Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Catherine Royle joined NATO in January 2015 as Political Adviser to the Commander at Joint Force Command Brunssum after a long career as a British diplomat. She joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1986 following studies at the Universities of Oxford (BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and Wales (MscEcon in Strategic Studies).

After an initial stint in London, Catherine’s first post was in Chile as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. She returned to the UK at the end of 1991 where she worked on various aspects of UK policy in Iraq until 1997. Catherine then served in Dublin as First Secretary for EU and Economic Affairs. From 2001-2003 she served as Head of the Policy Unit on the Convention for the Future of Europe. She acted as policy advisor to Peter Hain – the UK’s ministerial representative at the Convention on the Future of Europe – during the drafting of the proposed European Constitution (which later became the Lisbon Treaty).

Catherine spent seven years in Latin America where she served as Deputy Head of Mission in Buenos Aires, and then as British Ambassador to Venezuela where she worked closely with UK business to protect and promote investment in a politically volatile environment, and to build a partnership with Venezuela on tackling narcotic trafficking.

Catherine was posted to Kabul in September 2010 as Deputy Ambassador at the British Embassy. In August 2012 she took up the role as Head of the Secretariat of the International Police Co-ordination Board. In that role she reinvigorated the organisation and partnered the Ministry of Interior in developing a 10-Year Vision for the Afghan National Police (ANP)/Ministry of Interior (MOI), and initiating work on a series of 2-year rolling plans to promote implementation of the vision.

Catherine’s work on Afghanistan continued in Joint Forces Command, Brunssum (JFCBS). She was a regular visitor and firm supporter of ANP/MOI until the end of the NATO mission.

Her time in JFCBS has coincided with NATO’s return to its core mission of deterrence and defence. She has been actively involved in the defence planning for Eastern Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Catherine is also leading a project on assessing deterrence.

Catherine is Commodore of the NATO Tri-border sailing club. She has two surprisingly well-adjusted sons.

Dale Dorsey is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville.

He generally works on the intersection of morality, practical reason, and the good.  He also has substantial interests in the history of ethical thought, specifically with respect to the British Moralists, including Masham, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Mill.

He is currently pursuing a range of research projects, including a manuscript titled On Fellowship, another titled The Philosophy of Swine: Hedonism and Human Nature in the British Moralists, 1689-1861, and a general theory of metanormativity.

I am the Economics Fellow at Somerville.

I trained in Oxford, where I read PPE and then undertook the Economics MPhil; UCL, where I received my Economics PhD; and Yale, where I spent part of my PhD. 

I am an applied microeconomist with a policy-oriented research agenda. I am interested in understanding the behaviour of individuals, households and firms to the end of informing evidence-based decision-making by institutions including governments, courts and employers. Much of my work is motivated by the goal of uncovering and narrowing inequalities, especially gender inequalities. To allow me to investigate mechanisms and evaluate potential policy responses, I combine a structural approach with empirical analysis. To this end, I draw on microeconomic theory, mostly bargaining and game theory, in my work.

I am passionate about academic work having a concrete impact, and am affiliated with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), an influential UK economics think-tank. I also provide expert economic advice on antitrust cases. Between my MPhil and my PhD, I worked for three years as an economic consultant for Oxera, specialising in competition cases. I continue advising on cases, with a focus on using game theoretic models to investigate alleged anti-competitive behaviour of firms.

I also deeply enjoy teaching. Prior to starting at Somerville, I was a Stipendiary Lecturer at Jesus College, and have several years of experience teaching Oxford undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including microeconomics, maths for economists and game theory.

My research lies at the intersection of probability, statistics and computation, applied to problems in genetics.

I am interested in what we can learn about evolution by analysing sequenced genomes: for instance, through reconstructing the shared genetic history of a sample of individuals, we can gain insights into past demography, understand how genetic variation arises and how it is shaped by natural selection to produce the patterns we observe in the data. 

I am a planetary physicist and a Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Somerville. My research is focused on theoretical and numerical studies of the atmospheric dynamics and climate of exoplanets. This work covers a broad range of planetary climates, including the extreme atmospheres of close-in extrasolar gas giant (or “hot Jupiter”) planets, atmospheres of temperate Earth-sized rocky planets, and regimes in between. I completed my bachelor’s degrees in Geophysical Sciences and Physics at the University of Chicago and my Ph.D in Planetary Sciences in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. I was previously a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland before moving to Oxford in 2024.

