Chair of judges
Professor Rebecca Earle FBA
Food historian, Professor of History, University of Warwick
Rebecca Earle is a writer and Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
Mostly she writes about the cultural significance of food and eating in the early-modern and modern world. She’s also written about Spanish American history.
She is interested in how everyday activities like eating or dressing can shed light on big historical processes such as colonialism or the emergence of racial categories.
She has authored five books and over 40 articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, 'Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato' (Cambridge University Press, 2020), uses the history of the potato to trace out some of the key features of modernity.
She is currently researching the history of cookery books.
Judges
Professor Shadreck Chirikure FBA
Archaeological Scientist, Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science, University of Oxford
Professor Shadreck Chirikure applies scientific methods to study ancient materials and technologies in their socio-cultural contexts. He uses results of discoveries in the archive, field and laboratory to develop new understandings of technology, mobility, knowledge and economy to tackle global challenges such as inequality, sustainability and responses to colonialism.
His recent book "Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a "Confiscated" Past', (Routledge, 2020) combines science with decolonial theory to develop locally centred understandings of everyday life and innovations in Great Zimbabwe.
Chirikure is currently working on a supra national project exploring the mobility of people and elements of their lives such as crops, domestic animals, cosmology and technology in nine southern African countries. He is writing a major book on cosmology and the history of human material relations in AfroEurasia.
Ms Bridget Kendall Hon FBA
Broadcaster, Former BBC Foreign Correspondent and Former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge
After a long career as a BBC foreign correspondent, Bridget Kendall was appointed the first female Master of Peterhouse, the University of Cambridge’s oldest College, in 2016, serving until 2023. She also served as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 2020-2023.
From 2008-2023, she hosted the weekly discussion programme on new ideas and research for the BBC, The Forum, presenting the programme from all over the world, from Beijing to South Africa, from New York to New Zealand, with venues including the British Museum, the Sydney Opera House and CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Educated at Oxford and Harvard as well as two Russian Universities, she joined the BBC in 1983 and became BBC Moscow's correspondent in 1989, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. She served five years as BBC Washington's correspondent and 17 years in the senior role of BBC Diplomatic Correspondent. Her book 'The Cold War; a New Oral History' explores the decades long conflict through eye witness accounts.
Her awards and honours include the James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism and an MBE for services to journalism. She holds Honorary Doctorates from St Andrew’s, Exeter, York, and the Central University of Birmingham. She is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse as well as two Oxford Colleges – Lady Margaret Hall and St Antony’s. She is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad FBA
Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy, Lancaster University
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University.
He has published seven books and around sixty papers, primarily on Indian and comparative philosophy and religion. His work has covered metaphysics and epistemology, theories of consciousness, classical Indian approaches to liberation, the nature of the self, conceptions off the divine, and bodily phenomenology. He has also written on political theory, international relations, premodern and contemporary Hindu life, and gender in Hindu devotional thought.
His 2014 'Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in two Gita Commentaries' won the Best Book Prize 2011-15 of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. His most recent book is the 2018 'Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India'. He is currently working on a philosophical anthropology of emotions. He is a Fellow of the Dalai Lama’s Mind & Life Institute, and worked on Hindu-Christian relations in 2010-12 with the then Archbishop of Canterbury.
Ritula Shah
Journalist and broadcaster
Ritula Shah is a journalist and broadcaster with one of the most recognisable voices on speech radio.
Ritula was the lead presenter of the news and current affairs programme 'The World Tonight', on BBC Radio 4 for 15 years. She is also an experienced panel chair, including on the BBC’s weekly panel discussion show, 'Any Questions?' and 'The Real Story' on BBC World Service. She regularly leads major public debates for universities and think tanks.
Ritula has covered the biggest stories of the last three decades, from the break-up of the Soviet Union to Brexit. She reported from New York after the 9/11 attacks, and has discussed everything from the rise of populism to the flaws of cryptocurrencies with senior politicians and policy makers. She has covered numerous elections world-wide.
Indulging her lifelong passion for the arts, Ritula currently presents a daily show on Classic FM.
Outside broadcasting, Ritula sits on the advisory board of the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank. She is also a trustee of the Institute of International Visual Arts known as iniva, and an ambassador for the British Asian Trust.
