Fellows and Academics

I teach Biology at Somerville, and most of my teaching concerns plant biology because this is the interesting part of the subject.

In the first year the topics I cover include plant life histories including pollination, biological classification, the use of plants in medicine, the emergence of agriculture, and conservation.  In the second year I teach about plant adaptations (particularly those found in Mediterranean-type regions), ecology, and ethnobotany.  In the final year I run an option on species conservation and I teach on the Tenerife Field Trip.

Prior to coming Somerville I worked at the Oxford Botanical Gardens and Harcourt Arboretum for the best part of 34 years, the last 26 as Horti Praefectus (i.e. director).  My particular interests are plant conservation and the genus Euphorbia which is a fascinating group of 2000 species found all over the world.

http://www.timothywalker.org.uk

I am a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

My main research interests are in the ‘human side’ of the future of work, the emotional bases of political behavior, and the economic determinants of subjective wellbeing (or “happiness”).

My work has been published in various academic journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and American Journal of Political Science. I am also passionate about science communication and public engagement, and have written about my research for various outlets including Harvard Business Review, VoxEU, The Conversation, SPSP Character & Context, The Hill, and UN World Happiness Report. My research has also been featured by news outlets including The Economist, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, The Atlantic, Business Insider, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

Stephen Weatherill works on the constitutional, institutional and substantive law of the European Union.

He serves as Deputy Director for European Law in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, and is a Fellow of Somerville College.

His research interests embrace the field of European Law in its widest sense, although his published work is predominantly concerned with European Union trade law. . He is the author of LAW AND VALUES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION (Oxford University Press, 2016), PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE IN EU SPORTS LAW (Oxford University Press, 2017), THE INTERNAL MARKET AS A LEGAL CONCEPT (Oxford University Press, 2017), CONTRACT LAW OF THE INTERNAL MARKET (Intersentia, 2017), EU CONSUMER LAW AND POLICY (Edward Elgar, 3rd edition, 2013), CASES AND MATERIALS ON EU LAW (Oxford University Press, 12th edition, 2016) and co-author of CONSUMER PROTECTION LAW (Ashgate Publishing, 2nd edition, 2005, with Geraint Howells), EUROPEAN ECONOMIC LAW (Dartmouth Publishing, 1997, with Hans Micklitz), and WEATHERILL AND BEAUMONT’s EU LAW (Penguin Books, 3rd edition,1999, with Paul Beaumont). The areas in which he has published papers in journals and edited collections in recent years include; the impact of subsidiarity in EU law; the involvement of the EU in private law; aspects of “flexible” integration in Europe; the elaboration of strategies for the management of the internal market; sport and the law including the ruling in BOSMAN; and the law and practice of product safety.

In Oxford, his teaching interests focus on EU law. He has taught on the European Business Regulation course, as well as Constitutional Principles of EU Law and and Competition Law, offered to BCL and Mjur students, and also teaches at undergraduate level.

Before joining the Oxford Faculty, he held the Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at the University of Nottingham, and he has also previously held positions at the Universities of Manchester and Reading since beginning his academic career as a research assistant at Brunel University a long time ago.

Premila Webster is an Academic Associate at the University of Nicosia Medical School.

Dr Webster holds MBBS, DA (UK) and MSc (Public Health Medicine) from London University, and MFPHM (UK), FFPH (UK), DLATHE and DPhil from Oxford University.

Her research interests includes examining the impact of urbanisation on health and issues related to tobacco control.

Jennifer Welsh is a Professor in International Relations and a Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford.

She offers courses to undergraduates and graduate students in various sub-fields of International Relations; acts as supervisor to masters and doctoral students; and sits on a variety of College and Departmental Committees. Jennifer is also the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict within the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She was previously the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect.

At Somerville I teach Renaissance English literature and Shakespeare to second and third year students, and the paper ‘An Introduction to Literary Studies’ to first years. I also greatly enjoy supervising finalists working on dissertations about early seventeenth-century poets such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert.

For the English Faculty at Oxford I give undergraduate lectures on a variety of seventeenth-century poets and writers. For graduates I teach a course in Renaissance palaeography and manuscript culture designed to assist MSt and DPhil students learning how to interpret early modern handwriting and to find & work with manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. I regularly supervise MSt dissertations, and welcome inquiries from DPhil applicants interested in early seventeenth-century poetry, manuscripts, devotional poets, and writing of the 1630s.

My research focuses on literature of the early seventeenth century, particularly the Caroline poets and the work of John Donne. I am currently completing a critical edition of James Shirley’s poems, and have published several articles and chapters about how Shirley’s writing was composed and circulated in the period. My edition will appear as a volume in The Complete Works of James Shirley, gen. eds. Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer, 10 vols (Oxford University Press). My previous work has focussed on the poetry of Henry Vaughan (1622-95) and on the work of poets he admired, including Ben Jonson and George Herbert. Alongside my Shirley edition I am also editing a volume of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, gen. ed. Peter McCullough, 13 vols (Oxford University Press, 2013- ) containing the sermons Donne preached to select audiences at private houses.

My thesis is a comparative project exploring late medieval poetry composed about the Virgin Mary in poetic competitions in towns and cities.

I am interested in the way these lyrics reflect the urban spaces in which they were written, and the interplay between the ludic and devotional elements of their performance context.

My research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Willetts Scholarship at St Anne’s.

Matthew Wood is Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Head of the Medical Sciences Division (http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/support-services/matthew-wood) in the University of Oxford. His laboratory is based in the Department of Paediatrics.

Matthew graduated in Medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1987, working in clinical Neuroscience before gaining a doctorate in Physiological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 1993. His research team works on developing gene therapies for degenerative disorders of the brain and muscles – so-called neuromuscular diseases. This is exemplified by landmark work using small DNA patches called oligonucleotides to correct the genetic abnormalities underlying the fatal childhood muscle disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Further information is available at Professor Wood’s page with the Oxford Neuroscience and Department of Paediatrics.

Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World at the University of Oxford, and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College.

After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago from 2015-2018.

Dr Zaman is a historian of the modern British Empire, South Asia and global intellectual history.

Currently, she has two main areas of research. The first is a study of Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth century British India. She situates developments in the thought of these figures within a history of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline.

The second research area concerns history as an academic discipline in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and its relationship to the expansion and legitimisation of empire. To date, she has also written on memory and nostalgia, heritage and imperial visual culture and political visions of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Academic Biography:

2015-2018 Dorothy and Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Chicago

2010-2014 PhD in History, University of Cambridge

2009-2010 MPhil in Historical Studies, University of Cambridge

2006-2009 BA in History, University of Cambridge

I am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). At Somerville College, I teach French Language, Translation, Orals and Essay.

I have been teaching French ‘language cafés’ and French ‘research-based language tutorials’ at the University of Birmingham since 2020. I have also been an English academic language tutor at AWAS (Academic Writing Advisory Service) for the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham since 2021. 

Research

My research interests revolve around colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa and the literary productions that emanate from these encounters. My PhD in French and Francophone Studies reads Algerian identity from the prism of the Sahara. It posits the Sahara Desert as an accurate analytical prism through which we can understand complex paradigms related to cultural identities in Algeria, and North Africa in general. I am interested in researching how colonial encounters in spaces like the Sahara shape and make visible, but also invisible different memories, histories and identities. More broadly, I am interested in 20^th and 21^st-century French and Algerian literatures, and I am currently researching the imprint of imperial legacies on postcolonial societies and how the latter resist but also perpetuate the colonial tropes in literary writing.