MOVERS & SHAKERS

Women continue their raid on the top jobs in academe, notably in English and social work and - don't laugh - food choice. In fact, Annie Anderson is Britain's first professor of food choice, at Dundee University.

What is a professor of food choice, you may ask. Do we need one? The answer is yes. We know about the link between nutrition and health but we don't know how to get people to change their eating habits.

"What we need to do is find out how and why we choose to eat the foods we do and how that choice can be influenced," says Professor Anderson. Why do we shop where we do, she wonders. How does that limit what we eat? How do age, sex and ethnicity affect our choice? Such questions are the meat of food choice research.

At Reading University Dr Coral Ann Howells gets her nourishment from literature - from books such as The Edible Woman and The Handmaid's Tale. An expert on the feminist novelist Margaret Atwood, she has been made professor of English and Canadian literature.

And at Leeds, Katie Wales is the new professor of Modern English Language. Her next book, Personal Pronouns in Present-day English, is about to be published by Cambridge University Press. Will it sell like hot cakes in the same way as her Dictionary of Stylistics?

At Bristol University, Ms Geraldine Macdonald, 42, has won the new chair in Social Work and Applied Social Studies. Formerly reader at Royal Holloway College, London, her interests lie in the effectiveness of social work and community care, and child protection.

Another new professor of Social Work is Catherine Itzin, who has been hired by the University of Sunderland and has conducted research into families and social mobility, social diversity and inequality.

Also from Sunderland comes news of a new woman professor in Glass. Zora Palova, a premier figure in contemporary Slovak glass art, has exhibited her work all over Europe, the US and Japan