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

Markos joined the University in September 2022 after spending three years leading the people strategy at the House of Commons. Prior to this, he spent over a decade advising on people practice and organisational development at London South Bank University, becoming its Group People Director in 2019. Throughout his career, Markos’ focus has been on improving workplace cultures, leadership capability, staff engagement and inclusion, and capability for digital transformation. Markos has a PhD in Modern European History from Kings College London, and has studied in his native Greece, as well as in Italy and the UK. He is a qualified executive coach, a Freeman of the Guild of HR Professionals, a graduate of the first cohort of McKinsey Senior Leadership Master Class for senior LGBT executives and a Stonewall Leadership programme alumnus.

Sarah Butler is the College Librarian and Head of Information Services.

She is responsible for managing the College’s extensive lending library and its special collections, including the College’s collections of pictures (as Keeper of the College Pictures), chattels and antiquarian books. Please contact Sarah if you have any queries about consulting or using the College’s collections.

Sarah also oversees the Archives, IT and AV services, and is the lead on Data Protection for the College. She is happy to answer enquiries on any of those topics.

Emily is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology.

She leads a research group investigating enzymes involved in stress-sensing, with a particular focus on oxygen-sensing enzymes in plants and their role in flood tolerance. She gained her BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Southampton and her DPhil in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine in Oxford.

Emily’s research uses a molecular approach to understand the structural and functional properties of enzymes involved in plant stress responses. This understanding will enable targeted manipulation of the activity of these enzymes. By correlating biochemical and biological studies, Emily will be able to identify and implement interventions that can improve plant stress tolerance. Ultimately, she hopes this will help reduce crop losses as a result of climate change.

Konstantina works in the field of fluid dynamics. She has extensive teaching and research experience in simulation approaches – based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and more recently Machine Learning (ML) – that support the virtual design of low-carbon footprint propulsion and energy systems.

She has also extended her research towards applying the numerical approaches she develops to the biomedical field (lung modelling and cryosurgery).

She graduated from the Department of Applied Mathematics at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2005, and obtained her PhD from Imperial College London (2010) with a thesis entitled “Stochastic and deterministic multiple mapping conditioning for jet flames”. She was awarded the prestigious Bernard Lewis Fellowship by the Combustion Institute in 2010 for the development of a novel turbulent combustion modelling framework (namely Multiple Mapping Conditioning, MMC).

Following her PhD she worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Imperial College London for two years, developing LES models for sprays in gas turbines, before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was appointed as a Research Scientist at the Mechanical Engineering Department for two years, and she led lead the CFD team of the MIT’s Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory. working towards developing numerical tools for the modelling of combustion instabilities and fluid mixing for hydrogen fuelled systems. She conducted academic research and teaching in different institutions in the UK and abroad including the University of Stuttgart, Imperial College, City University of London and University of Brighton, after which she joined King’s College London as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and an EPSRC-UKRI Innovation Fellow.

Konstantina’s research is at the forefront of fluid dynamics with more than 60 high impact peer reviewed articles. Recent papers have been selected as editor’s pick and featured as journal covers in various journals such as Physics of Fluids. She has been involved in various projects with industrial support and was also awarded the prestigious “Hinshelwood Prize” in 2012 which recognises meritorious work by a young member of the British Section of the Combustion Institute.

Konstantina trained as both an engineer and a mathematician and her research is at the crossroads between Mathematics, Engineering and Complex Systems, covering both applications and fundamentals. Particular emphasis in their research is given to fluid dynamics at extreme pressure and temperature conditions such as cryogenic fluids, flammable fluids and supercritical fluids.

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. 

Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College.

Professor Zaman has two main areas of research. The first concerns Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth-century British India. Here, Prof Zaman explores the ways in which Muslim thought developed within the context of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline. Her work on this subject has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, South Asia, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. It will form the subject of her first monograph, The Young Muhammadans.

Prof Zaman’s second area of research concerns the relationship between the British left, imperialism and Islam in the twentieth century. Her first publication on this subject explored the place of sovereignty in socialist thought and appeared in Twentieth Century British History in 2022. To date, Prof Zaman’s work has also engaged with heritage and imperial visual culture, memory and nostalgia, travel and internationalism, and Muslim historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has written for a wider audience via the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, the Fabian Review, and History Today.

Prof Zaman is broadly interested in supervising research projects that develop our understanding of Britain and its relationship to the wider world since 1750, particularly concerning the history of ideas.

Research Interests

• Political and intellectual history in global and imperial contexts
• The role of religion in the history of ideas
• The development of concepts around history and temporality
• Pan-Islamism and socialist internationalism

Academic Biography:

2015-2018 Dorothy and Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Chicago

2010-2014 PhD in History, University of Cambridge

2009-2010 MPhil in Historical Studies, University of Cambridge

2006-2009 BA in History, University of Cambridge

At Somerville I teach Renaissance English literature and Shakespeare to second and third year students, and the paper ‘An Introduction to Literary Studies’ to first years. I also greatly enjoy supervising finalists working on dissertations about early seventeenth-century poets such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert.

