People

My research focuses on syntax and how it interfaces with other aspects of linguistic structure, in particular with intonation and information structure.

I have worked with spoken and written data from languages including Hungarian, Japanese, and Slovenian, as well from different dialects of British English. In my research, I work within the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).

At the undergraduate level, I teach grammar and syntax to Prelims and FHS students in lectures, classes, and tutorials. I am proud to have been shortlisted three times in the category Most Acclaimed Lecturer (Humanities) at the OUSU Teaching Awards, and to have won the award in 2014 when I was a Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics.

Further information is available on my website.

Professor McNay’s interests are in continental social and political thought and feminist theory.

She has a particular interest in the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists.

Professor McNay is currently Vice-Principal of Somerville College. 

Renaud Lambiotte is a Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems.

His main research interests are the modelling and analysis of large networks, with a particular focus on clustering and temporal networks, and applications in social and neuronal systems. He is Associate Editor for Science Advances and a Turing Fellow. See more here.

Renaud Lambiotte has a PhD in Physics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Following postdocs at ENS Lyon, Université de Liège, UCLouvain and Imperial College London, and a Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Namur, he is currently Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.

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

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 broad interests are in Greek History and Religion, especially late Classical and Hellenistic, as well as in the cultures and history of ancient Anatolia.

More specifically, I focus on the Hellenistic Period, especially priesthood and the link between ethnic and religious identities.

I am currently engaged in a study of the religious landscape and cultural identity of pre-Attalid Pergamon. Stemming from articles on the religious identity of Attalid Pergamon this is evolving into a long-term research project with regular research output of article length but also ultimately a monograph that will bring together much interdisciplinary research and, I think, will be of interest to a wide scholarly community. At present I am investigating the genesis of the cult of Dionysus in Mysia as well as the possible identification/ association of the Attalid hero Telephos with the Hittite divinity/ ruler Telepinu.

I am also beginning work on a comprehensive study on ‘Satyrs in the Hellenistic World’, trying to approach the phenomenon of the satyr in visual and textual culture not from an art-historical but cultural perspective. Apart from looking at the religious dimension and investigating the role of the satyr in Dionysiac worship the study will relate the figure of the satyr to the expressions and responses of Hellenistic societies, both local and transregional.

Julie Dickson (LLB, Dip. L.P. Glasgow; MA, DPhil Oxf.) is Professor of Legal Philosophy in the Faculty of Law, and Fellow and Senior Law Tutor at Somerville College. After completing an undergraduate law degree at the University of Glasgow in her native Scotland, and a D. Phil in Philosophy of Law at Balliol College, Oxford, she held lectureships at the University of Leicester and University College London before taking up a Fellowship in Law at Somerville College in 2002.

Professor Dickson works mainly in general jurisprudence or philosophy of law, and especially on methodological issues, and her publications on this topic include her books, Evaluation and Legal Theory (2001), and Elucidating Law (2022). She is also interested in theoretical aspects of transnational law, especially European Union Law, including the theory of legal systems in the EU context. Together with her colleague Professor Pavlos Eleftheriadis, she co-edited and contributed to Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law – Julie Dickson, Pavlos Eleftheriadis – Oxford University Press (oup.com)

Professor Dickson teaches Jurisprudence and European Union Law at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has been the recipient of a University of Oxford teaching excellence award and nominated for an “Outstanding Tutor” award in the student-led Oxford Students Union teaching awards. She serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Transnational Legal Theory, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Problema, and was the Review Articles editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies from 2003-2016.

Professor Dickson’s latest book on the methodology of Legal Philosophy, Elucidating Law, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. The book won the 2024 Alice Tay Book Prize for excellence in legal theory awarded by the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR).

Personal website (academic and bird photos): https://julie-dickson.academicwebsite.com/

Her current research includes the following articles/chapters:

J Dickson, ‘Law Unromanticized: Law in a Negative Light and Experience-Sensitive Engagement’ in A Green, J Jowitt, S Shah (eds.) Dialogues on Jurisprudence: Bridging the Analytic-Critical Divide (forthcoming, Routledge 2026)

J Dickson, ‘Authority and Methodology: can theories ‘come out negative’? (forthcoming, Problema, 2026)

Julie is a keen amateur photographer with a particular interest in wildlife photography.

