Reports

Report of the General Board on the establishment of a Professorship of Social Anthropology*

The General Board begs leave to report to the University as follows:

1. The General Board recommends the establishment of a Professorship of Social Anthropology as set out in paragraph 2 below. The funding arrangements were approved by the Chair of the Resource Management Committee on behalf of the Committee on 27 March 2024.

2. Professor Melissa Leach has been appointed to the post of Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI)* from 1 June 2024. The Board recommends that a Professorship of Social Anthropology be established for Professor Leach, to run concurrently with the Executive Directorship. An Advisory Committee met on 8 April 2024 for the purpose of determining Professor Leach’s professorial standing and agreed to recommend the establishment of a personal Professorship for Professor Leach to the General Board. The Advisory Committee’s membership comprised Professor Richard Penty, Head of the School of Technology, Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor Tim Harper, Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor Pauline Rose, Faculty of Education.

3. Professor Leach is a renowned academic and policy leader with extensive international experience, combining thirty years of ethnographic work in West Africa with engagements and networks across Africa, South Asia, China and beyond. She has led national and international policy-engaged programmes and consortia across the fields of global health, environment and sustainability, food systems, and social and gender equity. For the last decade, Professor Leach has been Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), helping it to become the world’s leading institute for research, teaching and policy engagement in global development. She also co‑founded and co‑directed the Economic and Social Research Council’s STEPS Research Centre and global consortium, is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has won several awards, including a Queen’s Birthday Honours CBE in 2017 for services to social science.

4. The office of Professor would be held without stipend, under the provisions for leave granted under Special Ordinance C (i) 2(b).

5. The General Board recommends that a Professorship of Social Anthropology be established from 1 June 2024 for Professor Melissa Leach for the duration of her appointment to the post of Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative*, assigned to the Department of Social Anthropology, and placed in the Schedule to Special Ordinance C (vii) 1.

2 May 2024