We are delighted to announce that two Somervillians have won Vice-Chancellor’s Awards 2025, receiving the highest recognition in both the Teaching and Learning and Research Culture categories.
Somerville Research Fellow Jim Harris has received both the Teaching and Learning and Research Culture awards for his contributions to two winning projects. Somerville DPhil student Utsa Bose is a co-recipient of the Research Culture award alongside Jim as a member of TORCH’s Medical Humanities Hub. Details of both awards are provided below.
Teaching and Learning Award – Diversity in Death and Dying: Medical Student Museum Experience
Jim Harris (third left) alongside his co-recipients of the Teaching and Learning Award 2025
The Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching and Learning Award recognises colleagues who have demonstrated a commitment to high-quality teaching and learning for Oxford’s students, in support of improved educational outcomes.
Jim Harris is an art historian and Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean Museum. As a Somerville College Research Fellow, Jim has for than a decade led the object-handling classes beloved by generations of English, History and German students. Jim and his team won the Teaching and Learning Award 2025 for their project “Diversity in Death and Dying: Medical Student Museum Experience”. A collaboration between the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Faculty of History, Ashmolean Museum and Faculty of Theology & Religion, medical students are immersed in the Ashmolean Museum to use objects and images to interrogate aspects of end-of-life care and are asked to reflect on the challenges presented by this unavoidable part of professional practice.
Speaking of winning the Teaching and Learning Award, Jim commented, “The truly exciting thing about teaching at the Ashmolean is that it is always a collaborative exercise, and this collaboration with Neuroscience, Psychiatry, History, Theology, and with Expert Patient Tutors, has been both extraordinarily rich and deeply impactful on the training of new doctors. It’s been a real privilege to see the Museum and its collections put to work so creatively.”
Research Culture Award – TORCH Medical Humanities Research Hub
Winners of the Research Culture Award 2025, including Somervillians Utsa Bose (far left) and Jim Harris (third right)
Jim Harris and Somerville doctoral student Utsa Bose are both members of The Oxford Centre for the Humanities (TORCH)’s Medical Humanities Research Hub (MedHum), winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Culture 2025.
The Vice-Chancellor’s Research Culture Award celebrates those who have contributed to a positive, inclusive and equitable research culture at the University of Oxford. TORCH’s MedHum team was one of two groups to win a Research Culture award in 2025, alongside the Wellcome Centre’s Ambassador Programmes. The MedHum team were recognised for their achievement in highlighting the contribution of the humanities to a proper understanding of health, disease, and medicine, countering the narrative that innovation in healthcare is solely the domain of physicians and laboratories.
Somerville’s doctoral candidate Utsa Bose is reading for a DPhil in the sociocultural and medical history of the bubonic plague in Calcutta between 1890 and 1920. He has also been an active contributor to MedHum’s work since 2024, collaborating on academic projects within the university as well as more community-based work, such as work with the Oxfordshire Council, as part of the Oxfordshire Health Humanities Project.
Historian Utsa Bose, proud recipient of a Research Culture award, 2025
Speaking of his award, Utsa commented, “I am really grateful to Medical Humanities (MedHum), and especially to our Academic Lead, Professor Erica Charters, for giving me an opportunity to join the team. Medical Humanities is a truly interdisciplinary hub under TORCH, running across departments and connecting work in the fields of health and medicine with research in the humanities. This award is a recognition of the diversity that the research hub embraces, across perspectives, opinions, and in the scales of interaction.
“As a doctoral student studying medical and health history, participating in the events organised by MedHum has been richly rewarding, as it has facilitated encounters with newer domains, and expanded my own boundaries. It has also helped me think through and connect a range of different issues, and, by bringing me in contact with a wonderful team of experts from different fields, helped foster interdisciplinary networks of collaboration, linking the past, the present and the future.”
Somerville’s Principal Jan Royall commented, “I am so proud of Jim and Utsa’s achievements in winning these prestigious awards. Jim’s work has long been a source of immense pride for Somerville, and it is wonderful to see his profoundly moving project highlighting experiences of diversity and dying recognised for generations of future medical students. I’m also thrilled that he and Utsa have won a Research Culture Award. The recognition given to their project is triumphant proof of the fertile and highly important link between the humanities and medical research.”
Dr Emma Soneson
We are also proud to note that Somerville’s Junior Research Fellow Dr Emma Soneson was highly commended in the same category alongside her Department of Psychiatry colleague Dr Galit Geulayov. Emma and Galit were recognised for their outstanding commitment to mentoring future researchers via the inaugural NIHR Undergraduate Internship Programme. Together, Emma and Galit gave personalised feedback to 429 applicants, providing mentorship that “surpassed any expectation completely” in order to nurture the next generation of researchers.