Fellows and Academics

I am a Professor of Freshwater Ecology in the Department of Zoology, and a Tutorial Fellow at Somerville.

My main research interest lies in understanding individual-to-ecosystem level responses to environmental change, including warming, invasion, pollution and habitat loss. I am particularly interested in interactions among these stressors, and how stressor effects cascade through food webs with implications for ecosystem processes and services. I use a combination of field studies across both natural and anthropogenic stressor gradients, manipulative experiments and meta-analyses to seek general predictive rules in multiple stressor effects. Most of my research is in freshwater ecosystems, spanning from the Arctic to the tropics.

My lab group’s website can be found at jacksonlab.co.uk

Sara Kalim read Classics at Somerville from 1990-94. She then spent 14 years in the media, working as Head of Development for two major television production companies. Her work included developing access and ideas, and fundraising for documentaries and current affairs programming.

Sara has most recently worked for the University of Oxford for three years at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Department of Politics and International Relations, where she held responsibility for financial and strategic planning, and played an instrumental role in securing journalism scholarships from a variety of funding sources.

As Director of Development, Sara oversees Somerville’s fundraising strategy and development, is responsible for fundraising campaigns (including for the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust and the Oxford India Centre), and heads up the Development Team. She is also a member of the College’s Management Team.

Sara has a long-standing family connection to India, with family coming from Patna, Bihar. She also studied at Somerville making her the perfect advocate to drive the further development of the Centre. Sara’s focus is on fundraising and profile-raising working with philanthropists and corporate partners.

If you are interested in making a gift, or are thinking about leaving a legacy, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

I teach French literature and language for the college and university.

Although I teach a wide variety of literature from the nineteenth century onwards, my main interest is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French culture. I’m currently working on the second volume of a trilogy of academic studies on the representation of consciousness and the unconscious mind.

The first volume, Writing the Mind, explored how writers since Marcel Proust have drawn on ideas from religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and science for their understanding of how the mind works, and reflected these ideas in the minds of the characters who people their fiction. From existentialist theories of consciousness in Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical novels to neuroscience and evolutionary theory in Marie Darrieussecq’s recent writing, by way of Freudian psychoanalysis in André Breton’s Surrealist texts or theological speculations in Georges Bernanos’s Catholic novels, the human mind has been presented in subtly and fascinatingly different ways across the course of the last century. I have been unpicking these differences in order to chart developments in literary representation, drawing up a cultural history of consciousness.

The second volume, Reading the Mind, examines the validity and usefulness of competing theories of the mind in literary criticism, and the final volume, Seeing the Mind, will focus these same concerns on film studies.

I also continue to speak and publish on topics relating to two previous monographs: the use and abuse of detective stories by French literary writers keen to explore themes of perception, reason and truth, and the state of narrative form in the contemporary French literary novel, conceived as a ‘return to the story’ in the wake of a period dominated by radical experiment.

I also maintain a lively interest in translation studies, and currently convene the Advanced French Translation course for the university. In 2007, I received the University Teaching Award for outstanding contribution to learning and teaching.

When I came to Somerville in 2010, I set up the college’s annual Study Day, offering sixth-formers a taste of the university experience, and I continue to be heavily involved in the college’s outreach programmes. I also set up the Modern Language Faculty’s Schools and Outreach blog ‘Adventures on the Bookshelf‘ a few years ago, which is full of information about modern languages as a subject, and applying and studying here.

I welcome enquiries from anyone considering taking an undergraduate or graduate degree at Somerville.

Adventures on the Bookshelf

My research focuses mainly on philosophy of language. I am particularly interested in the meaning of generic sentences, definite descriptions, proper names, and pronouns, as well as foundational issues in formal semantics. I also work on related issues in epistemology and ethics, and, more recently, the philosophy of AI.

At Somerville, I teach General Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Introduction to Logic, Ethics, Knowledge and Reality, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Logic and Language, and Practical Ethics.

Before Somerville, I taught at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and Magdalen College, Oxford, as well as the Linguistics Department at UCL.

I read for my DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Paul Elbourne and Prof Timothy Williamson. Before that, I read for a BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford, an MLitt in Philosophy at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling (SASP), and a BA in Philosophy at the University of Reading.

In addition to philosophy, I enjoy art, photography, and ashtanga yoga.

The goal of my research is to disentangle how a changing climate has impacted, is currently driving and will modify in the near future our natural forest ecosystems.

