Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Bolanle Awe (Yoruba: Bọ́láńlé (Fájẹ́m̄bọ́là) Awẹ́) is a Nigerian and Yoruba history professor and pioneer of feminist history, intersectional thought and decolonisation.

Professor Awe was born on January 28, 1933, in the town of Ilesa, Nigeria. After taking a Master’s in History from St Andrew’s, she came to Somerville to read for her DPhil in 1958. She returned to Nigeria in 1960, where she became the first woman formally appointed to academic office in a Nigerian university. Following a stint at the University of Lagos, she returned to Ibadan, where she was promoted to Professor of Oral History in 1976.

Awe’s work is ground-breaking on several fronts. Her interest in oral history has made her a pioneer in documenting the pre-colonial histories of Nigeria and the Yoruba people, as well as an early advocate for the decolonisation of African history. She is also pioneering as a feminist historian, where her use of oral history helped restore the narratives of previously overlooked or misrepresented women such as Efunsetan Aniwura.

Awe was one of those pioneering women who began to use the master’s tools of academic knowledge and power to demolish the house built on male hegemony.’

TOYIN FALOLA, HONORARY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Awe was also one of the first people to critique the Western, liberal feminist position which universalises women’s subjugation under patriarchal rule. As an advocate of nuanced intersectional thought, Awe argued that we can better serve women’s causes by understanding the history of oppression from culture to culture. In 1983, Awe was made an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. She retired from teaching and government roles in 1998. In 2005 she became the Pro-Chancellor of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, and in 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ibadan on its seventieth anniversary.

Dr Ammar Azzouz is a Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow of Somerville College.

He is the Principal Investigator of ‘Slow Violence and the City’, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. 

Dr Azzouz studied architecture in the city of Homs, Syria, where he was born and raised. Since the start of the Syrian Revolution, over half of the neighbourhoods of Homs have been destroyed. In 2011, he moved to the UK to complete his postgraduate studies and received his PhD from the University of Bath. He has not been able to return to Homs since then.

Dr Azzouz has earned a wide recognition as a researcher, academic, architect and writer. His research on inclusive and diverse cities, queering public space, cultural heritage, architecture and war, reconstruction and forced migration has been featured in different platforms such as the New York Times, The Conversation, The New Statesman, New Lines Magazine, Middle East Eye, and also in academic journals such as Antipode, CITY, Change Over Time, Urban Studies and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Azzouz’s first book, Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023), offers fresh insights into the role of the architects during time of war. It explores how architecture is contested and weaponised during years of conflicts, and how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs of local communities. The book has a foreword, by Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent.

Before moving to academia, Azzouz worked in the private sector, at Arup. There, he established and led several research projects on themes related to forced migration, destruction of cities and cultural heritage. One of his projects included interviews with displaced people impacted by wars, and also academics researching wars and cities at different times in history and in different geographies (e.g. Spain, Poland, Bosnia and Syria).

Robert Baines is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science, where he leads the Protean Robotics Lab (PRL).

PRL studies how robots could change their bodies and brains on demand to better suit the task at hand, working across robot design, control, and materials to build machines that can change shape, adapt how they move, and cope with challenging environmental interactions. Of particular interest are robots that have applications in the real world: alongside the fundamental science, PRL is working toward robots for ecological monitoring, industrial inspection and maintenance, and space exploration.

Robert studied Mechanical Engineering at Rice University, where he received his BS in 2017, before moving to Yale for his MS (2019) and PhD (2023) in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich.

When not pondering robots, Robert may be found composing music, running, or hiking.

Rasmus is a DPhil student with an interest in the philosophy of mathematics. His main interest lies at the intersection of axiomatic theories of truth and set theory.

With his supervisor, Professor Volker Halbach, he is currently looking at ways of extending the base theory of certain axiomatic theories of truth from arithmetic to set theory. This will allow him to explore the proof-theoretical consequences of adding axiomatic theories of truth to set theory.

Rasmus has an MA (Hons) in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford.

Chris Bamber and the IT team are responsible for maintaining and developing the College IT network infrastructure and systems and for the College computers and printers. They can also give some advice on the purchase of computers.

Chris has been with the College since December 1997 when he took up the new created position of Computing Officer. The role allowed the college to provide professional IT services to staff and students on a full-time basis.

