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New Director joins East 15

Professor Leon Rubin has joined East 15 Acting School this month as its new Director. He will spearhead the opening of East 15 at the University’s Southend campus, with four new degree courses due to be launched in September.

Professor Rubin has come to Essex from Middlesex University where he was Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts and head of an international theatre directing MA and MFA.

Previously he has been Artistic Director of three major UK theatre companies, including the Bristol Old Vic.

A member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, in 1997 he was awarded an Honorary Professorship of GITIS Russian Theatre Academy, Moscow, for his distinguished work in the Russian Theatre.

He is a former Associate at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and began his career as Assistant Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is author of The Nicholas Nickleby Story (the making of the RSC production) and a new book on Balinese theatre that will be published in June.

Professor Rubin has directed productions throughout the world, including a series of Shakespeare productions for the Stratford Festival Theatre, Canada and a major Japanese theatre company, Bungaku-za. In the past year he directed a Chinese version of Peter Pan in Hong Kong.

Professor Rubin replaces John Baraldi who left East 15 in October. He said: ‘I am delighted to join the University of Essex and East 15 at the beginning of a new era of development for them both.

‘I know we will all continue together the dynamic traditions of the past as we also innovate and prepare for the theatre of the future. There are exciting times ahead as the work at Loughton continues to flourish and the Southend campus begins to take shape.’

Journal first

Dr Andrew Canessa in the Department of Sociology has been successful in a competitive bid to succeed a team at the Florida International University in Miami in editing the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

The journal is published by the University of California Press in association with the American Anthropological Association, and this will be the first time the journal will be edited outside the United States.

The Department now hosts three internationally prestigious journals; the other two being the hugely successful Sage journal Sexualities and the journal of the European Sociological Association, European Societies, all of them administered and co-ordinated by Agnes Skamballis.

Prestigious award for Computer Science graduate

Essex graduate Saqib Shaikh took home a prestigious British Computer Society (BCS) award recently.

Saqib, who graduated in 2003 with a first class honours degree in Computer Science was presented with the Young IT Practitioner of the Year Award at the BCS Individual Excellence Awards.

According to the BCS, the judges selected him for his professionalism, enthusiasm and determination to succeed.
After graduating, Saqib took a job at Vodafone before setting up his own company, MacVisionaries in 2005. The company specialises in products and services to help the blind use Mac computers. Saqib, who is himself blind, is now working for Microsoft.