Fellows and Academics

Professor Simon is a physicist interested in quantum effects and how they are manifested in phases of matter.

He has recently been studying phases of matter known as “topological phases” that are invariant under smooth deformations of space-time. He is also interested in whether such phases of matter can be used for quantum information processing and quantum computation. Before coming to Oxford, Dr. Simon was a research director at Bell Laboratories, an industrial research laboratory.

Dave Simpson manages all aspects of the College’s Catering and Conference activities.

Nisha Singh is a senior postdoctoral researcher in psychopharmacology at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford.

Prior to this, she worked at King’s College, London where she trained in PET imaging as part of an MRC funded program. Nisha completed her DPhil in Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. Her project involved identifying and developing a repurposed drug, ebselen, for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Ebselen is currently undergoing a clinical trial in Oxford for efficacy in mania. Nisha has a keen interest in drug and biomarker development, especially in the field of psychopharmacology.

Justin is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Masters program in Mathematical & Computational Finance.

Justin’s research lies at the intersection of applied mathematics, machine learning, and high-performance computing and is focused on theory and applications of Deep Learning. Justin develops deep learning models for large financial datasets such as: high-frequency data from limit order books, loans, and options. He is also developing deep learning methods for constructing partial differential equation models from data, which has a variety of applications in science, engineering, and finance.

Justin received his PhD from Stanford University and holds a Bachelors degree from Princeton University. He was a Chapman Fellow at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College. He was awarded the 2014 SIAM Financial Mathematics and Engineering Conference Paper Prize.

Jacqueline is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow in the Coles/ Dendrou Lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology.

Jacqueline’s research focus is to understand the role of early human B cell response (extrafollicular response) which has a vital role in rapid antibody production. By integrating human challenge models, ex vivo cultures, and single-cell genomics, she aims to address a fundamental immunological question about early human B cells and their impact on long-lived antibodies. Findings may facilitate tailored nextgeneration vaccination and adjuvant strategies to enhance long-term memory responses.

Iyiola Solanke is Jacques Delors Professor of European Union Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Somerville College.

Professor Solanke was previously Professor of European Union Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds Law School and the Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the University. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i School of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law and Harvard University School of Public Health.  Professor Solanke is a former Jean Monnet Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She is an Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple.  

Her research focuses on institutional change, in relation to both law and organisations. Her work adopts socio-legal, historical and comparative methodologies. She is the author of ‘EU Law’ (CUP 2022), ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law’ (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti- Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017), as well as many articles in peer reviewed journals.  

She founded the Black Female Professors Forum to promote visibility of women professors of colour, and the Temple Women’s Forum North to promote engagement between legal professionals and students in and around Yorkshire. In 2018 she chaired the Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL and she is currently leading two research projects: Co-POWeR, an ESRC-funded project looking into the impact of COVID on practices for wellbeing and resilience in Black, Asian and minority ethnic families and communities; and Generation Delta, a RE/OfS-funded project promoting access to and success in PGR study for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women. 

Other current projects focus on legal protection from weight discrimination as well as de-colonising European Union law. 

Professor Southerden’s main area of research is in medieval Italian literature, particularly the works of Dante and Petrarch and early lyric poetry.

Academic background

Francesca Southerden holds a BA (Honours) in Italian and French from Somerville College, Oxford and a D.Phil in Italian literature from Hertford College, Oxford. Before joining Oxford she was Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-16) and Mary Ewart Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College (2007-10).

Research

Francesca Southerden’s main research interests are in medieval Italian poetry, particularly Petrarch’s lyric poetry and Dante’s Commedia. Her most recent book, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (Legenda, 2022), explores the significance of the garden for Dante and Petrarch’s thinking about language and desire and how the authors reimagine Eden in their poetic works. This book develops, within a medieval context, the concern with the relationship between desire, subjectivity, and poetic space that was at the heart of her first monograph, Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (Oxford University Press, 2012). She recently co-edited, with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi, The Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford University Press, 2021) and, with Manuele Gragnolati co-authored, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy (ICI Berlin Press, 2021). She is interested in the relationship between literature and critical theory, including affect studies, ecocriticism, and queer theory, and in lyric studies from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her current projects, which include both collaborative and single-authored projects, involve ecological and comparative ways of thinking (with) medieval poetry.

Teaching

Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature – including Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and thirteenth-century lyric poetry – to undergraduate and postgraduate (MSt and MPhil) students. She regularly supervises DPhil students in Italian, many of whom are working on interdisciplinary projects in medieval studies. In addition to being Professor of Medieval Italian at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Somerville College, Professor Southerden holds the post of Lecturer in Italian at St Catherine’s College and at Lady Margaret Hall. Prior to Oxford, she held the post of Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-2016). 

A list of publications can be found on Professor Southerden’s departmental page.

Charles Spence is Somerville’s Fellow and Tutor in Experimental Psychology, and the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory.

He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His work calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.

Over the years, Charles has consulted for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design, packaging, and branding. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the Crew Work Station on the European Space Shuttle. Charles and his group are currently working on problems associated with the design of foods that maximally stimulate the senses (together with Heston Blumenthal, chef of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray). His group also has a very active line of research on the design of auditory, tactile, and multisensory warning signals for drivers and other interface operators (together with Toyota). Charles is also interested in the effect of the indoor environment on mood, well-being, and performance (together with ICI).

Charles has published over 500 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last 15 years. Charles has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, not to mention the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition, for his groundbreaking work on the ‘sonic crisp’!

In Somerville, I teach and oversee students at all levels, from Freshers encountering Victorian Literature for the first time to Finalists working on their dissertations or revising for their exams.

Having worked with students from Admissions interview to graduation, I am always pleased to hear of their progress post-Somerville, too.

In the English Faculty, I usually give lectures on Romantic Literature.  I frequently give public lectures to general audiences on aspects of English and Scottish Literature, as well as on the cultural importance of Trees and Flowers.  I supervise MSt courses and dissertations on Romantic Literature, Place and Nature Writing.  Doctoral students, whom I’ve supervised, have worked on topics ranging from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Clare, Byron, Austen, Hogg and the Shelleys to Romantic Theatre, Travel Writing, Romantic Children’s Literature, Eighteenth-century novels, Irish and Scottish Poetry.  As chair of the Environmental Humanities Network at TORCH, I am part of a team promoting work from different disciplines in Place, Nature, and the Environment.  We work closely with the Oxford/National Trust partnership and the Heritage network at TORCH and, in 2019, organised a workshop on ‘Post-Conflict Landscape’.  With Professor Seamus Perry, I also convene the long-running Romantic Research Seminar, which meets regularly throughout term to welcome speakers from other institutions as well as discussing papers from established and early career scholars in Oxford.

I regularly participate in Radio programmes, including Radio 4’s Natural Histories and In Our Time, and have written and delivered or contributed to several series for Radio 3’s ‘The Essay’, including ‘The Meaning of Trees’, ‘The Meaning of Flowers’, ‘The Meaning of Beaches’, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Forests’.  In 2018, I delivered a walk-and-talk documentary, ‘Keats Goes North’, following in the footsteps of John Keats.  As a member of the Atlantic Archipelago Research Consortium (AARC), which is committed to exploring the local distinctiveness and rich cultural heritage of the coastal regions of Britain and Ireland, I have contributed to events, conferences and collections, including the Unencompassing the Archipelago Conference at Somerville in 2015.  I enjoy working with artists and art historians and have contributed to Calum Colvin’s art books, Jacobites by Name and The Magic Box and Tate Britain’s ‘In Focus’ project on William Dyce’s painting, Pegwell Bay.  I have longstanding research interests in Ossian, Austen, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Cowper, Heaney, Carson, literature of the Romantic period, place and nature writing (old and new), Scottish poetry (post 1700), dialogues between English, Irish and Scottish literature, literature and the visual arts, contemporary poetry.  As well as academic writing, I write on place and nature for wider audiences and in 2019 my play, The Dimlight Hours was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I am currently writing volume V of The Oxford History of English Literature: The Romantic Period, 1785-1830 and a book on Place, and editing, with Nicholas Allen, an anthology of the literary magazine, Archipelago.

Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM)

Richard Stone (FREng, FSAE, FIMechE) is one of Somerville’s Engineering Fellows, having been one of the first men to join the Governing Body of Somerville College in 1994.

Professor Stone is a world-renowned authority in the mobility industry, and the author of Introduction to Internal Combustion Engines, arguably the definitive textbook on the topic. His research interests are the modelling and measurement of combustion and heat transfer in spark ignition engines, cryogenic systems, and the measurement of laminar burning velocities in zero gravity.

Read Professor Stone’s retirement feature in the Somerville Magazine

The distinguished jurist Gopal Subramanium is a former Solicitor General of India and a Senior Advocate of the country’s Supreme Court.

Mr Subramanium was born in 1958 in Bangalore, and studied law at the University of Delhi. He was the youngest lawyer to be designated a Senior Advocate by India’s Supreme Court and has appeared as lead counsel in a number of landmark cases. Between 2009 and 2011 he served as Solicitor General of India, and was presented with the National Law Day Award for Outstanding Jurist by the President of India in 2009. One of Mr Subramanium’s most important contributions to legislation in India was to improving India’s sexual violence laws.

Somerville is a place where anybody who is interested in discovering himself and more importantly solutions for the world will find a vital wellspring of opportunity.

GOPAL SUBRAMANIUM

Mr Subramanium is a generous benefactor of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Developement. He endowed the Gopal Subramanium Scholarships in honour of his teacher His Holiness Shri. Bharati Tirtha. The scholarships support talented Indian postgraduate scholars to study at Oxford, with the first matriculating in 2017. He also supported the college choir’s tour of India in December 2018, which featured concerts and workshops with disadvantaged children in Goa and Mumbai.

In 2019, Mr Subramanium was elected as a Foundation Fellow of Somerville, the College’s highest recognition for philanthropy.

In its commitment to tackling the pressing challenges of the world, Somerville must be regarded not merely as an avant garde institution of promise and ability, but one that is deeply committed to the fundamental canons of humanism.

GOPAL SUBRAMANIUM