Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship of over 1600 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill. Previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.
Professor Daniel Freeman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Department of Psychiatry, is particularly known for his work understanding and treating paranoia, including developing the Feeling Safe Programme, which is the most effective psychological therapy for persecutory delusions. He has also been a pioneer in using virtual reality to assess, understand, and treat mental health conditions. He presented the BBC Radio 4 series ‘A history of delusions’.
It is a wonderful honour. My work focuses on using psychological science to develop, test, and implement new effective therapies for mental health conditions. None of it would happen without the expertise and efforts of my research group, lived experience advisors, collaborators, mentors, and so many people behind the scenes in the Department of Psychiatry and throughout the university.
The other new Fellows from Oxford are:
- Simon Gilson, Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages;
- Ian Jewitt, Sir Roy Harrod Fellow in Economics at the Department of Economics;
- Sally Maitlis, Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership at Saïd Business School;
- Hilary Owen, Senior Research Fellow in the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages;
- David Willis, Jesus Professor of Celtic at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics and the English Faculty; and
- Mark Wynn, Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion