallurgy at Cambridge University, where he held a lectureship until his appointment as Professor at the University of Manchester in 1998. His interests lie in the application of advanced techniques to assess the structural integrity of materials and components. He has built instruments for residual stress measurement and 3D X-ray imaging both in Manchester and at International Facilities, work for which he was elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2005. In 2010 he was awarded the Royal Society Armourers & Brasiers’ Company Prize for pioneering use of neutron and X-ray beams to map stresses and image components. In 2012, Philip became the inaugural Director of the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials, linking the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, Urbana-Champaign and Imperial College, aimed at advancing the fundamental understanding and use of materials across the energy sector. In 2014, the University of Manchester was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize, recognising the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility (which he co-directs)’s work on ‘new techniques in x-ray imaging of materials critical for power, transport and other key industries’.