Professor Barry Ife became Principal of the Guildhall School in September 2004. Since then he has made a number of important changes, including repositioning the School within the higher education sector, reviving strategic partnerships with a range of performing arts organisations, and conducting a complete review of the School’s operations and funding base. Jointly with Sir John Tusa, Graham Sheffield and, latterly, Nicholas Kenyon, he has led a wide-ranging re-examination of the opportunities of closer joint working with the Barbican Arts Centre. For the next five years, Professor Ife has laid out ambitions plans for a new, additional building on the Milton Court site, and the achievement of degree-awarding powers by 2012.

As a professional academic, Barry Ife specialises in the cultural history of Spain and Spanish America from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. After holding lectureships at Nottingham University and Birkbeck College, he was appointed to the Cervantes Chair of Spanish at King’s College London in 1988. During his tenure of the chair, whose emeritus title he still holds, he became Head of the School of Humanities (1989-1996), Vice-Principal (1996-2003) and Acting Principal (2003-2004).

Professor Ife was appointed CBE in the 2000 birthday honours for services to Hispanic studies.