Fellows and Academics

Since arriving at Somerville from Germany, I have come to appreciate what a unique form the tutorial is for tutors as well as students: it allows us to get to know students from when they first apply, encourage their intellectual curiosity, and see them spread their wings academically and personally over the course of their degree.

In Somerville, I teach students studying German from the first to the final year, advising them about and during their year abroad, which is part of the Modern Languages course. In the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, I give lectures on all aspects of medieval literature, often framing the past through current questions.

For the M.St programme, I teach an option on women’s writing, and I have supervised D.Phil. theses on topics ranging from medieval historical narratives and their relationship with fact and fiction to the cross-cultural links between German and Yiddish literature, on late medieval travel writing, constructions of space in narrative, concepts of enslavement in medieval culture and literature, and medieval women’s writing as a form of transfer between learned and urban spaces. I welcome projects which are interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary and international connections are important for cutting-edge research in the Humanities, and I have been fortunate to have been offered visiting professorships at the universities of Freiburg (G), Fribourg (CH), Munich, and Tübingen. The Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen has elected me as a corresponding fellow.

Over the last ten years, I have had the opportunity to serve the college and my faculty in leading roles, e.g. as Vice-Principal, or as head of department of one of the largest, most complex and most international faculties, finding a path for students and colleagues to meet the challenges of Brexit, Covid, and the war in Ukraine. In the faculty role, I have enjoyed working with the Humanities Development team in securing endowment funding for a key professorship and graduate scholarships, as well as spend-down funds for other key posts, such as an access and outreach post for the faculty.

Currently, I am leading the faculty’s application for accreditation under the Athena Swan gender equality charter. Expertise in medieval culture has often proved surprisingly helpful in this. My research is interested in interchanges between cultures, ways of transforming scholastic knowledge into lived experience through writing, and pre-modern culture as a way of questioning but also understanding the present. Together with Manuele Gragnolati, I founded the Somerville Medieval Research Group and am currently leading the fifth of our interdisciplinary projects ‘Post-Human Approaches to Pre-Modern Culture’.

Recent publications include ‘Including the Excluded’ in the Somerville Medieval Research Group volume on ‘Openness in Medieval Europe’ and essays on women’s use of song as well as the interrelationship between humans and nature. I have advised on aspects of medieval culture for a film production and took part in the ‘In our time’ programme on Hildegard of Bingen, in the Listeners’ Top Ten programmes. A full list of publications is available on my faculty webpage.

Ritheka Sundar holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Stella Maris College in Chennai. She aims to contribute towards building an empathetic society, with reduced poverty, so that people from marginalised social and economic backgrounds have an increased access to better opportunities and subsequently, a better life.

While performing research for a course in Agricultural Economics, she learned that women farmers are more constrained by the lack of access to land, technology, and financial resources.

In this light, she is specifically interested in analysing gender-based income inequalities within the agricultural labour market in India while also considering the effect the current trends in climate change can have on the target population. As one of the nine students chosen from her college to pursue the Millennium Fellowship in
2021, hosted by MCN and United Nations Academic Impact, she undertook a project on financial literacy to demystify personal banking and finance for college students in Chennai.

Ritheka has worked as a Senior Research Associate with The Parley Project, a youth-led organisation called where she has spearheaded the Prep with Parley Initiative that aims to improve students’ access to information related to graduate admissions process. She is currently a mentor at Project EduAccess, a non-profit initiative that aims to improve access to higher education for learners from marginalised communities in South Asia. Working with Bhumi, she volunteered as a mentor to engage students creatively and teach them about preserving the environment.

As a first generation student, she is deeply grateful for the support offered by the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD). Here, she aims to refine her research and work closely with the other scholars.

At Somerville, I teach Old English to first-year students and Middle English to the second years.

I also supervise finalists who have chosen to write dissertations on Old English or later medieval topics and authors.

In the English Faculty, I teach a wide variety of medieval literature to undergraduates, though I particularly enjoy lecturing on religious texts and cultures of the Middle Ages, and on modern and postmodern responses to the medieval. I am also very interested in interdisciplinarity, and regularly take students to workshops in the Ashmolean, where we have the opportunity to handle and discuss the Museum’s extensive collection of devotional artefacts, thinking about them in relation to literary culture. I also play a role in the provision of teaching for second and third-year students who have chosen to specialise in the literature and language of the medieval period (we call this Course 2). At graduate level, I supervise a range of MSt and DPhil students, particularly those who work on religious and biblical literature, and on devotional texts written by and for women. Current and recent DPhil students have worked on the language of suffering in thirteenth-century pastoral texts for women, the practice of prayer, the manuscripts of devotional texts, the Wycliffite translation of the Bible, the intersection between visual, material and literary cultures of devotion, the role of ‘otherworlds’ in religious texts, and the idea of compassion.

