MOVERS & SHAKERS

Changing faces in universities reflect the changing world outside. New subjects, new research interests, new chairs pop up in response to technological developments like the Internet or the fall-out from social and political upheavals such as the women's movement.

A clutch of new appointments at Cardiff University of Wales reveal the changing landscape. Leyland Pitt has joined Cardiff business school as professor of marketing from Henley management college. Having worked in South Africa, Singapore, America and Canada, his special subject is the the World Wide Web and the opportunities it offers for marketing. He is interested in the relationship between marketing in cyberspace and shopping as a leisure activity - or how to shop till you drop without leaving your screen.

Another recruit to Cardiff is Dr Padma Anagol, whose subject is gender history and who is writing a paper on infanticide and women in colonial India. Today she is working on a study of India's first woman doctor and a book on feminism, social reform and politics in British India called Beyond the Courtyard.

Thirteen new professors have been appointed at the University of St Andrews, including Professor John Broome in moral philosophy, whose most recent book Weighing Lives considers the weighty questions of life and death, and Professors Michael Fedak and John Harwood in biological and medical science who moved from Cambridge with the Natural Environmental Research Council's sea mammal research unit.

Bristol University is responding to new challenges in medicine by appointing a new professor of ethics in medicine, Alastair Campbell, who has come from the University of Otago in New Zealand. His chair is financed by a number of charitable bodies who are backing the university's desire to build up a centre for medical ethics and healthcare economics. Professor Campbell is writing a book on health and Christian ethics and conducting research into the ethical dilemmas of providing health care in the new competitive environment.

The prize for the most innovative professorship goes this week to the University of Sunderland which has made Peter Harvey a professor of Buddhist studies. He is thought to be the first professor of Buddhist studies in the UK, although there are professors elsewhere who are Buddhism specialists. Professor Harvey is co-founder of the UK Association for Buddhist Studies whose Web site has been established at Sunderlandn

Lucy Hodges