Professor Michael Russ

National Teaching Fellow 2008 Professor Michael Russ is Dean of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield. He moved to Huddersfield in 2002 as Head of the Department of Music following 28 years at the University of Ulster. Michael feels privileged to play a lead in what he regards as an excellent School at Huddersfield, and is particularly anxious to ensure the continued success of what is possibly the largest and most diverse University provision in the United Kingdom. In his short time at Huddersfield Michael worked with the University to secure  the new Music facility in the state-of-the-art Creative  Arts Building. He has also been instrumental in widening the curriculum at Huddersfield, notably to include popular music. Michael is an award-winning musicologist and believes in a symbiotic relationship between research and teaching. His publications are largely in Russian music and music theory and analysis and he has taken particular pride in having fired an interest in challenging analytical methods amongst generations of music students. He has also published on Higher Education Pedagogy. At Ulster Michael won a Distinguished Teaching Award after students nominated him as a result of his distinctive approach to teaching musicology which replaced the standard lectures and seminars with group learning projects and intranet resources. He has also co-directed an FDTL project on peer-learning; more recently he has directed a TQEF project on transition from School to University. Michael has a national reputation, not only for his academic research, but also for his work for bodies such as PALATINE (the Higher Education Academy subject centre) on whose management board he served from 2000- 2006, and the music subject association (NAMHE) to which he was twice elected to the committee by colleagues across the UK. In recent years Michael has become increasingly interested in the changing place of music of the West European Classical Tradition in 21st Century society and the importance of making students who plan to make their careers in music more aware of the value of what they do in the real world.