In my own research, I am interested in English religious literature of the early Middle Ages, particularly that which was intended for the use of female audiences. At the moment I am working on a collection of thirteenth-century prayers which were apparently composed for (and possibly by) a group of women living on the borders between England and Wales. These women seem to have been highly intelligent individuals, very possibly from wealthy backgrounds. Yet they chose to spend their lives in seclusion, voluntarily locked into small cells in which they could focus their attention on God. I am fascinated by what motivated them to live such lives, and by the books that they read in their isolation. My edition of these prayers (known collectively as the ‘Wooing Group’) is to be published by Liverpool University Press. I have also been commissioned by Cambridge University Press to edit a wide ranging, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the body in the global Middle Ages, The Body in Medieval Literature and Culture, c. 1000-1500. Below is a list of my further publications.

Kiri Te Kanawa is a New Zealand lyric soprano best known for her repertoire of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss.

After leaving school, she won various singing competitions in New Zealand and Australia, and in 1966, after a period as a popular singer and recording artist, she became a student at the London Opera Centre.

As a soprano, Te Kanawa shot to stardom in the 1970s with a series of appearances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and the enthusiastic support of conductors such as Colin Davis and Georg Solti. Her first big success was as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1971. That was followed by a run of Mozart operas and, among others, a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème in which she sang Mimi. Her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1974 as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello was widely acclaimed. In 1981 she sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and her rendering of George Frideric Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim” reached a worldwide television audience of more than 600 million. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1982. She received similar honours in Australia (1990) and New Zealand (1995).

In addition to singing in a great number of opera recordings, Te Kanawa produced a number of popular recordings, including such works as Kiri Sings Gershwin (1987), Kiri Sings Porter (1994), Kiri Sings Berlin (1998), and Maori Songs (1999).

Although in 2002 she began to scale back her appearances on the opera stage, she actively continued to perform concerts and recitals in connection with the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation (2004), whose mission it is to provide support and financial aid to struggling singers and musicians of New Zealand. In August 2009 Te Kanawa announced that she would fully retire from opera the following year. However, she continued to sing in public until 2016, when she performed her last concert. During this time she played Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in an episode (2013) of the TV series Downton Abbey.

Rajesh Thakker (FRCP, FRCPath, FmedSci, FRS) is the May Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

He was previously Professor of Medicine at The Royal Postgraduate Medical School, The Hammersmith Hospital, London, until 1999, when he took up his present position in Oxford.

His main research interests include the molecular basis of disorders of calcium homeostasis. He has published over 350 articles, and has been the recipient of many prizes which include Young Investigator Award from the ASBMR (USA), the Raymond-Horton Smith Prize (Cambridge University, UK), the Society for Endocrinology (UK) medal, the European Journal of Endocrinology Prize (EFES), the Graham Bull Prize from the Royal College of Physicians (UK), the Parathyroid Medal from the Fondazione Raffaella Becagli (F.I.R.M.O.), the Jack W. Coburn Endowed Lectureship from the American Society of Nephrology, and the Louis V Avioli Founder’s Award from the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (USA). In addition, he has served on the MRC Physiological Medicine and Infections Grants Committee (1994-1997), the MRC Clinical Training and Career Development Panel (1997-2000), the MRC Physiological Medicine and Infections Board (2000-2005), as Secretary to the Forum on Academic Medicine for the Royal College of Physicians (UK) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (2002-2005), and on the Council for the Society for Endocrinology (2003-2006). He has been Chairman of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) / MRC Efficacy and Mechanisms Evaluations (EME) Board since 2008. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014.

Benjamin Thompson (FHRS) is a medieval historian who specialises in the role of the church in society and politics between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation in England.

He is working on a book provisionally titled The Alien Priories Transformed: Church, Society and Politics in Late Medieval England which examines the ‘alien’ priories, lands and monasteries in England owned by French abbeys as a result of the Conquest.  These came under increasingly xenophobic scrutiny during the Hundred Years War, which provoked a public debate about the correct use of ecclesiastical resources.  Their eventual confiscation – more than a century before the Dissolution of the Monasteries – established the legitimacy of the secular power’s intervention in re-ordering the church.

Professor Thompson has investigated these broad themes across a range of material.  Recent articles have focused on the underlying ideology of the church in its relation to society and politics, for instance the tension between the clergy’s sense of difference from the laity based on their spiritual function of ministering to souls, and their practical integration into a society which embraced religious culture and practice, and in which they were powerful officials and landowners.

He explored the ‘polemic’ of ecclesiastical reform as part of the Somerville medievalists’ interdisciplinary research group’s second project: their book on Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse was published in 2015: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472425089

https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-benjamin-thompson

To respond adaptively in novel settings, intelligent agents must develop certain invariances (or abstractions) to map the infinite variety of the natural world to some smaller number of concepts, features, or values. Dr. Jessica Thompson investigates the computational principles that govern how those abstract representations develop through experience.

As a postdoctoral researcher in Chris Summerfield’s group at University of Oxford, she uses careful experimental design to establish the functional role of various computational ingredients in artificial neural networks trained on visual reasoning tasks. She completed her PhD at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music & Sound Research (BRAMS) and the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila) at University of Montreal where her research focused on characterizing and comparing representational hierarchies in artificial neural networks and the human auditory system.

Some chemotherapeutic agents, such as doxorubicin, have severe cardiotoxic side effects, which can lead to congestive heart failure in 5% of patients.

