People

Lucy is Somerville’s Academic Registrar.

She runs the day to day operations of the Academic Office, including the coordination of undergraduate admissions.

You can find her in the Academic Office in House between 8am and 4PM, Monday-Friday.

Hi everyone! I’m Grace (she/her), a second-year Maths & Stats student here at Somerville and your IT & Communications Officer this year!

My main responsibilities include running the JCR website (the one you’re reading right now!) and social media (follow us on Instagram @somervillecollegejcr!) to make sure you can easily find all the information you need. So if you’ve ever used the college website’s JCR section to learn more about Somerville or come across any of the freshers’ week event promotions on Instagram, that’s me:) We’re actually trying to expand the information/functionalities of this website a bit this year, so if you have any ideas about what more could be included or just otherwise would like to contribute, please let me know! Feel free to reach out to me via Messenger or email (Yongqing Grace Yu / Yongqing Yu) should you have any comms/IT-related questions or concerns 🙂

My name is Shamsideen, but everyone calls me Shams. I am currently a DPhil student researching how iron deficiency affects immunological memory.

I have a mixed background, having lived all over the world: Uzbekistan (Asia), Ghana (Africa), Russia and Ashville, North Carolina (America). I generally stay physically active (strength training) and enjoy long distance running – one of my goals is to run the original marathon in Athens (Greece). As well as learning about the human body and mind through psychological, neuroscientific and now immunological studies, I’m fascinated by the ‘weird, mysterious and unexplained’ in the world around us, including subjects outside of conventional science. As a result, in my free time I enjoy reading about lost civilizations, ancient history and the most mysterious organ in our body- the brain. I also like painting/drawing and take great interest in art from the 14^th to 18^th centuries. 

I am a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community and a trained Samaritan. Come talk to me anytime! I am very excited to join the Somerville Community and contribute to this historic college.

Student Welfare Advisors are available to support students in crisis overnight and at weekends. We provide a listening, support and signposting service. WEcan listen, provide guidance and support if you’re experiencing difficulties such as personal problems, poor mental health, or other welfare/wellbeing matters.

I have undertaken the following training for my role as Student Welfare Advisor:

• First Aid Training offer by St John’s Ambulance
• Junior Deans Training offered by the University Counselling Service
• Health and Safety Training – Somerville Lodge Porters
• Fire Evacuation Training – Somerville Lodge Porters
• Data Protection and Security Awareness Training – Information Services
• Welfare Policy and Procedures – Student Welfare Lead
• College Rules and Procedures – Decanal Officer
• Supporting Refugee Students – We Belong

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

After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago from 2015-2018.

Dr Zaman is a historian of the modern British Empire, South Asia and global intellectual history.

Currently, she has two main areas of research. The first is a study of Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth century British India. She situates developments in the thought of these figures within a history of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline.

The second research area concerns history as an academic discipline in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and its relationship to the expansion and legitimisation of empire. To date, she has also written on memory and nostalgia, heritage and imperial visual culture and political visions of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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

I am a postdoctoral research assistant at the theoretical physics department of the University of Oxford. I work in the field of theoretical particle physics, the aim of which is understanding the final fundamental law of nature. In particular, my research is focussed on precision phenomenology for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

I am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). At Somerville College, I teach French Language, Translation, Orals and Essay.

I have been teaching French ‘language cafés’ and French ‘research-based language tutorials’ at the University of Birmingham since 2020. I have also been an English academic language tutor at AWAS (Academic Writing Advisory Service) for the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham since 2021. 

Research

My research interests revolve around colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa and the literary productions that emanate from these encounters. My PhD in French and Francophone Studies reads Algerian identity from the prism of the Sahara. It posits the Sahara Desert as an accurate analytical prism through which we can understand complex paradigms related to cultural identities in Algeria, and North Africa in general. I am interested in researching how colonial encounters in spaces like the Sahara shape and make visible, but also invisible different memories, histories and identities. More broadly, I am interested in 20^th and 21^st-century French and Algerian literatures, and I am currently researching the imprint of imperial legacies on postcolonial societies and how the latter resist but also perpetuate the colonial tropes in literary writing.

Professor Noa Zilberman is a network-hardware researcher, focusing on the integration of micro-level architectures and macro level, large scale networked-systems.

Before joining Oxford, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she spent close to 15 years in industry, last as a Chip Architect and Engineering Manager at Broadcom.

Rocco is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics and at the Oxford Martin School.

He completed his DPhil at the Oxford Department of International Development. His research focuses on social protection and labour markets. In his current work, he is using experimental and quasi-experimental methods to study the potential to leverage innovations in the design and delivery of social protection systems to increase household resilience to poverty in the context of extreme climate events such as floods and droughts. In the past, he has researched labour markets, inequality, poverty alleviation, poverty dynamics, and social stratification, using a variety of methods, including longitudinal surveys, field experiments, qualitative studies, and behavioural lab experiments.