Robert Ness

Bob has spent the past four decades at the heart of international cultural relations, grappling with the question of what exactly he was trying to achieve and how he would know if his efforts were successful. He's still working it through, after a senior career with the British Council spent (chronologically) in London, Vienna, Jo'burg, Nicosia, Lisbon, Bogota, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong and Tunisia. This included a three-year interlude in the mid-2000s as the British Council's Regional Director for what his organisation chose to call 'East Europe', i.e. the countries of the former Soviet Union, minus the Baltics, plus Turkey. He spends time now as Chair of the British Tunisian Society and will be taking up a role as Tunisia's Honorary Consul in Scotland. More generally, he's interested in exploring the extent to which studies of culture relations in practice relate to theoretical perspectives, particularly in examination of claims made for the role of the state.