Professor Michael Huxley
About
Biography
Mike Huxley was educated at Manchester Grammar School, The Crypt School, Gloucester, University of Bristol, University of Surrey. He graduated from Surrey with a first class honours in civil engineering.
From 1965 to 1973 he was employed in the Earthworks and Foundations section of the Road Research Laboratory (subsequently Transport and Road Research Laboratory, now Transport Research Laboratory). In 1973, he moved to the University of Surrey, carrying out research on the engineering properties of the Chalk Marl, through which the Channel Tunnel passes.
His career at the University has progressed as follows:
- Experimental Officer (1973)
- Lecturer in Civil Engineering (1975)
- Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering (1991)
- University Director (1998)
- Professor (2006).
Since his original appointment as a lecturer, Mike's teaching interests diversified to include:
- Soil mechanics
- Geology
- Communication skills
- Leadership and teamwork
- Presentation skills
- Negotiation skills
- History of civil engineering.
He contributed regularly to the University's staff development programme, running courses on:
- Teaching and learning generally
- Effective presentation skills
- Leadership
- Interviewing.
He has also organised and delivered more than 70 short courses for engineers in the civil engineering profession and at other universities, particularly in the area of personal transferable skills.
He was highly commended in the Partnership Awards (Taylor Woodrow Prize) in 1990 and was awarded the University of Surrey Teaching and Learning Prize in 1994. He was contracted part-time to the Higher Education Funding Council for England between 1996 and 1998 as a subject-specialist assessor for Civil Engineering.
During his career at Surrey, Mike Huxley fulfilled many administrative roles, including:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies for Civil Engineering
- Director of Teaching: School of Engineering in the Environment
- Deputy Dean of Engineering
- Member of Senate
- Chair of the Standing Committee on the Careers Service.
At national level, he was a committee member of the Engineering Professors’ Council from 2002 to 2004, and again from 2005 to 2007.
Since retiring from full-time employment at the University, Mike has maintained his academic interests, giving occasional lectures at the University, running short courses, and acting as an External Examiner. He has also found a little more time to spare for extra-curricular activities such as croquet (representing Middlesex in the Inter-Counties Championships), geocaching, and travel.
Publications
This article reconsiders the significant contributions made by women who worked in England during the 1930s and developed modern dance and movement as performers and teachers. Laban's arrival in 1938 built on a series of ideas, practices, events, and relationships that were to have far reaching consequences and which left a legacy where it is Laban's name that is canonical. These dancers and teachers included Anny Boalth, Leslie Burrowes, Anny Fligg, Joan Goodrich, Diana Jordan, Lisa Ullmann, Louise Soelberg and others. It gives an overview of the ways in which these women interacted with Laban and his ideas and how they variously developed networks that enabled Laban's practices to flourish. The histories of these women working in Britain during the 1930s are uncovered. As a genealogy, this chapter is a re-appropriation of those archival and published records out of which the canonical history of dance and theatre performances have been created in order to find something altogether different. Previously unpublished interviews and archival documents are drawn on to help uncover the hidden histories of the contributions that these women made to the field of theatre, dance, performance and movement training, bringing their pedagogy out of the shadows.