Since then Chris and his team have kept the college’s ICT infrastructure current through one of the fastest technological growths over the last two decades.

Professor Caroline Barron is a medieval historian whose research centres on the late medieval period in Britain.

She served as President of the London and Middlesex Archaelogical Society from 2008-2011 and as President of the British Association for Local History since 2016. She is also a former President of the Somerville Association.

She was appointed OBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to education.

Alice Barron is a violinist and collaborator based in London.

She enjoys a varied career combining orchestral, chamber and solo performances with improvisatory and multi-disciplinary projects. Specialising in contemporary and intercultural musics, recent performances include projects with Nigel Kennedy, Jean-Luc Ponty, L. Subramaniam and with Sam Lee at WOMAD festival in Australia and New Zealand. Alice’s collaborative work is genre-spanning and draws on her experiences studying South Indian violin techniques.

Janet Bately is Sir Israel Gollancz Professor Emeritus of English Language and Medieval Literature, King’s College, London.

A student at Somerville College Oxford, she began her academic career at Birkbeck College London, where she was successively Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader, moving to King’s College, London as Professor of English Language and Literature in 1977. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and made CBE in 2000. Still actively engaged in research, her specialisms are in Old English language and literature, and bilingual dictionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Shahnaz “Nazee” Batmanghelidj studied PPE at Somerville, followed by a Masters at Princeton University and an MBA at Harvard, leading to her career in finance.

Most recently she has been an advisor at Hoegh Capital Partners. Nazee serves on the boards of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia.  She is also an Honorary Board member of the Near East Foundation. She has been a long-serving member of the Board of Americans for Oxford, and in 2016 was made a Distinguished Friend of Oxford by Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson for her involvement in AFO and other institutions across the University.

Radford “Roddy” Klotz is an alumnus of the University of Virginia, where he continues his involvement as a member of the board of the College Foundation of the University of Virginia. He is a partner in the private financial services firm of Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) where he started his career in 1977 in the firm’s Treasury Department.

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.

In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.  In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For more information, see Professor Bell’s departmental web page.

I am a Wellcome Trust early career fellow in the Department of Biochemistry. My research investigates organisation and biophysical properties of bacterial membranes.

I first started looking at the outer membrane during my PhD in the lab of Bart Hoogenboom at University College London. I then did a postdoc in the lab of Prof Tom Silhavy at Princeton University, where I learnt bacterial genetics.

In Oxford, I am looking at how and why the outer membrane of species like E. coli are kept organised and highly immobile. These are intriguing properties, since cells must be dynamic to survive. They must insert new proteins and lipids to grow, move molecules laterally to migrate, and deform the membrane to divide. I investigate these properties using atomic force microscopy, bacterial genetics and super resolution microscopy.

I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, working across the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics and the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. My research sits at the intersection of linguistics, social science and applied healthcare, focusing on language aspects of clinical interactions.

With a background in sociolinguistics, my earlier work examined language variation and change in multicultural settings. Over more than a decade of teaching English and clinical communication to medical students in Ukraine, I became increasingly interested in how linguistic practices shape clinical encounters and influence the uptake of medical advice.

My research draws on Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis to investigate how clinicians use language to navigate sensitivities of advice-giving, maintain rapport, and support behaviour change—particularly in the context of weight management. In addition to theoretical contributions, I am involved in applied projects that translate linguistic insights into practical communication strategies for healthcare providers.

Beyond academia, I have worked as an interpreter for election observation missions with the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, supporting real-time communication in high-stakes, politically sensitive contexts. This experience has deepened my understanding of language under pressure and the ethical dimensions of communication.

I work across a range of externally funded studies. I previously held a prestigious British Academy fellowship, and I am a co-investigator on a NIHR policy research programme grant.

I am committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, international academic exchange, and public engagement, with a particular focus on improving the policies and practices of healthcare communication through linguistically informed research.

Research Interests

• Clinical Communication
• Conversation Analysis
• Discourse Analysis
• Interactional Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and at Somerville College.

Prior to joining DPIR in 2026, I was an LSE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I received my PhD in International Relations from Queen Mary, University of London in 2023.

I am a scholar of International Relations, International political theory, and colonial history, with a particular interest in theorising the historic relationship between race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality.

