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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

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.