Fellows and Academics

Dr Pelagia Goulimari is the Co-Director of the MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Co-Director of Intersectional Humanities at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and a Senior Fellow in Feminist Studies.

Her research interests include fiction and non-fictional prose in English (1790-present); women’s writing; literary theory and criticism; the modern and the postmodern. She teaches on Literature in English from 1740 to present day; Introduction to Literary Studies; women’s writing; literary theory and criticism; and feminist writing and theory.

She is also the founder and General Editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, published by Routledge. Established in 1993, Angelaki is an international journal in literary and cultural theory and Continental philosophy published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes four themed and two open, ‘General’, issue per volume. Angelaki is one of the most accessed of Routledge’s 200+ arts and humanities journals (c. 100,000 full-text downloads and c. 2,500 libraries in 2021). Included in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, it is ranked A* in the literature category in the European Reference Index for Humanities of the European Science Foundation. In 1996, it was awarded ‘Best New Journal’ by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. It has published over 1000 articles, including work by: Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Andrew Benjamin, Homi K. Bhabha, Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, Alain Caillé, Barbara Cassin, Howard Caygill, Monique David-Menard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Costas Douzinas, Alexander García Düttmann, Michèle Le Doeuff, Mike Gane, Lawrence Grossberg, Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Ihab Hassan, Leslie Hill, Peggy Kamuf, John Kinsella, Friedrich Kittler, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Douglas Kellner, Jacques Lacan, Ernesto Laclau, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, John O’Neill, Jacques Rancière, Nicholas Rand, Bill Readings, Leonard Rosmarin, Nicholas Royle, Stella Sandford, Michel Serres, Paul Virilio, Robyn Wiegman, Robert Young, Slavoj Žižek.

Manuele Gragnolati is Full Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Associate Director of the ICI Berlin, as well as Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.

He studied Classical Philology, Medieval Studies, and Italian Literature at the Universities of Pavia (BA and MA), Paris IV-Sorbonne (MA) and Columbia in NYC (PhD).

Before joining the University of Paris-Sorbonne, he taught at Dartmouth College from 1999 to 2003 and from 2003 to 2015 at the University of Oxford, where he was Full Professor of Italian Literature. A significant part of his research, including his first monograph “Experiencing the Afterlife”, focuses on Dante and medieval literature and culture, especially on the significance of corporeality in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century eschatology.

He is also interested in the concept of linguistic subjectivity from Dante’s “Vita Nova” to the present, in modern appropriations of medieval texts, and in feminist and queer theory. He has written a substantial commentary on Dante’s Rime and published essays on medieval and modern authors. His second monograph “Amor che move” offers a ‘diffractive’ exploration of body, language, desire in Dante and authors who have engaged with Dante’s oeuvre in the late twentieth century from a “feminine”/feminist and queer position.

Manuele Gragnolati enjoys studying and teaching literature for its critical potential to challenge normative ways of thinking and is particularly interested in texts that propose different figurations of reality, whether in the past or in the present. He believes in an interdisciplinary approach to culture and in collaborating with colleagues with different intellectual histories and backgrounds. At the ICI Berlin he has run several interdisciplinary projects on Dante, Elsa Morante, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, which have often resulted in collective volumes.

From 2020-23, Sarah Gurr’s research interests in crop disease, with particular emphasis on fungal infestations and in their global movement and control, have led to a series of high impact publications and invitations to speak all over the world. Amongst these recent publications are:-

• Stukenbrock, E and Gurr, SJ (2023) Address the growing urgency of fungal disease in crops. Nature 617 31-34
• Johns, LE, Bebber, B, Gurr, SJ and Brown, NA (2022) Health threat and cost of Fusarium mycotoxins in European wheat. Nature Food 3 1014–1019
• Cannon, S, Kay, W, Kilaru, S, Schuster, M, Gurr SJ and Steinberg, G (2022) Multi-site fungicides suppress banana Panama disease, caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense Tropical Race 4. PLoS Pathogens https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal. ppat.1010860 (SG and GS as CAs)
• Kilaru, S, Fantozzi, E, Cannon, S, Schuster, M, Chaloner, T, Aragones, CA, Gurr, SJ and Steinberg,G (2022) Zymoseptoria tritici white-collar complex integrates light, temperature and plant cues to initiate dimorphism and pathogenesis.  Nature Communications 13, Article number: 5625
• Fisher, M et al (2022) Tackling the emerging threat of antifungal resistance to human health. Nature Microbiology Reviews https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-022-00720-1
• Chaloner, T, Gurr, SJ Bebber, DP (2021) The global burden of plant disease tracks yield under climate change Nature Climate Change https://www.nature.com/art/s41558-021-01104-8
• Fones, H, Bebber, D, Chaloner, T, Kay, William T, Steinberg, G, Gurr, SJ (2020) Threats to global food security from emerging fungal and oomycete crop pathogens. Nature Food doi: 10.1038/s43016-020-0075.
• Chaloner, T, Gurr, SJ, Bebber, D (2020) Geometry and evolution of the ecological niche in plant-associated microbes. Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16778-5.
• Steinberg, G, Schuster, M, Gurr, SJ, Schrader, M, Wood, M, Kilaru, S (2020) A lipophilic cation protects crops against fungal pathogens by multiple modes of action Nature Communications https://doi.org/ 10.1038/s4146-020-14949-y.
• Patents –  Antifungal compositions WO2020201698A1 and GB2202216.4

There have been 5 press releases associated with these papers and some of this work featured in articles in The Guardian; The New York Times (Children’s board game “monkey puzzle” Christmas Day 2022); The Toronto Star; The Daily Mail; The Independent; as well as on BBC World News, Live Science News Hour and various other media channels.