See also the interview on the Jurisprudence in Oxford subject page: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/jurisprudence-oxford/julie-dickson

I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music, and a Tutorial Fellow at Somerville.

My main research interests lie in music and migration, intercultural relations, and collective voice. One strand of my research focuses on the musical lives of migrant and former refugee communities, in emigration, diaspora and resettlement. Another focuses on the functionalisation of music as public pedagogy to enable self-representation and address intergroup conflict. In other projects I’ve examined the construction and experience of ‘diversity’ in secondary school music curricula. My current project is a community-engaged diasporic study about the interface between the musical voice and global labour migration, particularly in relation to Overseas Filipino Workers.

I publish on these topics in journals and edited volumes across ethnomusicology, community music, and music education, and have served on the editorial boards of International Journal of Community Music and Research Studies in Music Education.

My teaching for the Music Faculty includes convening courses on ‘Foundations in the Study of Music’, ‘Music in the Community’, ‘History and Philosophy of Music Education’, and ‘Music Education: Practice and Pedagogy’. In addition to these courses, at Somerville College, I provide tutorials for the modules on ‘Musical Thought and Scholarship’, ‘Critical Studies in Ethnomusicology’, ‘World Jazz’, and ‘Women in Popular Music’. 

Recent postgraduate supervisees’ dissertation titles include, ‘Institutional music education and public pedagogy in Afghanistan’ (DPhil), ‘Music and trust in international relations: Bilateral relationship between Canada and France’ (DPhil), ‘Black musicians and accessibility to music education and the classical music industry, UK and US’ (MPhil), ‘Music integration programmes for migrants in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’ (MPhil).

My work centres on inflammatory diseases, and I lead the Experimental Neuropathology Laboratory at the University of Oxford in the Department of Pharmacology.

As a Fellow of Somerville College and an Honorary Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, my research explores the effect of systemic inflammation on the outcome of central nervous system (CNS) injury and disease. I also investigate circulating extracellular vesicles in CNS diseases and the role of cytokine production in neuropsychiatric disorders.

My career started with a Ph.D. from University College London in 1994, followed by a British Biotech Fellowship in Oxford focusing on CNS metalloproteinase expression. Downstream, this research has led to clinical trials with protease inhibitors in inflammatory diseases, including COVID. My work has also identified new biomarkers for disease diagnosis and progression in human and veterinary medicine, using a mix of in vivo and molecular biology, immunohistochemistry, MRI/PET imaging, and metabolomics.

After a Lecturer position in Neurobiology at the University of Southampton, I returned to Oxford in 2004 to further my research on the neurobiology of inflammation. My work is has led to over three hundred publications and patents. I was made Chair in Experimental Neuropathology in 2015 and I was awarded a Fellowship by the British Pharmacological Society in 2020. At Somerville College, my focus is on educating future medical professionals, combining my research insights with teaching.

At Somerville College, I teach physiology and pharmacology to preclinical and graduate entry medical students.

For a full list of publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1380-6655

My research is in representation theory, an area of mathematics concerned with the study of symmetries.

I am particularly interested in unitary representations of reductive Lie groups and Hecke algebras in the framework of the local Langlands correspondence.

My research has been recently supported by the EPSRC grants “New Horizons” EP/V046713/1 (1/2021-12/2023) and EP/N033922/1 (09/2016-08/2020).

At Somerville, I teach Prelims and Part A Pure Maths tutorials. In 2017, I was awarded an MPLS Teaching Award. I am currently the Academic Lead for Prelims and Part A in the Maths Institute.

Hi, I’m Abigail (or Abbie – either one works!). I am a DPhil student in Education interested in higher education and social mobility. My research explores the long-term impacts of widening participation initiatives and how former participants narrate their experiences. I received my bachelor’s degree in History and Politics and my master’s in Education, Globalisation, and International Development. I then moved to Bristol (my favourite city in the UK!) where I worked in Higher Education regulation. Outside of my research, you will most likely find me reading a non-fiction book, doing something creative like scrapbooking, or spending time with friends. I’m also learning how to DJ which has been lots of fun. I am really excited to be part of the welfare team and the community at Somerville. Please feel free to get in contact if you have a welfare concern, need support, or just want to have a chat!