For the English Faculty at Oxford I give undergraduate lectures on a variety of seventeenth-century poets and writers. For graduates I teach a course in Renaissance palaeography and manuscript culture designed to assist MSt and DPhil students learning how to interpret early modern handwriting and to find & work with manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. I regularly supervise MSt dissertations, and welcome inquiries from DPhil applicants interested in early seventeenth-century poetry, manuscripts, devotional poets, and writing of the 1630s.

My research focuses on literature of the early seventeenth century, particularly the Caroline poets and the work of John Donne. I am currently completing a critical edition of James Shirley’s poems, and have published several articles and chapters about how Shirley’s writing was composed and circulated in the period. My edition will appear as a volume in The Complete Works of James Shirley, gen. eds. Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer, 10 vols (Oxford University Press). My previous work has focussed on the poetry of Henry Vaughan (1622-95) and on the work of poets he admired, including Ben Jonson and George Herbert. Alongside my Shirley edition I am also editing a volume of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, gen. ed. Peter McCullough, 13 vols (Oxford University Press, 2013- ) containing the sermons Donne preached to select audiences at private houses.

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

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.

Read Annie’s feature “Why English Matters”

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.

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.

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’!

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.

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.

Elena joined the Oxford University Biochemistry Department in 2014 as an independent group leader to study the structure and function of cell surface receptors in neural and vascular development.

‘Understanding how cells form tissues is important, because failure leads to developmental diseases and cancers. Specialised proteins are found at the surfaces of cells and direct their movements as tissues grow. My lab uses a range of cutting-edge techniques to understand how this works, especially X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, cell biology assays, confocal and super resolution microscopy.’

Learn more: http://seiradake.web.ox.ac.uk

Steve Rayner oversees the College’s academic activities, including admissions and outreach, and supports Fellows and Students in their teaching and learning.

He is responsible for overseeing the work of the College Access and Outreach Team, including Somerville’s regional work as part of the Oxford South-East consortium of colleges (see Oxford for South East | University of Oxford) and is a trustee of Universify Education. As a native of Stoke-on-Trent and a season ticket holder at Stoke City Football club for over twenty years, until that particular mix of joy and suffering was rudely interrupted by the pandemic, he is also particularly interested in access and outreach in Staffordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire. As a result, Somerville is a member of the Uni Connect partnership Higher Horizons+ (see Higher Horizons+ – Part of the Uni Connect Programme).

As Senior Tutor, Steve is responsible for the work of the Academic Office, which supports graduate and undergraduate students, along with tutors and Fellows, in their academic activities. This includes supporting Somerville applicants and selectors through the undergraduate admissions process here at Oxford.

Steve’s background is in Physics, specifically Very High Energy Gamma Ray Astronomy research, but his work at Somerville encompasses all subjects studied by Somervillians.

Stephen Roberts (FREng, FIET, MInstP, CEng, CPhys) is Professor of Machine Learning in the Department of Engineering Science.

He leads the Machine Learning Research Group and is Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems. His main research interests lie in the application and development of mathematical methods in data analysis and data-driven machine learning, in particular statistical learning and inference and their application to complex problems in science and engineering.

Recent research has focused on non-parametric Bayesian models for multi-sensor data fusion, system optimisation and network analysis. Particular emphasis is placed on the real-world applications of advanced theory and over many years he has applied these statistical methods to diverse problems in astrophysics, biology, finance and engineering as well embedding them in a variety of commercial and industrial settings.

As Treasurer and Domestic Bursar, Andrew Parker is responsible for the College’s finances and investments including legacies, building projects and maintenance, and commercial property, as well as Human Resources, health and safety, the College gardens, and the Bursary.

Andrew, who is a qualified accountant, has had an extensive career in Finance and Administration. From 1988-2002 he was Finance Director of Oxford University Press, as well as Group Financial Controller and Interim Managing Director of OUP’s International Division. From 2003 to 2013 he was Director of Finance and Administration at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with responsibility for Finance, HR, IT, Estates and Health & Safety, as part of the senior executive team.

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.

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.

Patricia went to a comprehensive school in London and, as the first in her family to go to university, did not even think to apply to Oxbridge… She particularly welcomes applications to study PPE from students at non-selective state schools.

Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought, and historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention. She was Principal Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought.