Appointments

Professor Nick Fyfe
Chair of Human Geography

Nick Fyfe joined the University in 2000 as a senior lecturer. Prior to this he taught at the University of Strathclyde and has held visiting positions at the University of British Columbia in Canada and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He has an MA and PhD from Cambridge University.

Nick is an urban geographer whose main research focuses on issues of crime and policing. He has undertaken studies on a range of topics, from the implications of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to the role of police-community consultation.

Much of his most recent research, funded by the Home Office and the Scottish Executive, has focused on issues of witness intimidation and witness protection in serious organised crime investigations. He undertook the first ever in-depth study of a witness protection programme and is author of Protecting Intimidated Witnesses (2001). He is also a member of the Home Office academic panel on organised crime and is involved in a project examining the role of activists in community safety and crime prevention initiatives in Manchester and Auckland.

He is a key player of a £9.5 million collaboration between 13 Scottish universities to establish a Scottish Institute for Policing Research.

Ms Catriona Blake
Deputy Director of Finance

Catriona Blake has been appointed Deputy Director of Finance from 1 August and will support Pete Cooper in steering the University's financial strategy. She came from the University of Abertay Dundee, where she held the post of Head of Finance for three and a half years.

After graduating in History from the University of York, she studied for a Masters in Social History at the University of Essex and subsequently turned her dissertation, on women's entry to the medical profession in Britain, into a book which was published in 1990. During this time she was employed in the voluntary sector in London, including working for Women's Aid and MIND.

On her return to Scotland she decided on a change of career and commenced studying for her professional accountancy qualification. She worked in various parts of the Tayside NHS for eleven years. During this time she was involved in supporting many changes in the health service, including the introduction of the internal market, a capital programme partly funded by PFI, and successive service restructuring.

She is excited by the University's ambitions as expressed in the Planning Framework, and is looking forward to contributing to the achievement of the financial strategy, particularly through enhanced management information and greater involvement with Colleges and Schools.

Professor James Williams
Chair of Philosophy

James Williams has taught philosophy at Dundee since 1991. His main areas of research are in continental philosophy, poststructuralism and postmodernism. He is an international expert on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard.

James has published books and articles on both thinkers, including Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (Polity Press, 1998), Lyotard and the Political (Routledge, 1999), Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), Understanding Poststructuralism (Acumen and McGill University Press, 2005), The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences (Clinamen Press, 2005) and The Lyotard Reader and Guide (with Keith Crome, Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2006).

His current project is a book on Deleuze's moral philosophy and philosophy of language for Edinburgh University Press. This book is guided by the problem of how we can think of a life well-lived once we abandon a primary focus on individual humans, locked in particular bodies bounded by birth and death, in favour of a sense of beings, locations and histories folded into one another across much broader stretches of space and time. There is a strong connection to Scotland through Gilles Deleuze, whose first book was on the great Scottish philosopher David Hume - it was inspiring to be able to read this book, in Edinburgh, at the foot of Hume's mausoleum designed in 1777 by Robert Adam (pictured).