Support Staff

Professor Phillips holds the Professorship in Linguistics, and he currently is head of department (“Faculty Board Chair”) in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, a department whose existence owes a great deal to the efforts of legendary Somervillian Anna Morpurgo Davies, Professor of Comparative Philology from 1971-2004.

Professor Phillips returned to Oxford in 2024 after 33 years based in the United States. As an undergraduate student in Oxford he came to Somerville for tutorials in medieval German. Later, in a career spent mostly at the University of Maryland, where he retains a part-time role, he built an interdisciplinary research programme on the moment-by-moment processes involved in speaking and understanding, drawing on diverse languages and methods from linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and computational modeling.

Beyond his primary research focus, Professor Phillips is also a passionate evangelist for language science. During more than two decades in Maryland he built a broad community of language scientists that spans 17 departments and centres across the university, from education to engineering, leading to the creation of the Maryland Language Science Center, a unique interdisciplinary hub that he directed from 2013-2023. As part of these efforts he led innovations in postgraduate training that trained 100 PhDs from 10 fields. In Oxford he is working on building connections across language experts across the university.

Outside work, Professor Phillips is enthusiastic about community building through running and walking. He supported the spread of parkrun events in Maryland and across the US, and in Oxford he supports healthy communities through his role in the weekly University Parks parkrun and the Oxford University Cross Country Club.

Recent publications

Colin’s website

Hey, I’m Chloe the First Generation and Low Income Student Rep in the MCR.

I am a first year DPhil Student in Primary Healthcare Sciences, exploring Sarcoma and AI using social science research methods, I’m a Sociologist by background. I am also a first-gen student! In the coming year I will be running some events and workshops within the MCR to support the first gen and low income graduate students. Outside of my DPhil I am a powerlifter, coffee lover and reader.

Feel free to contact me with any concerns or queries.

Matt leads Somerville’s Communications team.

Matt manages Somerville’s social media presence and website, as well as working on the team’s regular publications and reporting on College life and research. 

Luke Pitcher teaches ancient Greek and Roman literature.

He is principally interested in the writing of history in antiquity. His recent works include Writing Ancient History: An Introduction to Classical Historiography (London, 2009) and chapters in the Blackwell Companions to Julius Caesar and Greek and Roman historiography. At present he is engaged in a study of the historian Appian.

Hey! I’m Lucy, one of two of Somerville’s LGBTQ+ Reps. Our role is to represent and support the queer community at Somerville. This mostly involves running events, but it also includes supporting student welfare and running the Gender Expression Fund (GEF). Our biggest events are the LGBTQ+ Formal, a formal dinner held in Michaelmas; and Pride Week, but there are smaller events on almost every week.

I am a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at UCLA. Previously, I was Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford.

I was also a Tutorial Fellow in Somerville College. Before then, I studied at Caltech and Cornell, before a postdocs at Georgia Tech and and Berkeley.

I am also a die-hard fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter (@masonporter). I am also involved with the Legends of Caltech movie and co-edited Legends of Caltech III.

I joined Oxford as the Sybille Haynes lecturer after an enjoyable career as a content developer for museum exhibitions and visitor attractions in New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, and the United Kingdom, between degrees from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), University College London, and the University of Oxford.

These experiences have given me special interest in the stories we tell about the past through its material culture. My research focuses on using archaeology, and in particular architecture, to reconstruct the beliefs, institutions, and economies of societies with little or no surviving literature. I am especially interested in how the remains of buildings reveal information about perceptions of the divine and the role of cult, as shown by my work on the civic, social, and economic functions of temples in Archaic central Italy. My research also challenges traditional divisions between pre-Roman and Roman archaeology by examining continuities in material culture and refining our perceptions of early Rome.

My teaching likewise spans pre-Roman and Roman material. I teach papers on the archaeology of Italy between the Iron Age and end of the Roman Empire, and have special interests in Roman art and the archaeology of religion.

Dr Alice Prochaska is a historian. She was Principal of Somerville from 2010 to 2017 and a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 2015 to 2017.

An alumna of Somerville, she holds both her BA and DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Her career has spanned museums, archives and libraries, working both in national organisations (the UK National Archives and the British Library) as well as universities on both sides of the Atlantic (University of London, Yale and now Oxford). Dr Prochaska is a Fellow and one-time Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. She has managed large staffs of scholars, librarians and archivists, and has chaired national and international boards and committees dealing with archives and scholarly resources. She is currently chair of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust and the Institute of Historical Research Trust, a commissioner of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, member of the General Federation of Trade Unions Education Trust, and an adviser to the OP Jindal Global University and other organisations in India. During her tenure as Principal of Somerville, she was instrumental in establishing the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust, and in securing additions to student accommodation in the College. Her current scholarly interest focuses on the history of cultural restitution, and the relationship between national heritage and national identity, with a special interest in the period of the Second World War.

Find out more about Alice Prochaska here.

Dr Frank Prochaska is an historian of modern Britain and the author of a number of critically acclaimed books.

He was born in America but has lived much of his life in Britain and has dual nationality. He has taught at universities on both sides of the Atlantic and in recent years taught British history at Yale. He moved to Oxford in 2010, where he became a member of Somerville and Wolfson Colleges. He has been a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London University, and a Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. He lectures and reviews widely and contributes to media programs and the press in Britain on such subjects as contemporary social policy and the monarchy. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London University, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Somerville. As a scholar of Victorian social reform and ideas, he helped to establish the programme of work on the John Stuart Mill Library and its rich store of Mill annotations that is currently underway in Somerville.

See more about Frank Prochaska here.

Professor Pulman’s research interests are in computational linguistics: the development of computer programs that behave as if they understood English. He is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, and is currently a senior researcher at Apple, working on Siri.

Susan has worked in Somerville Library for thirty years, and before that was an undergraduate at Somerville.

She deals with most of the day-to-day running of the Library, and with ordering books; she also has a long-term project to catalogue the College’s antiquarian and special collections. She is usually to be found in the main Library office, except when buried in the depths of the stacks. She has a cataloguing blog where you can follow her progress (or lack of it) in cataloguing.