Over the past 2 years Sarah has been appointed to The International Advisory Board at SLU University, Uppsala, as Advisor to The Scottish Government on Plant Health (RESAS) and as a member of Plant Heath Scotland (James Hutton Institute). She has also been elected to Board of Trustees of The Rank Foundation, the East Malling Research Trust and The Wolfson Science and Medicine committee.

She holds a Visiting Professorship at Utrecht University, is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Fellow of American Academy of Microbiology, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by SLU Uppsala. Her work with UK and Scottish Government has guided to a policy paper and a Parliamentary Bill (Plant Health and Biosecurity, and Crops and Gene Editing, 2022 and 2023).

Oliver graduated with a first-class degree in Medicine from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

During his medical studies, Oliver was involved in numerous research projects, studying the effects of neurotrophic growth factors at the University of Helsinki and the binding properties of a stimulant substance methcathinone on dopamine receptors at the University of Tartu.

In 2015 he took a year off of his medical studies to come to the University of Oxford and examine the role of D1/D2-like and 5-HT2C receptors on goal-directed actions, funded by the Archimedes Fund from Estonia.

Oliver is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford as a member of the Sharott Group and the Walton Group (Experimental Psychology). His research focuses on the role of the projection from prefrontal cortex to the dorsomedial striatum in co-ordinating motivated action, with a particular focus of elucidating the circuit disruptions leading to poverty of movement in Parkinson’s disease. He aims to use these experiments to develop closed-loop deep brain stimulation approaches for the treatment of motivational deficits.

Jim Harris is the Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, and an art historian specialising in late-medieval and early-Renaissance sculpture.

At the Ashmolean, he is responsible for exploring the use of the Museum’s collections in the university curriculum, devising and delivering classes and courses across a wide range of disciplines and training faculty and early-career researchers to deploy objects and images in developing their own teaching practice.

He has been an Academic Visitor at Somerville since 2017 and a member of the Somerville Medieval Research Group, building a number of long-standing teaching partnerships with members of the college.  He has taught the college’s English undergraduates alongside Dr Annie Sutherland every year since 2012.

Jim trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and later, after over a decade in theatre and television, as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute. He wrote his PhD thesis on the polychrome sculpture of Donatello, and held the Courtauld’s Andrew W Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship in Conservation before coming to Oxford.

“My research has been focused on the materials and techniques of sculpture, and especially in the question of how three-dimensional surfaces are transformed by polychromy, the addition of paint, gold and inlays, and by the subsequent, successive alterations, deliberate or by chance, that they undergo during their lifetimes.

I completed my PhD in German Studies at Yale University in 2019. Prior to that, I received an MA in German Literature from the University of Hamburg (2013) and a BA in German Studies and Political Science from the University of Münster (2009).

I have taught undergraduate courses on German-speaking literature, philosophy, and culture at Yale, Hamburg, and Goethe University Frankfurt. Currently I teach at several colleges across the university, including Somerville.

My research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, with an emphasis on 20th-century German literature and critical theory. I’m currently working on my first book, a genealogy of the idea of contemporaneity (“Zeitgenossenschaft”) in modern thought, literature, and the arts from the early 19th century to the present day. Other areas of interest include philosophical theories of literature, Marxism, aesthetics, contemporary literature and visual culture.

Research Interests

Henry Hung joined Somerville in October 2023 as a Fulford Junior Research Fellow. He is also a Lecturer in Biology at Magdalen and St Hilda’s.

His main research concerns the adaptation and genomics of forest trees. He started his research in tropical forests in Southeast Asia. He is now shifting his focus to temperate forests in Europe and North America. He also conducts research in Wytham and Blenheim in Oxford.

He currently co-chairs the Ecological Genetics Group and serve in the Events Committee of the British Ecological Society. He is named a National Geographic Explorer in 2022 for his research on critically endangered rosewood trees. His research on rosewoods is featured in the University News: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/features/race-save-world-s-most-trafficked-wild-species

He graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in Biology, triple-minoring in Environmental Science, German, and Music. He then read his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Tin Hang Hung (洪天恒) is a Cantonese name. First name is ‘Tin Hang’ altogether, surname is ‘Hung’. There is no middle name. ‘Henry’ is the preferred alternative name.

Professor Lorna Hutson (1976, DPhil English) is Merton Professor of English.

Professor Hutson’s work focuses on the interrelations between early modern Enlish literary form and other forms of cultural practice, including economics, law, and national conception. Her monograph The Invention of Suspicion won the Roland Bainton Prize in 2008, and The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 won the Bainton Reference Prize in 2018. Her current project – England’s Insular Imagining – studies how early modern literature spanning multiple genres contributed to the conception of England as the whole island of Britain. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.