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

• First Aid Training offered 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
• Welfare Policy and Procedures – Student Welfare Lead
• College Rules and Procedures – Decanal Officer
• Level 2 Generalist Safeguarding – Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership

Dr Giovanbattista Califano is a Non-Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College.

He is also a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Naples Federico II, where he obtained his PhD in Food Science (Doctor Europaeus) in 2025. His research examines how consumers choose food and drink and how much they are willing to pay for them, combining methods from economics and psychology. His current main research interest is generative AI in the food domain, both as an object of study and as a research tool, from consumer responses to AI-generated food images to the use of large language models as synthetic respondents. Personal website: https://califano.xyz

Dr Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy completed her PhD in French at the University of Cambridge.

She then held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Oxford Department of International Development , Refugee Studies Centre, alongside the Sir William Golding Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose College. Along with Somerville, she holds a permanent lectureship at Christ Church College. Ashwiny’s interests are in life writing, documentary films, postcolonial and contemporary literature. Her first monograph, Locating Hybridity (2015) focused on the novels of Ananda Devi, her second monograph, Migrant Masculinities (2021) centred women’s writing from Cameroon, Senegal, Mauritius, Algeria, Vietnam and China and based in France and Canada. Her latest monograph, Refugee Afterlives (2024)  examined two generations of Vietnamese diasporic writing. Ashwiny has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on a book on refugee children’s narratives. 

I am a DPhil candidate in Economics (Magdalen College), originally from Brisbane in Australia.

I am also a member of the British Open-Ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD), and a research affiliate in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. My supervisors are Maximilian Kasy, Noam Yuchtman, and Jakob Foerster. 

My main interests are in machine learning theory and empirical political economy. My research aims to develop methods in high-dimensional econometrics, natural language processing, and deep learning, and to apply these to study political institutions and representation. I am also interested in the theoretical foundations of modern statistical learning, and how to build useful models in science.

I help organise the Machine Learning and Economics group at Oxford, and am a co-founder of the UK Graduate Econometrics Network (UK-GEN).

Rafael (Ardi) Echevarria is Stipendiary Lecturer in Music (Analysis and Musicology) at Somerville and St. Catherine’s Colleges, Oxford.

Ardi’s research theorises musical form, drawing on cross-disciplinary discourses to advance historical and cultural understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Asian music. He earned his PhD at Durham (2026), supported by the AHRC’s Northern Bridge Consortium and the Ramsay Centre’s Postgraduate Scholarship. Prior to Durham, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard (2024) and earned Master’s (2022) and First Class Honours (2019) degrees at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. This disciplinary and international breadth lies at the heart of Ardi’s research, teaching, and professional service.

Ardi’s primary speciality lies in nineteenth-century musical form. His PhD theorised the concept of ‘sonata reformation’ to explore analytical, historical, and hermeneutic issues surrounding contemporary formal theory. Reformation addresses key debates in nineteenth-century Formenlehre in dialogue with Adornian philosophy and disability studies. Portions of this research have been published in Music Analysis in an article rethinking the relationship between analysis and hermeneutics through the case study of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Ardi’s work on Mendelssohn was awarded the TAGS prize at the Society for Music Analysis 2024 student conference

More recently, Ardi has cultivated an interest in Filipino art music. In particular, he is investigating in Filipino symphony’s transnational entanglements and its postcolonial implications for twentieth-century musical history in the Philippines. As part of this project, he has been researching the composer Sufonias Aguinaldo, whose 1934 ‘Filipinas’ Symphony is one of the earliest complete works in the genre. Preliminary findings of this research were presented at the RMA’s 2026 Southeast Asia Chapter conference, where it earned the Springer Researcher Prize.

As a teacher, Ardi bridges scholarly divides between music theory and musicology to enable in-depth exploration of historical and cross-cultural debates. At Sydney, Durham, and Harvard, he has taught music theory and musicology classes across both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He cultivates students’ research skills and critical thinking by integrating close musical analysis with wider interdisciplinary discourses. In 2025, his teaching was recognised by Durham’s Early Career Educator Award in a university-wide competition.

Ardi’s global background involves cultivating diverse academic communities across institutional, professional, and societal networks. He is a trustee of the Society for Music Analysis and chair of its Formal Theory Study Group. Previously, he was secretary for the Musicological Society of Australia’s Sydney chapter and chair of the Early Career Researcher committee of Durham’s Centre for Nineteenth-century Studies. In these roles, he has organised scholarly events and conferences to foster connections across a range of disciplines, with a particular concern for the professional development of early career academics.