My current book manuscript, The Global Aryan: Transnational Hierarchies in British India, traces the idea of the Aryan race back to its imperial roots in the encounter between British imperialists and Hindu upper-caste elites, from early colonisation in the eighteenth century to Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. The book analyses key ideas and infrastructures that have given rise to contemporary alliances between Western reactionary politics and Hindu supremacism. I have published on this research in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

My new manuscript project, Romantic Authoritarianism of the South, interrogates the centrality of the Romantic movement to contemporary postcolonial politics. With an empirical focus on authoritarian regimes in the Global South, I understanding Romanticism as a heterogenous set of global intellectual lineages exceeding the political spectrum as well as conventional notions of imperial metropole and periphery.

Finally, I also hold a keen interest in interpretivist research methodologies, especially thinking about how we as scholars of global politics make judgments and pronouncements across scales of time and space, and between the abstract and the concrete. I have published on this research in European Journal of International Relations.

Teaching

I convene the MPhil paper on Historical and Interpretive Methods, lecture on the MPhil paper on Research Design and Methods, and teach the MPhil Core paper, as well as the undergraduate paper on International Relations. 

I am the proud recipient of two LSE Class Teacher Awards. 

Elaine and the Treasury team are responsible for the College accounts, banking and finances, for student fees and battels, for payments to suppliers, for invoicing, for loans and grants to students including vacation and hardship grants, and for general advice on financial matters, particularly in cases of financial difficulty.

Doreen Boyce (1953, PPE) is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville and former Provost and Dean of Faculty at Chatham College (1974-1980).

An influential campaigner for equal opportunities in the workplace, she was President of the Buhl Foundation (1982-2007) and founded the Executive Women’s Council to provide a source of collective support and influence for professional women.

I’m Alfie (he/him) and I’m super excited to work be one of your welfare officers this year!

I am a big music fan, playing, writing, streaming, singing, going to gigs or whatever else, (did someone say top 0.5% Taylor Swift fan on Spotify?). I also love baking, so if you have cooked up any cool creations please send me pics and I will be very jealous of you for getting to eat them!

Our role as welfare officers is to make sure Somerville is a place where people can feel comfortable, welcome, and able to talk freely about any mental health issues they may be facing. Despite restrictions in England having been almost completely eased, coronavirus is still likely to impact student experience this year, so we want to make sure that you can access all support available to you. We’re here to provide non-judgmental support for any concern you might have. I have completed 24 hours of peer support training to develop the necessary skills to support students. Katie will do the peer support training in Oxford as soon as they can.

We’ll also be hosting fortnightly welfare teas where you and your peers can come and enjoy all the (free!) snacks and take some time out of your hectic Oxford life to relax. Members of the welfare team will also be there, but there’s no obligation to talk to them if you’re just in it for the free food and chill. In 5^th week (aka welfare week) we’ll be hosting tons of events to help fight off those pesky 5^th week blues (activities normally include a bouncy castle and having alpacas visit on the quad, a cookie fairy and much more!!).

Evie is a recent Music graduate from Hertford College, where her research focused on the societal impacts of musical women, past and present.

She could frequently be found organising events and revelling in admin, alongside singing in choirs and playing the oboe. Singing with Somerville College Choir in her third year was a particular highlight!

As Chapel and Music Administrator, Evie is the first point of contact for all queries to do with the Chapel and Choir. She assists with booking events and concerts in the Chapel, as well as organising piano tunings, looking after PRS reporting, and acting as clerk for the Chapel and Music Committee.

Evie works for Somerville in term time only, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. She can be reached on chapel.music@some.ox.ac.uk or choir@some.ox.ac.uk

I work primarily on the intersection of literature and economics (in the ‘Economic Humanities’), and have published works on modernism, economics, critical theory and the philosophy of language. 

As a Rhodes Scholar, I received my DPhil (PhD) in English from Hertford College, Oxford, in 2024. I am currently working on turning my dissertation on Walter Benjamin into a book. This project not only tries to demonstrate how Benjamin’s philosophy allows us to think traditional approaches to economics anew, it also helps us see how, in Benjamin’s words, we might begin to work ourselves free of “the net in which we are caught.”

I have an edited collection with Palgrave Macmillan due to be published at the beginning of next year, entitled Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy.