Principal and President, King’s College London

Sir Richard has been Principal and Professor of Social History at King’s College London since 2004; since June 2009 he has also been President of the College. Between 2000 - 2004 he was Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Social History at the University of Greenwich.

An American, he was an undergraduate at Brown University and did the ‘prelims’ stage of his history PhD at Princeton. He completed his doctorate at Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a junior research fellow). From 1979 he was a member of the Department of Economic (later Economic and Social) History at Glasgow University, where he was subsequently Professor, Dean of Social Sciences and Vice-Principal. His published research has focussed on 19th and 20th century British elites, especially in industrialised urban areas. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he was Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society 1998-2004 and was Chair of the Advisory Council of the Institute of Historical Research 2004-2009. He has also been heavily involved in computer-based teaching and in national initiatives to improve teaching and learning.

Sir Richard is an academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences, an honorary fellow of Merton College Oxford, and Trinity College of Music and an honorary doctor of civil law of the University of Kent. A member of the US-UK Fulbright Commission 2003-2009 and President of Universities UK 2007-2009, he is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Within the University of London he was a member of the review group which produced the draft statutes approved and implemented in 2008.

Other Charities

Nil return