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and at Somerville College.

Prior to joining DPIR in 2026, I was an LSE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I received my PhD in International Relations from Queen Mary, University of London in 2023.

I am a scholar of International Relations, International political theory, and colonial history, with a particular interest in theorising the historic relationship between race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality.

My current book manuscript, The Global Aryan: Transnational Hierarchies in British India, traces the idea of the Aryan race back to its imperial roots in the encounter between British imperialists and Hindu upper-caste elites, from early colonisation in the eighteenth century to Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. The book analyses key ideas and infrastructures that have given rise to contemporary alliances between Western reactionary politics and Hindu supremacism. I have published on this research in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

My new manuscript project, Romantic Authoritarianism of the South, interrogates the centrality of the Romantic movement to contemporary postcolonial politics. With an empirical focus on authoritarian regimes in the Global South, I understanding Romanticism as a heterogenous set of global intellectual lineages exceeding the political spectrum as well as conventional notions of imperial metropole and periphery.

Finally, I also hold a keen interest in interpretivist research methodologies, especially thinking about how we as scholars of global politics make judgments and pronouncements across scales of time and space, and between the abstract and the concrete. I have published on this research in European Journal of International Relations.

Teaching

I convene the MPhil paper on Historical and Interpretive Methods, lecture on the MPhil paper on Research Design and Methods, and teach the MPhil Core paper, as well as the undergraduate paper on International Relations. 

I am the proud recipient of two LSE Class Teacher Awards. 

Siân Wilson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Oxford Machine Learning in Neuroimaging Group, led by Professor Ana Namburete in the Department of Computer Science.

Her research weaves together neuroimaging analysis, maternal–fetal medicine and developmental neuroscience, with the aim of modelling how maternal exposures affect early brain development across a global population.

Siân’s work addresses a global health equity problem in early-life brain imaging: much of what is known about the developing human brain comes from MRI studies in high-income settings, but MRI is costly and hard to access in many of the places where the burden of adverse pregnancy outcomes is greatest. In contrast, ultrasound is part of standard care and is used routinely worldwide. Siân’s work brings computational neuroscience methods to ultrasound, to make quantitative study of the fetal brain possible at a global scale, and to characterise how factors such as maternal health and physiology influence the brain before birth. At Oxford, her work is supported by the Gates Foundation.

Siân has a background in Neuroscience, with an MSc from UCL and a PhD from King’s College London, completed on the MRC Institute of Translational Neurodevelopment Doctoral Training Programme. Her doctoral work developed a bespoke pipeline to study structural connectivity in utero, using fetal diffusion MRI, as part of the Developing Human Connectome Project. She then held a position as a research fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, in the group of Professor Ellen Grant (2024–2025), and was awarded a Global Exchange Fellowship from the International Brain Research Organization.

Flavia is the Co-Director of the Master of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

Flavia’s research and advisory work focuses on social policy, particularly in the development of social protection systems in low- and middle-income countries. Her work emphasises the critical role of these systems in addressing unprecedented challenges related to demography, technology, and climate change. She has a specific interest in social pensions, collaborating with governments and international organisations on the feasibility, design, and impact of such policies.

Flavia holds a PhD in Government and Public Administration from Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, a MSc in Development from the University of Reading, a MSc in Corporate Governance and Business Ethics from Birkbeck, University of London, and a BA in International Relations from the University of Brasilia, Brazil.

Professor Rachel Upthegrove MBE, MBBS, MPhil, PhD, FRCPsych

Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
Director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford Health
Chair of the NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration.

Rachel trained in Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital, University of London and completed Psychiatry training in Birmingham. Her research focuses on the identification of novel treatments for early stages of schizophrenia, and she leads the UKRI funded Psychosis Immune Mechanism Stratified Medicine Study (PIMS), a collaborative multi-stage project investigating inflammatory mechanisms of psychosis. Her translational research includes NIHR funded Early Psychosis Informatics into Care (EPICare) platform. She is chief investigator and co-investigator on a number of RCTs for repurposed and targeted treatments. She was recognized in Kings Birthday Honours in 2024 for services to Mental Health Research and Life Sciences.

