Welcome Janet and Jenny: CCI’s new lecturers

CCI is very happy to welcome two new members of staff: Dr Jenny M’Baye and Dr Janet Merkel. Both were selected in a very competitive international appointments process; it is great that CCI attracted such interest, and that in particular Jenny and Janet could join us. They bring expertise in the field of cultural policy and practice, and of cultural work and cities: plus a range of international experience. This coming term they will be mainly involved in delivering courses on Cultural Policy to the MA CPM, and to the 2nd Yr. BA CCI.

Janet Merkel is an urban sociologist interested in the mutual relationships and interdependencies between creative practices and urban spaces. She has worked at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) in the research unit “Cultural Sources of Newness” and was a research fellow at the Center for Cultural Policy at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She completed her PhD on the urban governance of creative industries at Berlin’s Humboldt University in 2012. Her research interests include cultural and creative labour, new organizational practices in culture and creative industries, creative collaborations, urban governance and politics.

For the past three years, Jenny Mbaye was a postdoctoral research fellow at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) of the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her research interests focus on urban popular music and cultural economies in Francophone West Africa; and engage with the work as well as the policy practices of urban creativity in African contexts. She worked in cultural and media organisations in Senegal and Burkina Faso, and as an academic researcher in Canada, the U.K. and South Africa. She is a research and policy consultant for UNESCO and the pan-African organization, Arterial Network.