Fellows and Academics

Vilija is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law.

She teaches undergraduate courses in Constitutional Law and EU Law. She also leads seminars in Law and Public Policy for students reading for the MPP degree at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Previously, she was Emile Noël Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017–2018) at the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law.

Vilija completed her DPhil in EU Law in 2017 at the University of Oxford, thanks to the Weidenfeld-Roland Berger Scholarship and Oxford Law Faculty funding. During her doctorate, she also held a lectureship in EU Law, teaching at five colleges at the University of Oxford.

Vilija’s research interests include public law and EU constitutional law. Her DPhil thesis examined the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union in shaping the EU’s constitutional order. It was supervised by Prof. Stephen Weatherill and Prof. Anne Davies.

As a Louis Dreyfus-Weidenfeld Scholar, Vilija graduated with Distinction from the Magister Juris (2012) and from the MPhil in Law (2013). Her MPhil thesis focused on the status of the right to strike in the EU after accession to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Vilija completed her Bachelor of Laws (2008) and Master in International Law (2010) degrees at the Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she graduated first in her class for both degrees.

I arrived in the UK in 1993 to take my fellowship in Somerville and lectureship in the Physics Department. The UK is my fourth country after my native Poland, Switzerland and Germany where I lived and worked for many years; quite a long journey from state schools in Poland to Oxford. In 2019 I retired my Tutorial Fellowship to become a Senior Research Fellow.

Most of my research so far has been in experimental particle physics but in recent years I have been moving my main interests from particle to accelerator physics. In plasma (ionised gas, for example hydrogen), using a laser, one can move electrons away from ions creating a huge electric field; many orders of magnitude bigger then what one can get using current technology. Such a field can be used to accelerate particles and to build accelerators beyond the Large Hadron Collider era and beyond current X ray sources (synchrotron radiation), like Diamond near Oxford. Acceleration using plasma would move particle physics to a new territory and simultaneously would make tuneable wavelength, short pulse X ray sources affordable for Universities and hospitals.

My main expertise in particle physics is in the design of wire chambers and calorimeters and on physics beyond the Standard Model as well as on some aspects of Quantum Chromo Dynamics. I worked at the following accelerators: CERN: PS, ISR, SPS; and DESY: PETRA, HERA. At John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science at Oxford University, I am leading the Lasers for Accelerators (L4A) group.

Besides physics, I am working on a small family farm and I am a keen swimmer; I am holding one national swimming record in my age group.

My advice to my students: Only beginners compete. When you go to a higher level, your aim is quality.

I teach Biology at Somerville, and most of my teaching concerns plant biology because this is the interesting part of the subject.

In the first year the topics I cover include plant life histories including pollination, biological classification, the use of plants in medicine, the emergence of agriculture, and conservation.  In the second year I teach about plant adaptations (particularly those found in Mediterranean-type regions), ecology, and ethnobotany.  In the final year I run an option on species conservation and I teach on the Tenerife Field Trip.

Prior to coming Somerville I worked at the Oxford Botanical Gardens and Harcourt Arboretum for the best part of 34 years, the last 26 as Horti Praefectus (i.e. director).  My particular interests are plant conservation and the genus Euphorbia which is a fascinating group of 2000 species found all over the world.

http://www.timothywalker.org.uk

Stephen Weatherill works on the constitutional, institutional and substantive law of the European Union.

He serves as Deputy Director for European Law in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, and is a Fellow of Somerville College.

His research interests embrace the field of European Law in its widest sense, although his published work is predominantly concerned with European Union trade law. . He is the author of LAW AND VALUES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION (Oxford University Press, 2016), PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE IN EU SPORTS LAW (Oxford University Press, 2017), THE INTERNAL MARKET AS A LEGAL CONCEPT (Oxford University Press, 2017), CONTRACT LAW OF THE INTERNAL MARKET (Intersentia, 2017), EU CONSUMER LAW AND POLICY (Edward Elgar, 3rd edition, 2013), CASES AND MATERIALS ON EU LAW (Oxford University Press, 12th edition, 2016) and co-author of CONSUMER PROTECTION LAW (Ashgate Publishing, 2nd edition, 2005, with Geraint Howells), EUROPEAN ECONOMIC LAW (Dartmouth Publishing, 1997, with Hans Micklitz), and WEATHERILL AND BEAUMONT’s EU LAW (Penguin Books, 3rd edition,1999, with Paul Beaumont). The areas in which he has published papers in journals and edited collections in recent years include; the impact of subsidiarity in EU law; the involvement of the EU in private law; aspects of “flexible” integration in Europe; the elaboration of strategies for the management of the internal market; sport and the law including the ruling in BOSMAN; and the law and practice of product safety.

In Oxford, his teaching interests focus on EU law. He has taught on the European Business Regulation course, as well as Constitutional Principles of EU Law and and Competition Law, offered to BCL and Mjur students, and also teaches at undergraduate level.

Before joining the Oxford Faculty, he held the Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at the University of Nottingham, and he has also previously held positions at the Universities of Manchester and Reading since beginning his academic career as a research assistant at Brunel University a long time ago.

Premila Webster is an Academic Associate at the University of Nicosia Medical School.

Dr Webster holds MBBS, DA (UK) and MSc (Public Health Medicine) from London University, and MFPHM (UK), FFPH (UK), DLATHE and DPhil from Oxford University.

Her research interests includes examining the impact of urbanisation on health and issues related to tobacco control.

Jennifer Welsh is a Professor in International Relations and a Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford.

She offers courses to undergraduates and graduate students in various sub-fields of International Relations; acts as supervisor to masters and doctoral students; and sits on a variety of College and Departmental Committees. Jennifer is also the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict within the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She was previously the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect.

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.

Matthew Wood is Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Head of the Medical Sciences Division (http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/support-services/matthew-wood) in the University of Oxford. His laboratory is based in the Department of Paediatrics.

Matthew graduated in Medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1987, working in clinical Neuroscience before gaining a doctorate in Physiological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 1993. His research team works on developing gene therapies for degenerative disorders of the brain and muscles – so-called neuromuscular diseases. This is exemplified by landmark work using small DNA patches called oligonucleotides to correct the genetic abnormalities underlying the fatal childhood muscle disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Further information is available at Professor Wood’s page with the Oxford Neuroscience and Department of Paediatrics.

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

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.