Support Staff

Chris Bamber and the IT team are responsible for maintaining and developing the College IT network infrastructure and systems and for the College computers and printers. They can also give some advice on the purchase of computers.

Chris has been with the College since December 1997 when he took up the new created position of Computing Officer. The role allowed the college to provide professional IT services to staff and students on a full-time basis.

Since then Chris and his team have kept the college’s ICT infrastructure current through one of the fastest technological growths over the last two decades.

Professor Caroline Barron is a medieval historian whose research centres on the late medieval period in Britain.

She served as President of the London and Middlesex Archaelogical Society from 2008-2011 and as President of the British Association for Local History since 2016. She is also a former President of the Somerville Association.

She was appointed OBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to education.

Alice Barron is a violinist and collaborator based in London.

She enjoys a varied career combining orchestral, chamber and solo performances with improvisatory and multi-disciplinary projects. Specialising in contemporary and intercultural musics, recent performances include projects with Nigel Kennedy, Jean-Luc Ponty, L. Subramaniam and with Sam Lee at WOMAD festival in Australia and New Zealand. Alice’s collaborative work is genre-spanning and draws on her experiences studying South Indian violin techniques.

Janet Bately is Sir Israel Gollancz Professor Emeritus of English Language and Medieval Literature, King’s College, London.

A student at Somerville College Oxford, she began her academic career at Birkbeck College London, where she was successively Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader, moving to King’s College, London as Professor of English Language and Literature in 1977. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and made CBE in 2000. Still actively engaged in research, her specialisms are in Old English language and literature, and bilingual dictionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries.

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.

In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.  In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For more information, see Professor Bell’s departmental web page.

Mahek Bhatia is reading for the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law. She is interested in the intersections between feminist legal theories and criminal justice, specifically within the context of marital sexual violence.

Previously, she served as an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer at Warwick Law School during her LLB, where she actively engaged with various departments and committees to represent student concerns.

As your Disabled Students’ Representative, she is interested in making available resources more accessible to students, and building a community and forum for students to voice their disability-related concerns. Please feel free to reach out to her to voice any issues you may be facing, or if you just want to chat.

Elaine and the Treasury team are responsible for the College accounts, banking and finances, for student fees and battels, for payments to suppliers, for invoicing, for loans and grants to students including vacation and hardship grants, and for general advice on financial matters, particularly in cases of financial difficulty.

Doreen Boyce (1953, PPE) is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville and former Provost and Dean of Faculty at Chatham College (1974-1980).

An influential campaigner for equal opportunities in the workplace, she was President of the Buhl Foundation (1982-2007) and founded the Executive Women’s Council to provide a source of collective support and influence for professional women.

I’m Alfie (he/him) and I’m super excited to work be one of your welfare officers this year!

I am a big music fan, playing, writing, streaming, singing, going to gigs or whatever else, (did someone say top 0.5% Taylor Swift fan on Spotify?). I also love baking, so if you have cooked up any cool creations please send me pics and I will be very jealous of you for getting to eat them!

Our role as welfare officers is to make sure Somerville is a place where people can feel comfortable, welcome, and able to talk freely about any mental health issues they may be facing. Despite restrictions in England having been almost completely eased, coronavirus is still likely to impact student experience this year, so we want to make sure that you can access all support available to you. We’re here to provide non-judgmental support for any concern you might have. I have completed 24 hours of peer support training to develop the necessary skills to support students. Katie will do the peer support training in Oxford as soon as they can.

We’ll also be hosting fortnightly welfare teas where you and your peers can come and enjoy all the (free!) snacks and take some time out of your hectic Oxford life to relax. Members of the welfare team will also be there, but there’s no obligation to talk to them if you’re just in it for the free food and chill. In 5^th week (aka welfare week) we’ll be hosting tons of events to help fight off those pesky 5^th week blues (activities normally include a bouncy castle and having alpacas visit on the quad, a cookie fairy and much more!!).

I have held several lectureships at different colleges. I have taught modernism and literary theory to 1st years at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (Stipendiary Lectureship: 2022), modernism to 1st years at Somerville, Oxford (Retainer Fee Lecturer: 2023) and will be teaching part of a literary theory course as well as the modernism course again to Somerville first years in 2024 (Retainer Fee Lectureship). I have also taught 3rd year exchange students from the U.S. and am supervising several 3rd year dissertations (on Ocean Vuong, Irish Literature, the Harlem Renaissance and 20th century Utopian fiction). 

My research focuses on 20th Century Literary Theory; Modernism (from Woolf, Joyce, Beckett to the Harlem Renaissance); 18th-19th century German Thought (Kant, Hegel, Marx and the German Romantics); Structuralism and Poststructuralism (from de Saussure to Derrida and Giorgio Agamben); Economy and Economic Theory, in particular the intersections between literature and economy (as found, for instance, in the novels of Daniel Defoe and Dickens, the poetry Baudelaire and Ezra Pound, and the philosophy of Jean Joseph-Goux); Theory of the Novel (particularly Lukacs and Benjamin); J.M. Coetzee and South African fiction.