Much is still unknown about how tropical forests around the world are responding to an increasingly fast changing climate, and there may be regions that are or will experience stronger biodiversity shifts and may be in more need of protection or regulation.

Having grown-up in Guadalajara, one of the biggest cities in Mexico where not much nature is around, I decided to spend a year living with the indigenous “Rarámuri” community in Northern Mexico to learn from their vision of nature.

My research interests come from understanding the importance nature has on our livelihoods – something I learnt through my experiences with indigenous communities in Mexico and abroad.

I joined SoGE in 2017 to develop a project, at ECI School of Geography, to understand the role that plant functional characteristics play in the resilience of tropical forests. I am currently a Researcher Co-Investigator in the “Arboles” NERC funded project monitoring plant functional diversity by remote sensing in Latin American forests.

I am the Stipendiary Lecturer in Law at Somerville College, teaching Contract Law and Trusts Law. After reading for the BA in Jurisprudence at Somerville I trained and qualified as a solicitor. I then read the Bachelor of Civil Law as the Bingham Scholar in Law at Somerville College. I teach on the Company Law course and currently provide research assistance to Professors Jennifer Payne and Louise Gullifer in connection with the latest edition of Corporate Finance Law: Principles and Policy.

Qualifications and awards

• BA Jurisprudence (First Class), University of Oxford (2019)
• White & Case Prize in Company Law (2019)
• Qualified solicitor in England and Wales (2022)
• Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction), University of Oxford (2023)
• Bingham Scholar in Law, Somerville College (2022 – 2023)
• Law Faculty Prize for Corporate Finance Law (2023)
• Archibald Jackson Prize for Distinction on the BCL

Charlotte leads a programme of research which focuses on understanding relationships between clinical communication and behaviour change.

She currently holds an EDI-Themed Fellowship, from the THIS Institute, and previously held a Mildred Blaxter Fellowship from the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. She additionally holds research grants from the British Heart Foundation, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.

Her research has contributed to national guidelines, and she has advised government and policy makers. She is a member of the NICE Adoption and Impact Reference Panel, and an honorary member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics. In 2022 she was the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) Principal Investigator of the Year.

Charlotte is an experienced teacher and educator. Alongside her teaching role at Somerville she leads research methods courses within the Primary Care department and Medical Sciences division. She hold a postgraduate certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, awarded with Distinction.  In 2023 she was recipient of both the Medical Sciences Division ‘Excellent Supervisor’ award (recognising her significant contribution to supervision within the division), and the Society for Academic Primary Care Education Prize.

Key papers

• Clinician–patient communication about emergency aerial medical evacuation in case of infectious disease
• Relationship Between Clinician Language and the Success of Behavioral Weight Loss Interventions
• The importance of language in engagement between health-care professionals and people living with obesity: a joint consensus statement

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Oxford’s School of Archaeology and a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College.

As a geneticist working in an archaeology setting, my research sits at the intersection of natural and social sciences. Most of my work uses DNA from contemporary and archaeological populations to investigate how humans and the environment have shaped the genomes of species. I am interested in a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the process of domestication to the adaptation to novel habitats.

I am originally from Portugal, where I did my undergraduate in Biology at the University of Porto, followed by a master’s in Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution at CIBIO Institute. I then moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge on the topic of evolution of viral resistance. In 2018, I joined the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford where I am currently leading research projects that use Ancient DNA to investigate how humans and animals have interacted through time.

https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/people/alves-joel

Dr Susan Anthony is a Consultant Interventional Radiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where she served as Clinical Lead and Director of Radiology 2012-18.

Having qualified in 1992 from University College Hospital Medical School, London, she trained in Radiology at the Royal Free Hospital, London, before moving to Oxford in 2005.

Her specialist interests include Non-invasive Vascular Imaging, Cardiac Imaging, Intervention (including Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty, Aortic Stent Grafting and Uterine Artery Embolisation), Endovenous Laser Treatment for Varicose Veins, and Interventional Oncology (Transarterial Chemoembolisation, Selective Internal Radiation Therapy and Portal Vein Embolisation).

Suzie has an honorary senior clinical lecturer position at the University of Oxford. She teaches anatomyand radiology to undergraduate and graduate-entry medical students and enjoys introducing young doctors to the opportunities provided by image-guided intervention. Suzie has an active interest in current research and is section editor for European Journal of Radiology.