Philip Dodd

Short Biography

Philip Dodd is a cultural entrepreneur and public intellectual as well as an award-winning broadcaster, writer, curator and academic. His work has helped to reshape political, cultural and educational agendas.Philip first became a truly public figure in 1997, when he was appointed Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. When he took the job, the ICA had 250, 000 visitors a year and a large financial deficit. When he left seven years later, visitor numbers had trebled, there was a financial surplus, and the Institute had been transformed. The novelist JG Ballard wrote that Philip had made the ICA into ‘an ideas lab for the 21st century’; the commentator Yasmin Alibhai Brown said that he had made the ICA a thoroughfare for global culture. Philip introduced a writer-in-residence programme, with the then unknown Zadie Smith, as well as a scientist-in-residence programme. He also helped to develop an innovative postgraduate programme for the ICA, Birkbeck College and the Tate. At the same time, Philip became an honorary professor at King's College London, and there founded an MA programme in creative industries, the first in the country. At the ICA he also founded a networking agency known as The Club, which supported 500 of London's young creative businesses, and curated exhibitions with architects such as Zaha Hadid and artists such as Yoko Ono. These accomplishments are a tribute to Philip's creative imagination, stamina and business acumen.Philip Dodd's editorial work includes the deputy editorship of the New Statesman and the editorship of Sight and Sound, which is the magazine of the British Film Institute. Stuart Hall, the influential academic and intellectual, declared that Philip had made the magazine ‘essential reading’. As a broadcaster Philip is probably best known as a presenter of Night Waves, Radio 3's flagship arts and ideas programme, even though he also broadcasts regularly on Radio 4 and the World Service. The fertile combination of academics and artists on Night Waves, knowledgeably chaired by Philip Dodd, has enlivened and sometimes enriched millions of homeward journeys over the past twelve years. An editorial in The Guardian praising the programme spoke of Philip’s ‘reliably piquant questioning’.The common thread that links Sight and Sound and Night Waves and the ICA is the interpenetration of the intellect and the imagination, or the academic and the creative. The origin of this creative tension that animates Philip's professional life lies here at Leicester, where he came as an MA student in our School of English and then worked as a lecturer in English for thirteen years. Philip was a serious intellectual in our midst, and it was he who began to broaden our sense of what constituted English, as he had an interest in what would now be called cultural studies. Perhaps more importantly, it was here in Leicester that he began, in partnership with our colleague Professor Rob Colls, what has since become an important debate about national identity. They published a collection of essays called Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920; the title sounds narrowly academic, but when the history of this debate comes to be written, it is this book that will be seen as the fountainhead of current debates about national identity. Its readers included Alan Yentob, who was then head of Music and Arts at the BBC; he promptly hired Philip as his one-man think tank, to help him re-imagine what counted as arts on the BBC. Philip developed programme ideas, wrote scripts for documentaries, and acted as the consultant on the enormously influential The Late Show, as well as on a six-part global art series, Relative values: art and value; the book of the series, which Philip co-authored, continues to feature on introductory courses on art.Philip returned to the theme of national identity in 1995 with an essay called The Battle over Britain, which he wrote for the think-tank Demos. In this pamphlet he examined the complex notion of Britishness. Britain was an import-export culture, with a port rather than a village green as its emblem. Tony Blair and New Labour took the message on board, and Philip's pamphlet contributed to the rebranding of Labour as Cool Britannia - an influential idea in in Labour’s first term in office – even if Philip is keen not to take responsibility for what the then government did with the idea.In recent decades Philip's eye has increasingly been on China. This is not a case of jumping on a bandwagon, but rather, as in the case of the debate on national identity, initiating what would prove to be an important new dimension of the UK's engagement abroad. In 1998 Philip took an ICA programme to China, to accompany Tony Blair’s first visit to China; the next year he hosted at the ICA 'Revolutionary Capitals: Beijing in London ', an exhibition, film screenings, talks and other events which showcased contemporary Chinese arts and culture for the first time in Britain. Philip subsequently left the ICA to found an agency called Made in China, which develops cultural and educational projects between China and the UK. This company has been immensely active, and through it Philip shaped the first digital arts festival in China, co-founded the 2008 'China Now' festival in the UK, devised the China strategy for the Hong Kong Art Fair, which is the largest in Asia, and acted as creative consultant to the award-winning UK Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Many Chinese students come to British universities, including Leicester, and it is Philip's consultancy that has developed a networking club for Chinese students in Britain – to connect them with Britain’s creative businesses. It has generated enormous acclaim, not least from the government agency Creative England.Philip Dodd's work as cultural entrepreneur and public intellectual are of lasting importance, and we are proud that this University exercised a formative influence on Philip's mind, and that it provided a research environment that nurtured his thinking.Mr Vice-Chancellor, on the authority of the Senate and of the Council, I present to you Philip Dodd, that you may confer upon him the degree of Doctor of Letters.Written and delivered by Professor Gordon Campbell.