How do the humanities engage with business, and vice-versa? And what might this relationship lead to in the future? This panel will explore the reciprocity – existing and potential – of business and the humanities, considering the contribution humanities researchers and graduates can make to the business world and how the humanities might benefit in return.
Speaker: Dr Donald Drakeman
Panel: Professor Elleke Boehmer (Chair), Professor Howard Hotson, Professor Sally Maitlis
Panel Bios
Don Drakeman has been an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the life sciences for many years. A lawyer with a PhD in the humanities, he has also written extensively about religious history and constitutional law. His book, Why We Need Humanities, will be published later this year. He is currently Distinguish Research Professor in the Program on Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and a Fellow in Health Management at the University of Cambridge.
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English. She has published Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the author of four acclaimed novels, including Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize), and Nile Baby (2008), and the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). A book on ‘Empire’s Networks’ and a new novel, The Shouting in the Dark, are forthcoming.
Sally Maitlis is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her areas of expertise include sensemaking in organisations, trauma and adversity at work, and processes of personal growth. Sally conducts research in a range of public and privatesector organisations, with a particular interest in the cultural industries,studying symphony orchestras, dancers, and other creative professionals. She specialises in qualitative research, closely observing individual, team and organisational processes as they unfold in real time, and analysing these processes through talk and text.
Howard Hotson is Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Oxford. He currently works on traditions of religious non-conformity in the Holy Roman Empire in the post-Reformation period, pedagogical innovations linking Ramus to Comenius and Leibniz and a book on the intellectual diaspora of the Thirty Years War. He also directs the Oxford-based collaborative research project, ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550-1750’.