There are currently no imaging techniques available to detect patients before the onset of functional decline and there are no specific cardio-protective drugs. My research focuses on both the early detection of cardiotoxicity using the novel metabolic imaging technique, hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the repurposing of existing drugs that target cardiac metabolism as potential cardio-protective therapy. 

Before I came to the UK I trained as a vet at the Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany). I then undertook an MRes in “In Vivo Imaging in Biology and Medicine” and a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. During my PhD in Prof Kevin Brindle’s laboratory I used hyperpolarized MRI to assess tumour metabolism and redox state in mouse models of cancer. I was then awarded a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Immediate Postdoctoral Basic Science Research Fellowship to move to the Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG) at the University of Oxford. During my time in Prof Damian Tyler’s lab at DPAG I established a clinically-relevant rat model of doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity and found that hyperpolarized MRI can detect early changes in cardiac mitochondrial metabolism that precede functional decline. I am now in the process of testing existing drugs that boost mitochondrial metabolism and have some early encouraging data that shows prevention of functional decline with this approach in rats treated wit doxorubicin. 

In addition to my role as Career Development Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology, I am also the Isobel Laing Career Development Fellow in Medical Sciences at Oriel college. This involves tutorial teaching in metabolism for first year Medical and Biomedical Sciences students. I am furthermore a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College (since 2017), where I conduct tutorials in the ‘Organisation of the Body’ course for first year medics, for whom I am also personal tutor. In addition I offer FHS tutorials in cancer metabolism and I act as College Adviser to graduate students in Medical Sciences. In the past I was a Lecturer in Metabolism at Corpus Christi College (2016-2020). I am passionate about disseminating research to the wider public and have thus taken part in outreach events such as ‘Pint of Science’ and ‘FameLab’ as well as events organised by the BHF and Somerville College.

John Traill is a prominent conductor, composer, and educator.

He values musical endeavours at all levels and he fervently promotes music for all, with a particular focus in higher education. As Director of Music at St. Anne’s, John co-ordinates music across the breadth of the academic community. With twenty years experience combining freelance performance with academic positions at leading UK conservatoires and universities, John is currently also director of the Oxford Conducting Institute, the St Anne’s Camerata, Ensemble ISIS (the new music group at Oxford Faculty of Music), the City of Southampton Orchestra, and the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra.  Previous academic positions include acting Head of Performance at Bangor University, Teaching Fellow positions at Royal Holloway and King’s College, University of London, and lectureships at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and Bristol University.

Judith Unwin read Philosophy Politics & Economics at Somerville College and subsequently spent 35+ years in international banking in the City.

She initially joined the merchant bank Lazard Brothers & Co., Limited as their first female graduate trainee and worked in the Bank’s International Division arranging financing for infrastructure projects in a range of overseas markets. Having first visited India in 1984 she has been a regular and frequent visitor ever since. 

After 10 years at Lazard Judith joined ANZ Grindlays Bank in London specialising in South Asia, particularly India. She was appointed to various UK Government advisory positions including the South Asia Advisory Group under the auspices of the then Department of Trade & Industry and participated in many Ministerial Trade Missions to India. 

From 2000 she held a number of senior roles at BNP Paribas London the last being head of a team working with the international Development Finance Institutions and Multilateral Agencies. She was a founding member of the Indo British Partnership and subsequently Director and Chair of the Nominations Committee of the UK India Business Council (2008-2014). She took a sabbatical from the Bank in 2006 to travel to rural India researching and working with women’s self help groups and microfinance schemes and has supported several Indian charities. 

In parallel with her professional career, Judith has held a number of Non Executive Director and pro bono trustee roles. 

She retired from banking in 2016 and is currently Chair of Contemporary Applied Arts in London as well as being involved with an Adult Literacy programme.

Judith was awarded an OBE in 2000 for Services to Export promotion to South Asia.

In 2014 Baroness Vadera was appointed as the first woman to chair a major UK bank.

Her move to Santander follows a remarkable career that has seen her at the heart of banking, business and politics in the UK and abroad. We asked her about the global financial crisis, trouble in the Eurozone, the outlook for women in the workplace and the lessons she learnt from an exceptional childhood.

Hello there, I’m Gladson Vaghela, and I’m delighted to serve as your MCR Welfare Officer. I’m currently reading for my MSc in Global Health Science and Epidemiology. 

In my capacity as Welfare Officer, I’m dedicated to being your ally in navigating the challenges that may arise during your time at university. Whether it’s a health-related concern, a mental well-being issue, or if you just need someone to talk to, I’m here to provide a listening ear and guide you to the appropriate resources. Think of me as your personal signpost, directing you to the vast support network we have, from counselling services to health centres and all essential support groups. Additionally, I come from a background in medicine, which I hope brings an added layer of understanding and empathy to our interactions.

Reaching out for help can sometimes feel daunting—trust me, I’ve been there. But please know that I am always happy to hear from you, and confidentiality is a cornerstone of our interactions. Remember, no problem is too big or too small. University life is a journey with its fair share of ups and downs, and seeking help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

So whether you need assistance or simply fancy a chat over a cup of coffee, my offer stands—don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s create an inclusive and supportive community where each one of us can truly thrive.