Dr Kamal Munir, a Fellow of Homerton College, has been appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Community and Engagement at the University.

He will take up the post on 1 October 2021 – the beginning of the new academic year – and will hold the position for three years.

Munir is a Reader in Strategy and Policy at the Judge Business School, as well as Academic Director at the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy. He is also one of two University Race and Inclusion Champions.

Munir will be one of five Pro-Vice-Chancellors who will support the Vice-Chancellor in various ways, providing academic leadership to the University. Munir will be responsible for matters relating to the University’s community, as well as staff and public engagement.

As part of his community engagement work, Dr Munir will work with University museums to help develop their collections as a resource for teaching and learning amongst external communities.

The Pro-Vice-Chancellors will also work on developing policy alongside the University’s senior administrators. Munir will be developing and implementing policy relating to staff, with a key focus on equality and diversity.

“The role has been restructured with a greater emphasis on diversity, which is quite exciting,” Dr Munir stated. He added that he wants “Cambridge to be a leader in terms of how diverse, forward-thinking and progressive it is.”

Dr Munir’s engagement with University museums comes as the museums and their collections face scrutiny as a result of the University-wide Legacies of Enslavement project, which focuses on investigating Cambridge’s historical links to slavery and how it informs teaching, learning and culture at the University.

The project offers the museums a new opportunity to engage with their history and the community. In January 2021, the University’s museums were awarded a grant of £90,000 from the Museums Association. The grant will fund a two-year research project into their legacies of enslavement and empire, culminating in an exhibition scheduled for 2022.

Dr Munir said “Working with the museums allows us to build a bridge between the University and the people and cultures represented in the collections, for whom they hold a lot of meaning.”