Exeter College is delighted to announce that Professor Sir Richard Trainor has been formally pre-elected as Rector of the College. He will take up his role as Rector on 1 October 2014.
From Ms Jeri Johnson, Sub-Rector and Fellow in English:
On behalf of the Fellows, I am pleased to announce that today Professor Sir Richard (‘Rick’) Trainor, currently Principal of King’s College London, has been formally pre-elected as Rector of Exeter College, Oxford to succeed Ms. Frances Cairncross, CBE FRSE, who has been Rector since 2004. He will take up his role as Rector on 1 October 2014 in the College’s 700th Anniversary year. We are delighted to welcome Sir Rick to Exeter and look forward to the first decade of our eighth century in partnership with him. I hope that many of you will have opportunity over the coming year to meet him and to welcome him and his wife, Professor Marguerite Dupree, to the College and that you share our pleasure in his election, and our confidence that Professor Trainor will build upon the achievements of the College under the leadership of its first two women Rectors, Professor Marilyn Butler and Ms Cairncross.
From Sir Rick Trainor:
On being pre-elected, Sir Rick said: “I am honoured and excited to be succeeding Frances Cairncross, and joining the Exeter family in the College’s 700th anniversary year. Exeter is one of the most dynamic, diverse, open and international colleges within Oxford. I look forward to leading the whole College community in even greater academic and fundraising achievements, and to continued global prominence and engagement with alumni, in the years ahead.”
Biography of Professor Trainor
A graduate of Brown University, Professor Trainor, who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, completed a second undergraduate degree at Merton College (of which he is an Honorary Fellow), was a research student at Nuffield College, a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, and a lecturer at Balliol College and took his doctorate in Victorian social history.
Born and raised in the US, Professor Trainor’s career as a historian and academic leader has taken place in the UK, of which he is now a dual citizen. In 1979 he became a lecturer in the Department of Economic History at the University of Glasgow where he later became Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and then Vice Principal. At Glasgow he taught the economic and social history of modern Britain and continental Europe and published on the social history of British elites, especially on the origins and impact of the leaders of industrial towns and cities.
In 2000 he became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, and four years later was appointed Principal and Professor of Social History at King’s College London. Between 2007 and 2009 Professor Trainor was also President of Universities UK, the representative organisation for the heads of all UK universities. He remains active in research and is President of the leading learned society in his field, the Economic History Society.
