Vicky Randall (born Mary Victoria Madge; 1945 – 2019) was a professor of political science and feminist scholar.
Early life and education
Randall was born in Birmingham on 3 April 1945, to the novelist Inez Pearn (who published under her pen name, Elizabeth Lake) and the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, co-founder of Mass Observation and later Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham.
She studied at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and won a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to study English, but decided to go to Cambridge instead to study history at Newnham College. She was at Cambridge from 1964-7. She completed her Master's degree in Russian and Soviet Politics at the London School of Economics in 1968, staying on to complete a Ph.D. on decision-making in local government.
Career
While researching her Ph.D. she taught at the Polytechnic of Central London (later to become the University of Westminster) and subsequently at the University of Essex, where she became Professor of Politics.
Her special interests were political science and international relations, politics and gender. Over the course of her career, she published a large number of enduring works including Women and Politics (1982),The Politics of Child Daycare in Britain (2000)
and Politics in the Developing World (2005), which she co-edited with Peter Burnell and Lise Rakner.
From 1998 to 2006 she co-edited the journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics of which she was the first female editor.