Danijela is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oxford. Her research combines experimental and correlational methods and focuses on two areas: language, memory and cognition, particularly in second language learning and use; and language, literacy and academic attainment among university students who use English as an additional language.

She read English Language and Literature at the University of Belgrade before completing an MPhil and PhD in English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Oxford, she held academic posts at several UK universities, most recently at the University of York, where she was Professor of Second Language Education and research leader of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Education.

Danijela has been a visiting scholar at universities in Thailand, Japan and the Netherlands, including Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Chuo University in Tokyo, and the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. She has served as President of the European Second Language Association, founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of the European Second Language Association, and an associate editor of The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics.

Hello and welcome to Somerville College. I work for the University Counselling Service and am also the designated Counsellor in this college on Wednesdays during term-time from 10.30am – 6.30pm.  You can contact me via email at college.counsellor@some.ox.ac.uk and find me in college in room Park 06.

If you wish to speak to me or another counsellor outside the college or on another day of the week you can contact the central counselling service at counselling@admin.ox.ac.uk

A bit about me

Having completed my first degree in English and Psychology, I enjoyed a riotous career as an advertising creative in 1980’s London.   During this hedonistic period I also worked for Central London Samaritans as a volunteer.  I then went on to train with mental health charity MIND and Barnado’s Support4Parents scheme.  Later I worked for 7 years as a counsellor at Child Bereavement UK supporting both adults and children learning to cope with the death of someone important to them. From 2013 I also worked as an honorary counsellor for two low cost services and in two schools in Oxfordshire.  More recently I have been working with patients in an Eating Disorder Unit using a range of therapeutic interventions including Psychodynamic counselling (my initial training modality) and DBT.  I currently supervise and work in private practice and as a counsellor at Oxford University.

My academic training was initially in Psychology and Arts at Leicester University and I subsequently gained a Post Graduate Diploma and Masters Degree in Psychodynamic Practice at University of Oxford. I now practice as a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor, Accredited by the UKCP and am a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

I am Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville, and a Research Fellow at the Pharos Foundation. I am a Member of the English Faculty at Oxford, and specialise in the fields of poetics and aesthetic philosophy. 

I previously taught at Trinity College, Cambridge (where I remain a Senior Member), and St Peter’s College, Oxford. I was also previously Procter Research Fellow at Princeton University. 

My research is interested in the effects that poetry has on our minds and on our ethics. All my writing shares an interest in the ways that verse form makes demands on us to be more magnanimous in such a way that poetry brings us closer to what is good. I usually work on Romantic and Victorian poetry, but I have also published on Milton, T.S. Eliot, and as well as on English literature, on poetry in German, French, and Latin. I have just finished a book on the poetic line-ending’s relationship to ethics, and I am now beginning a new project on British Jewish authors in the long nineteenth century.

I care deeply about access to education in the humanities, and often work with schools in London and my native Yorkshire to that end.

Hi everyone! My name is Ben and I am your Sports Rep for this academic year. I am a 5th year medical student and in my spare time have been involved in college rowing, helped run a dance society and participated in university gymnastics. I used to play rugby and I do still occasionally boulder so I am enthusiastic about a wide breadth of sports!

I am really looking forward to promoting sports and physical activity in college, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about sports in college or the university more broadly. I am also in charge of college stash for the MCR for which there will be an opportunity to buy some lovely college branded clothing every term.

I’m Ben. I started my BPhil in Philosophy at Somerville in 2025, and serve as House Chair since HT 2026. In my free time, I like to spend time with my friends, read some fiction and go for a run.

Hi everyone! I’m Erica, a second-year DPhil student in Cardiovascular and Stem Cell Biology. I’m originally from Toronto, Canada and before coming to Oxford, I studied biology at Imperial College London and neuroscience for my MSc at UCL. I’m a huge fan of musicals (especially Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera), Roger Federer, and can tell you where to get the best bubble tea in Oxford!

As Social Secretary of the Somerville MCR, I love creating opportunities for students to connect, whether through formal exchanges, themed socials, bar nights, or day trips. I’m always open to new ideas, or if you just want to have a chat, feel free to reach out 🙂

I’m 22, and a 2nd year MPhil Economics student at Somerville. I’ve been MCR treasurer since last Michaelmas, and I’ll also be a peer supporter this year, so I’m always here for a chat of any kind 🙂