Fellows and Academics

Jan Royall is Somerville’s Principal.

She has had a distinguished career in politics, notably serving as Chief Whip in the House of Lords and then as Leader of the House from 2008-2010. She also served as Shadow Leader of the House of Lords from 2010-2015.

Prior to her parliamentary career, she was a senior adviser in the European Commission before heading its office in Wales. In 2004 she was appointed to the Lords as Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and in 2005 became a Government Spokesperson for Health, International Development, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

Following a degree in Spanish and French at the University of London, Jan’s first job was importing flowers into Europe from Colombia but she soon started working in the world of politics. She spent six years working as General Secretary of the British Labour Group in the European Parliament, then went to work for then-Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock.

Jan stepped down from frontbench politics in May 2015 in order to engage in her other interests, including youth policy, higher education, women, diversity and inclusion, democratic engagement, health, the EU, and foreign affairs, and she continues to speak out on these issues in the House of Lords from the backbenches. Jan is a trustee, patron and active supporter of many charities and organizations including Full Fact, the Centre for Opposition Studies, South Gloucestershire and Stroud College and the ASHA Centre. She is co-chair of the Oxford inclusive Economy Partnership.  She was formerly chair of the People’s History Museum, Pro Chancellor of the University of Bath and Vice President of the Party of European Socialists. 

Jan works with governments, political parties and NGOs in many countries on democracy building, leadership, nurturing civil society and women’s empowerment.

Daniel Anthony is Professor of Experimental Neuropathology. His research group is located in the Department of Pharmacology.

Daniel joined Somerville and the Department of Pharmacology in 2004 where he established the Experimental Neuropathology Laboratory. The focus of the work of his laboratory is to explore the cross-talk between the brain or spinal cord and the peripheral immune system using a combination of non-invasive imaging, molecular biology and immunochemical techniques. Signals carried between the brain and the peripheral immune system are important in the development of CNS disease, and there is now considerable evidence to support the idea that inappropriate immune system activation contributes, in a deleterious manner, not only to the archetypal inflammatory disease of the brain, multiple sclerosis, but also to acute neurological diseases, such as stroke and head trauma, and to chronic neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, prion disease, and HIV-related dementia.

Laboratory website: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~bioc0541/ENP/Welcome.html

Sarah Butler is the College Librarian and Head of Information Services.

She is responsible for managing the College’s extensive lending library and its special collections, including the College’s collections of pictures (as Keeper of the College Pictures), chattels and antiquarian books. Please contact Sarah if you have any queries about consulting or using the College’s collections.

Sarah also oversees the Archives, IT and AV services, and is the lead on Data Protection for the College. She is happy to answer enquiries on any of those topics.

My research is in representation theory, an area of mathematics concerned with the study of symmetries.

I am particularly interested in unitary representations of reductive Lie groups and Hecke algebras in the framework of the local Langlands correspondence.

My research is currently supported by the EPSRC grant EP/N033922/1, 09/2016-08/2020.

At Somerville, I teach Prelims and Part A Pure Maths tutorials. In 2017, I was awarded an MPLS Teaching Award.

My research is in statistical genetics, the application of statistics to large genetics datasets for inference and prediction.

I am particularly interested in statistical methods development in human genetics that could ultimately facilitate more accurate phenotype prediction from genotype with potential clinical applications.

Julie Dickson (LLB, Dip. L.P. Glasgow; MA, DPhil Oxf.) is Professor of Legal Philosophy in the Faculty of Law, and Fellow and Senior Law Tutor at Somerville College. After completing an undergraduate law degree at the University of Glasgow in her native Scotland, and a D. Phil in Philosophy of Law at Balliol College, Oxford, she held lectureships at the University of Leicester and University College London before taking up a Fellowship in Law at Somerville College in 2002.

Professor Dickson works mainly in general jurisprudence or philosophy of law, and especially on methodological issues, and her publications on this topic include her books, Evaluation and Legal Theory (2001):  Evaluation and Legal Theory: : Legal Theory Today Julie Dickson Hart Publishing (bloomsbury.com) and Elucidating Law (2022): Elucidating Law – Julie Dickson – Oxford University Press (oup.com) She is also interested in theoretical aspects of transnational law, especially European Union Law, including the theory of legal systems in the EU context. In 2012, together with her colleague Professor Pavlos Eleftheriadis, she co-edited and contributed to a volume presenting some of the best contemporary work combining legal and political philosophy and European Union law: 

Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law – Julie Dickson, Pavlos Eleftheriadis – Oxford University Press (oup.com)

Professor Dickson teaches Jurisprudence and European Union Law at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has been the recipient of a University of Oxford teaching excellence award and nominated for an “Outstanding Tutor” award in the student-led Oxford Students Union teaching awards. She serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Transnational Legal Theory, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Problema, and was the Review Articles editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies from 2003-2016.

