Fellows and Academics

I am the Lord and Lady McNair Early Career Fellow in Law at Somerville College, teaching Criminal Law and Constitutional Law. My doctoral research, supervised by Professor Laura Hoyano and funded by the Gopal Subramaniam OICSD scholarship, examined how rape adjudication takes place in India.

Prior to taking up doctoral studies, I read on the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) programme and the MPhil in Law at Oxford as a Cornelia Sorabji Scholar. I also hold a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from the National Law University, Delhi (India).

Awards and Previous Qualifications

• BA, LLB (Hons), National Law University Delhi (July 2017)
• Bachelor of Civil Law, University of Oxford (July 2018)
• Master of Philosophy in Law, University of Oxford (October 2019)
• Awarded Archibald Jackson Prize for securing a Distinction on the BCL
• Awarded Suresh Shroff Gold Medal for First Rank Holder of Batch of 2012-17, National Law University, Delhi.
• Recipient of Cornelia Sorabji Scholarship by Somerville College, University of Oxford and Goa Education Trust (British Council) Scholarship to pursue Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) at University of Oxford for the year 2017-18.
• Recipient of Somerville College Alumni Scholarship and scholarship by Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) to pursue MPhil (Law) at University of Oxford for the year 2018-19.
• Recipient of Gopal Subramanium Scholarship by OICSD Somerville College to pursue DPhil (Law) at University of Oxford starting October 2019.
• Awarded Modern Law Review Scholarship 2021.
• Awarded Mike Redmayne Award for research into Criminal Law and the Law of Evidence (MLR) 2022.
• Awarded Best Doctoral Student Prize at the Society of Legal Scholars’ Annual Conference 2023.

Renier is a plant biologist interested in understanding the manipulation of plants by microbial plant pathogens.

His research activities also aim at improved recombinant glycoprotein production in plants and pioneering activity-based proteomics in plant science.

Renier was born in Leiden, the Netherlands in 1971 and was fascinated by plant biology from early childhood. He studied chemistry at Leiden University and focused soon on plant molecular biology and biochemistry. After his graduation in 1996, he started his PhD in Molecular Phytopathology (Wageningen University, Prof. Dr. Pierre de Wit), where he worked on the tomato Cf resistance proteins.

He continued working on Cf proteins in Wageningen as a postdoc, and started his own research program by introducing and applying activity-based protein profiling in plants. To further develop the technology he joined the phosphoproteomics group of Dr. Scott Peck for one year (Sainsbury lab, John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK).

He initiated the Plant Chemetics lab in October 2005 at the Max Planck Institutes of Cologne and Dortmund as part of the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society. His research group operated independently from the departments at the Max Planck Institutes while he trained twelve MSc students, nine PhD students, eleven postdocs and over 30 visiting scientists.

In October 2013, he was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Sciences of the University of Oxford, and elected Tutor in Plant Sciences at Somerville College. His research focuses on the use of chemical proteomics to uncover novel host manipulation mechanisms employed by microbes when colonizing the apoplast.

http://www.plantchemetics.org

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=6UPEEfUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

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

I am a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

My main research interests are in the ‘human side’ of the future of work, the emotional bases of political behavior, and the economic determinants of subjective wellbeing (or “happiness”).

My work has been published in various academic journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and American Journal of Political Science. I am also passionate about science communication and public engagement, and have written about my research for various outlets including Harvard Business Review, VoxEU, The Conversation, SPSP Character & Context, The Hill, and UN World Happiness Report. My research has also been featured by news outlets including The Economist, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, The Atlantic, Business Insider, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

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

He retired from the Jacques Delors Chair in European Law in 2021, and is now Professor Emeritus in the University and a Senior Research Fellow of the 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; and the law and practice of product safety.

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.

My thesis explores failures of feeling in relation to the tradition of highly emotive, Passion-centred medieval devotion known as ‘affective piety’.

While late medieval devotional texts often work to stimulate the devotee’s compassion through affective meditation and emotive rhetoric, we also find references to devotees failing to feel as they ought, responding to divine suffering not with tears, but with apathy, frigidity or even callousness. I focus on these ‘stony-hearted’ devotees to ask: what are the challenges of feeling according to the affective logic of medieval devotional texts? What are the consequences of feeling isolated from your emotional community’s dominant affective paradigms? Where might resistance to those affective paradigms ultimately lead? My research breaks new ground in reading for strains in medieval affective piety traditions. It represents a significant contribution not only to medieval studies, but to wider histories of marginal, difficult, and disruptive (un)feeling