Surrey Professor named Fellow of the British Academy
Friday 18 July 2008
Professor Sara Arber of the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey has been elected to the prestigious Fellowship of The British Academy, which elects 35 new Fellows each year from across the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Professor Arber’s work is recognised internationally in three fields: Firstly, inequalities in health, particularly gender and class inequalities; secondly, in sociology of ageing, particularly gender and the provision of informal care, health, and income in later life, and thirdly, establishing the innovative field of Sociology of Sleep, including developing new methodologies to better understand the relationships between health, ageing, gender and sleep.
Her research is recognised by frequent invitations to give keynotes at international conferences. She has obtained very extensive research funding, for example as Principal Investigator of a multi-disciplinary £2.4m grant from the cross-council New Dynamics of Ageing Research Programme, ‘Optimising quality of sleep among older people’ (2006-2010), which involves 6 co-investigators at 4 universities.
Professor Arber plays an influential national and international role in professional associations. She was President of the British Sociological Association (1999-2001), and Vice President of the European Sociological Association (2005-07). She is President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee (RC11) on Sociology of Aging (2006-10), and is invited to serve on numerous national and international advisory groups.
Professor Arber has been at the University of Surrey throughout her career and was Head, School of Human Sciences (2001-04) and Head, Department of Sociology (1996-2002). She is Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender (CRAG) at Surrey, which she co-founded in 2000.
There are only 25 Sociologists in the UK who are elected Fellows of The British Academy, and one other British Academy Fellow at the University of Surrey, Professor Grev Corbett (Linguistics).
An admissions ceremony will take place on 24 September 2008 where the President will welcome the new Fellows and invite them to add their names to the Academy’s historic roll, which includes the signatures of such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Clark, John Maynard Keynes and Mortimer Wheeler.