Professor Dickson’s latest book on the methodology of Legal Philosophy, Elucidating Law, has recently been published by Oxford University Press: Elucidating Law – Julie Dickson – Oxford University Press (oup.com)  She is now working on a short book on the possibility and potential of content-independence in law (under contract with Cambridge University Press). She is also a keen amateur photographer with a particular interest in wildlife photography.

See also the interview on the Jurisprudence in Oxford subject page: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/jurisprudence-oxford/julie-dickson

I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music, and a Tutorial Fellow at Somerville.

My main research interests lie in how intercultural relations and notions of ‘diversity’ play out in a range of music education settings. Music education is broadly conceived, and my projects have involved investigating music-making across a range of classroom, policy and curriculum development, extracurricular, community music intervention and self-directed music contexts. One strand of my research focuses on the musical lives of migrant and former refugee communities in resettlement contexts. Another focuses on the functionalisation of music as public pedagogy to enable ethnocultural self-representation and address intergroup conflict. My current project considers the construction and experience of ‘diversity’ in secondary school curricula and classrooms. I publish on these topics in journals and edited volumes across music education, community music, music psychology and ethnomusicology, and serve on the editorial boards of Research Studies in Music Education and International Journal of Community Music.

My teaching for the Music Faculty includes undergraduate courses on ‘History and Philosophy of Music Education’, ‘Music Education: Practice and Pedagogy’, ‘Music in the Community’ and ‘Musical Multimedia’. In some of these modules, students undertake placements in school and community settings and are assessed both practically and theoretically. At Somerville College, I provide tutorials for the modules on ‘World Jazz’, ‘Critical Studies in Ethnomusicology’, ‘Foundations in the Study of Music’, ‘Music Mind and Behaviour’ and ‘Musical Thought and Scholarship’.

Recent postgraduate supervisees’ dissertation titles include, ‘Institutional music education and public pedagogy in Afghanistan’ (DPhil), ‘Music and trust in international relations: Bilateral relationship between Canada and France’ (DPhil), ‘Black musicians and accessibility to music education and the classical music industry, UK and US’ (MPhil), ‘Music integration programmes for migrants in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’ (MPhil).

My broad interests are in Greek History and Religion, especially late Classical and Hellenistic, as well as in the cultures and history of ancient Anatolia.

More specifically, I focus on the Hellenistic Period, especially priesthood and the link between ethnic and religious identities.

I am currently engaged in a study of the religious landscape and cultural identity of pre-Attalid Pergamon. Stemming from articles on the religious identity of Attalid Pergamon this is evolving into a long-term research project with regular research output of article length but also ultimately a monograph that will bring together much interdisciplinary research and, I think, will be of interest to a wide scholarly community. At present I am investigating the genesis of the cult of Dionysus in Mysia as well as the possible identification/ association of the Attalid hero Telephos with the Hittite divinity/ ruler Telepinu.

I am also beginning work on a comprehensive study on ‘Satyrs in the Hellenistic World’, trying to approach the phenomenon of the satyr in visual and textual culture not from an art-historical but cultural perspective. Apart from looking at the religious dimension and investigating the role of the satyr in Dionysiac worship the study will relate the figure of the satyr to the expressions and responses of Hellenistic societies, both local and transregional.

Emily is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology.

She leads a research group investigating enzymes involved in stress-sensing, with a particular focus on oxygen-sensing enzymes in plants and their role in flood tolerance. She gained her BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Southampton and her DPhil in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine in Oxford.

Emily’s research uses a molecular approach to understand the structural and functional properties of enzymes involved in plant stress responses. This understanding will enable targeted manipulation of the activity of these enzymes. By correlating biochemical and biological studies, Emily will be able to identify and implement interventions that can improve plant stress tolerance. Ultimately, she hopes this will help reduce crop losses as a result of climate change.