Dr Alastair Niven, OBE - Principal
Alastair Niven became Principal of Cumberland Lodge early in 2001. Prior to this he had been Director of Literature at the British Council for four years.He has held several public positions, including being Director of Literature at the Arts Council of Great Britain (latterly The Arts Council of England) for ten years and Director General of The Africa Centre from 1978 to 1984.Alastair began his career as an academic, with positions at the Universities of Ghana (where he had been a Commonwealth Scholar), Leeds and Stirling.He had been a Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and has held honorary positions at the Universities of Exeter, Warwick and London.He is the author of four books and over fifty articles on aspects of Commonwealth and post-colonial literature, and has also written extensively about the welfare of overseas students.A judge of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1994, he was also President of English PEN from 2003 to 2007.He was for five years Chairman of the Executive Committee of the United Kingdom Council for Overseas Student Affairs (now UKCISA) and is President of the local branch of the Workers Education Association.He is married to Helen and has two grown-up children.
Ginny Felton, MBE – Manager
Ginny Felton first came to Cumberland Lodge in 2003 to administer the Commonwealth Writers Prize and moved to the conference programme department in 2006.Previously, she had been UK Project Director of the British-American Project for eleven years, managing a diverse fellowship of young transatlantic leaders and an annual conference held alternately in the UK and the US.The early part of her career was spent in the arts - at the Royal Court Theatre, in film and tv production and for many years, as a corporate video producer. She is married with a grown-up son.
Dr Owen Gower – Director
Owen was educated at St John's College, Durham and King's College London where, in 2008, he completed a PhD in Philosophy (Philosophy and Philosophical Method in Plato’s Phaedo). His academic research focuses on questions in the fields of epistemology and moral psychology, in particular on the nature and value of intellectual autonomy and the epistemic status of the moral agent. He teaches Ancient Philosophy and Ethics at Royal Holloway, where he is Honorary Research Associate.
Since joining Cumberland Lodge in 2007 Owen has developed an interest in applied ethics, having taken the lead on various Cumberland Lodge conferences such as Is a Just War Possible? (2008), Religion and the News (2009), and Drugs and Harm (2010). A regular contributor to the Cumberland Lodge Blog, Owen has also written a selection of Cumberland Lodge Reports on issues such as surveillance, ageing, and the relationship of between the police and society.
For many years he served as the Charity Secretary for a youth organisation in the East End of London, which tried to build relationships between the Bangladeshi and Somali communities in Brick Lane. He is married to an artist and has two children.
Janis Reeves – Co-ordinator
Janis Reeves started working at Cumberland Lodge as a receptionist in 2001 and became conference co-ordinator the following year. Before that she worked for ten years as a receptionist with a medical company. Janis and her husband, John, have a daughter and son, grand-daughter and grandson.
Sandra Robinson – Associate Director
Sandra Robinson joined Cumberland Lodge in 1997 and has planned, researched and written reports on more than 50 conferences. Two Masters degrees, from the University of Surrey and the London School of Economics, reflected Sandra’s broad interest in culture and imperialism, in particular, the politics of human rights. This interest led to conferences on human rights and development, minority rights and children’s rights; an essay on the children’s rights conference has been reproduced in ‘Creating a World Fit for Children’ (International Debate Education Association, 2010). Sandra previously worked for the Department of Education, Australia, writing publications on the education systems of developing countries. She has also done voluntary work for several international NGOs in parts of the Indian Subcontinent and Eastern Europe. Sandra now works part-time at Cumberland Lodge, promoting conference outcomes. In this role she edited ‘Glorious Seclusion Cumberland Lodge and Windsor Great Park in the Life of the Nation’ (Phillimore, 2011). Sandra is married and has two children.
Faye Taylor – King George VI Fellow
Faye joined Cumberland Lodge as the King George VI Fellow shortly after submitting her PhD in Medieval History in September 2011. Faye's academic research considered the role of French and Italian miracle-stories and saints' cults in the social and political structures of the High Middle Ages. Her particular focus was on law, violence and the regulation of society when state structures are weak. More broadly, Faye's research interests lie in the creation and abuse of historiography and social memory, as well as symbolic and material representations of space. She is currently developing these interests by applying GIS (geographic information system) technologies to miracle-story and legal data, with a view to creating a map of the cultic landscapes of medieval France and Italy.
Although she was based at the University of Nottingham, where she also tutored in Medieval History, Faye has lived across the UK and spent many months researching in Piedmont, Lombardy, the French Midi, and Paris. She intermittently takes groups of American students on educational tours in France.
Jamison Steele - Conference Research Assistant
Jamison Steele joined Cumberland Lodge as Conference Research Assistant in February 2012. She is currently studying for her MA in marketing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to her postgraduate studies, Jamison worked in marketing for two years at McLaren Automotive in New York, NY. Jamison received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York where she majored in sociology.
