chief executive
New Writing North
Claire is the founding chief executive of the literary charity New Writing North where she oversees flagship projects such as the David Cohen Literature Award, Gordon Burn Prize, the Northern Writers’ Awards and Durham Book Festival and award-winning work with young people. She works with partners from across the creative industries and charity and public sectors including Penguin Random House, Hachette, Channel 4 and the BBC to develop talent in the North. Claire is a trustee of the reading charity BookTrust, the Community Foundation Tyne and Wear and a board member of the North East Cultural Partnership.
engagement and programming manager, Locomotion, Science Museums Group
Eileen has been working in the arts and culture sector for 20 years. She specialises in museum learning, outreach, and community cohesion. Her varied roles have included local museums and heritage engagement through to strategic regional and national programmes, supporting cross-sector collaborations, partnerships, and skills development. She currently works for the national Science Museums Group. Eileen has degrees in Industrial Archaeology with History, Museums Studies, and Leadership and Management. She is an associate and mentor for the Museums Association. As a historian at heart, Eileen loves debating and believes it is one of the best ways to develop critical thinking skills; empowering freedom of speech and encouraging us to question our biases and the world around us.
Eileen tweets as @eileenperrie
head, Oxford Text Archive, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Martin Wynne runs the Oxford Text Archive, a repository of digital data which, for more than forty years, has made available digital data for research in languages and literature, and has worked to preserve and share important historical texts. He is a former director of the European research infrastructure CLARIN, which supports the use of digital language data and tools in research across the humanities and social sciences. Martin has a background in research and teaching in languages and linguistics, has worked at a number of universities and research institutions in the UK and in Europe, speaks a number of European languages, and continues to travel widely, despite now being happily settled in Oxford. Martin looks forward to a future of improved cooperation and collaboration with European colleagues after Brexit.
philosopher, author
Dr Stephen Law is a humanist and author of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction to Humanism. Stephen defends a liberal attitude to moral and religious education in his book The War For Children’s Minds. He is also the author of several popular philosophy books including The Philosophy Gym: 25 short adventures in philosophy, and the young person’s The Complete Philosophy Files.
Stephen has no A-levels, and worked as a postman in Cambridge for four years before discovering philosophy and entering university as a mature student age 24. He was junior research fellow at The Queen’s College Oxford, reader and head of department at Heythrop College University of London, and is currently an honorary research fellow at Roehampton.
retired nurse; writer
Bríd is a retired nurse, midwife, health visitor and health service manager and worked predominantly in the NHS in London. She’s also worked as a fundraiser for a development aid charity. Since retiring, she has engaged critically with the shifting terms of debate around female genital mutilation/cutting via her blog at Shifting Sands. She is also using her retirement to indulge her interest in travel and walking long-distance paths. The next one she plans to tackle is in Portugal.
deputy director, associate professor, and senior policy fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
Victoria Nash is the Oxford Internet Institute’s deputy director and senior policy fellow. Her research focuses on the opportunities and risks experienced by children using digital technologies; she also leads OII engagement on Internet regulation and digital policy issues.
MSc student, WHT scholar, University of Oxford
Ramon is a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann scholar at the University of Oxford. He has participated as a panellist in several forums including the SDG tent at Davos 2019 and the Battle of Ideas session “Democracy under Siege: Renewed Liberalism or a Different Path for the Global South”.
He has previously worked for the Mexican Ministry of Finance monitoring public policies and developing analytic tools to evaluate the performance of federal agencies and subnational governments. Among other responsibilities, he has coordinated all federal agencies in Mexico to link the national budget to sustainable development goals. He has also coordinated the drafting process of the Budget Explanatory Memorandum that the Ministry of Finance presents annually to the Congress.
He is a co-author of a United Nation’s forthcoming publication as a contribution to the World Public Sector Report 2019 entitled “Institutional principles and strengthening of the budgeting process to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”.
Michael lives in north Cumbria with his wife and six children. He works in education and has taught various subjects and ages since joining the profession in 2010. He was a contributor to the Blue Labour book of essays, which has sought to reclaim an authentic conservative legacy within the now liberal-dominated Labour Party, and was involved with research and writing for its close kin, Red Tory. He has written for various outlets and takes an interest in the ways in which a values clash is shaping education, politics, and the character of an increasingly fraught civic space in the UK.
writer and consultant
Martyn has written about design, technology and innovation for a number of publications including spiked, Blueprint, New Media Age, the Guardian‘s arts&entertainment blog and The Big Issue magazine. He has also organised and spoken at numerous events including at the Design Council and the Design Museum. He was a contributor to ‘The Future of Community: reports of a death greatly exaggerated’, published in 2008, as well as a co-author of ‘Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation’
writer/researcher for Ideas Matter, Debating Matters Alumnus
An alumnus of the competition, Tom now works for Debating Matters, writing and updating topic guides. Before this, Tom went to the University of Southampton and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His dissertation was an investigation into the influence of Edward Bernays’ Public Relations theories over contemporary, social media-based, political activism.
