Dr Steve Mills joins the college to teach on the History Diploma module "What is History?" having just taken early retirement from Keele University where he taught American History for over thirty years, specialising in landscape and evironmental history, heritage issues, and the cultural history of the death penalty. He was trained as an historical geographer at the University of Maryland but his research ranges far beyond the USA, looking comparatively at heritage sites across Maritime Canada, northern Europe and more recently New Zealand where he is examining the ways open air museums focus upon only certain aspects of an imperial past. He has been engaged with Ruskin's public history Saturday seminars for some years, has presented papers at many of the college's public history conferences, and was part of the last OUVS team that validated Ruskin's MA in Women's History and the MA in Public History. He remains an member of Amnesty International and gives talks to local groups interested in writing campaigns for those on death row in the USA. He is a patron of Lichfield Cathedral and an enthusiastic canal walker and campaigner for the Lichfield and Hatherton Canal Restoration Trust, living on the edge of Cannock Chase north of Birmingham next to the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal (and the West Coast mainline). As the National Memorial Arboretum nearby has grown he has helped start its regular academic seminar series in which those, including Dr Hilda Kean of Ruskin, meet regularly to discuss memorialisation in general and the arboretum in particular. For relaxation he still plays Northumberland, Scottish and Irish folk tunes on the Spanish guitar, though not as well as his archaeologist son.