Seven Cambridge academics elected to The British Academy

Dr Zara Steiner (Senior Fellowship)
Dr Steiner is an esteemed historian specialising in aspects of British foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the Cold War. She has been a Fellow of New Hall since 1965, serving as Acting President from 1995 to 1996. She is now an Emeritus Fellow of the College having retired in 1996. Her most recent book, published in 2005 was the highly acclaimed The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933. She is working on its sequel, The Triumph of the Night , examining the immediate lead up to the Second World War and its early years. She is married to the prominent literary critic George Steiner, who became a founding fellow of Churchill College in 1961.

Professor Paul Binski
Professor Binski is Professor of the History of Medieval Art. He specialises in the art and architecture of Western Europe in the Gothic period. His fields of interest include manuscript, panel and wall painting, sculpture and architecture, patronage and the relationship of art and ideas. His first book, The Painted Chamber at Westminster, appeared in 1986. He collaborated on Age of Chivalry (1987), the catalogue of the memorable exhibition at the Royal Academy which he co-edited with Jonathan Alexander. His book Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets (1995), was a winner of the Longman's-History Today Prize. Most recently he was one of the organizers of the Cambridge Illuminations exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge (2005), and published Becket's Crown, Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (2004), winner of the Ace-Mercers 2005 International Book Prize. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and a member of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate.

Professor Robert Foley
Professor Foley is the Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and a Fellow of King's College. His research is concerned with understanding the pattern of human evolution in terms of evolutionary processes. This work has focused on evolutionary ecology, social evolution, community ecology and biogeography. While much of this work has been concerned with the whole range of human evolution since the divergence from the African apes, more recently it has been developed in relation to modern human evolution and diversity. This work, with Marta Lahr, has been particularly concerned with the integration of genetic, archaeological and fossil evidence into a coherent model of geographical diversification, adaptive change and behavioural evolution in recent human populations. He has published numerous books and papers; his most recent book was Principles of Human Evolution (Lewin R. and Foley R.A 2003).

Professor Christopher Hill
Professor Hill is Director of the Centre of International Studies and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He joined the Centre in October 2004 from the London School of Economics. His teaching specialisms are Foreign Policy Analysis and the International Politics of Western Europe, as well as Research Methods in International Relations. He has written many scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as being author, joint author or editor of nine books including Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy .

Dr Boyd Hilton
Dr Hilton is a historian and a Fellow of Trinity College. His research interests are British history from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. He has recently completed a large volume on the period 1783-1846 for the New Oxford History of England series. His previous work focused mainly on politics, economic and social thought and policy, religion (especially evangelicalism); and scientific controversy. One of his most recent publications was A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (2005).

Professor Ian Roberts
Professor Roberts is a Professorial Fellow in Linguistics at Downing College. He specialises in comparative and historical syntax, using and developing the 'principles and parameters' approach to cross-linguistic variation. In this context, he has worked on the synchronic and diachronic syntax of a wide range of Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages. He has published three research monographs in this field: The Representation of Implicit and Dethematised Subjects (1987); Verbs and Diachronic Syntax (1993); and Syntactic Change (2003) with A Roussou, as well as numerous articles and a textbook Comparative Syntax (1996). His most recent publication is Principles and Parameters in a VSO Language: A Case Study in Welsh, 2005.

Professor Richard Smith
Professor Smith is Professor of Econometric Theory and Economic Statistics in the Faculty of Economics and Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. His research interests primarily concern theoretical issues associated with estimation and inference in econometric models. Richard also has interests in economic statistics, in particular, aspects of nonresponse and missingness in sample surveys and methods for data estimation based on combining disparate data sources. In 2002 Richard was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for research on models formulated in terms of moment conditions. He has published widely in leading international academic journals in economics.

In addition, Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd , FBA, former Master of Darwin College and Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University, has been awarded the Academy's Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies. Sir Frederic Kenyon (1863–1952), elected a Fellow in 1903 and serving in turn as the Academy's sixth President and second Secretary, bequeathed to the Academy a sum to provide a medal to be awarded biennially (or at longer intervals if necessary) to the author of some work relating to classical literature or archaeology.

The British Academy is the national academy for the humanities and the social sciences, the counterpart to the Royal Society which exists to serve the natural sciences. Its President is the philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill, the former Principal of Newnham College who received an Honorary Degree from the University of Cambridge last month.

Robin Jackson, Chief Executive and Secretary of the British Academy, said: "Election to Fellowship is the principal way in which the Academy recognises scholarly excellence. It comes as the culmination of a rigorous selection process in which each of the Academy's eighteen Sections, organised by academic discipline, is involved.