People

Dr Anne Makena (2012, DPhil Chemical Biology) is Co-Director of the Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx), a vibrant platform for all things Africa at Oxford. 

The goal of Dr Makena and her AfOx colleagues is to make Africa a strategic priority for the University of Oxford by facilitating equitable, sustainable and impactful collaborations between Oxford and African institutions.

Working with partners across 30 African countries, AfOx facilitates academic and research partnerships by supporting activities including a travel grant scheme, visiting fellowships for African academics, high quality research engagement meetings and financial, academic and mentorship support for African students and research staff in Oxford. AfOx has an ambitious, but justified, aim to increase the number of African graduates at Oxford from 3 to 10%.

Dr Makena is responsible for developing and implementing AfOx’s overall strategy, as well as leading on fundraising and stakeholder engagement, and supporting the delivery of core AfOx programmes. Under Dr Makena’s guidance, AfOx is making strides to support the creation of a culture-shifting cohort of emerging African leaders whose experiences and passion can be practically addresses to some of the most pressing challenges in Africa, recognising moreover that Africa is the most rapidly changing continent whose future demographic and economic growth will have a major influence globally.

Dr Makena holds a DPhil in Chemical Biology from the University of Oxford and an Executive MBA from the Said Business School. She was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College in June 2025.

Professor Emma Smith (1988, English) is an internationally renowned Shakespeare scholar and current Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

Professor Smith’s work explores the influence of Shakespeare on stage, print, and in wider culture. She has written on Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) – the first collected edition of his plays – and is interested in how Shakespeare came to be so important.

An associate scholar of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Professor Smith is also a regular speaker in schools, literary festivals, theatres, libraries, and book groups, as well as in universities. She has extensive experience of both print and broadcast media, including on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC News, as well as authoring articles for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Observer and The Guardian.

Professor Smith’s recent publications showcase her ability to combine forensic close-textual reading with sweeping surveys of the reception given to Shakespeare in performance, print, and criticism. Her 2019 book This Is Shakespeare was a Sunday Times bestseller and her 2022 book Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize.

Professor Smith has worked with theatre companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Donmar Warehouse. In 2023, she was the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe, and she has served as a consultant for TV and film, including Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, and the BBC series ‘Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius’ (2023).

Professor Smith’s next full-length work, The First Elizabethans, is a study on Elizabethan artistic culture from architecture to music to gardens to fashion, and will be published by Penguin in 2026.

Professor Emma Smith lives in Oxford with her partner Elizabeth. She was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College in June 2025.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne MBE (née Ebrahim, 1978, Medicine) is Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She was elected in 2022, becoming the fifth woman to hold the position.

Professor Hawthorne has been a GP for 37 years, with 30 of them spent working in South Wales. She qualified from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1984, and completed her GP training in Nottingham in 1988. Kamila was Head of the Graduate Entry Medicine Programme at Swansea University and is on the Trustee Boards of the Kings Fund, and Cardiff Women’s Aid. She is also a Bevan Commissioner and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Kamila has a deep interest in medical education, and believes passionately in the importance of training excellent, caring and inclusive GPs for a global society. She is passionate about the role of GPs in patient care and as advocates for patients.

Her research and clinical working interests have been in health inequalities and access to health services, (her MD was based on working with BAME patient groups with Type 2 diabetes in Nottingham, Manchester and Cardiff). With wide experience of general practice and running community projects in diabetes and heart disease, she has been named ‘GP of the Year’ twice and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to General Practice.

The RCGP is the UK’s largest medical college, with over 50,000 members. It represents and supports GPs on key issues including licensing, education, training, research and clinical standards. The RCGP has both a President and a Chair, but the former is a mainly ceremonial role. As Chair, Professor Hawthorne sets the college’s policy direction, and leads the RCGP decision making body.

Professor Hawthorne was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville in June 2025. 

Pat Davies (née Owtram) is a WWII codebreaker and recipient of the Legion d’Honneur who smashed glass ceilings as a producer in the world of Sixties television. She describes herself today as the only 100-year-old woman in Chiswick who knows how to use a sten gun. 

Like many women of her generation, Pat was determined to contribute to the war effort during WWII. Quite unlike most other women, however, Pat Davies spent her war years conducting vital secret work at covert listening stations on the South Coast, for which she would later receive the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit. 

Pat joined the WRNS in 1942, aged just 18, motivated by her father’s capture and internment by the Japanese army. As a German-speaker, she was selected for work manning wireless intercept stations around the coast. Her intercepts of German military communications were translated, with encoded messages sent to Bletchley Park. After the war’s conclusion, Pat was offered a role as a translator in the Nuremburg Trials, but chose to return home to care for her recently liberated father. Unbeknownst to Pat, her younger sister Jean Argles (née Owtram) had also worked as a codebreaker for SOE, decoding messages from agents in the field. The sisters only learned about their shared experiences after the war, leading them to write the popular memoir ‘Code-Breaking Sisters’.

After the war, Pat became a noted television producer, helping to devise several longstanding shows including The Sky At Night, University Challenge and Coronation Street. More recently, Pat won a seven-decade-long battle to restore the authorship rights to her plagiarised BLitt thesis. Somerville played a significant role in this case for restorative justice, which you can read about here.

Pat Owtram arriving at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024 with Principal Jan Royall before receiving applause as news of her Honorary Fellowship was announced.

Now 100 years old, Patricia describes herself as the only centenarian in Chiswick who knows how to use a Sten gun. In 2023, she was named The Oldie magazine’s ‘Oldie Secret Agent of the Year’ by Gyles Brandreth. 

Pat Owtram together with her younger sister Jean Argles (née Owtram, 1925-2023) during and after the war, and in Chiswick wearing her Victory medal and Bletchley badge

Pat Davies was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville in March 2024, and informed of the decision while attending the annual Dorothy Hodgkin Lecture. Speaking of the news, Pat commented, ‘I certainly never expected to become a Fellow of an Oxford College. However, I feel very privileged to have been considered worthy of this recognition. My family were not terribly supportive of university education for women, so I was only able to attend university because I received a grant in recognition of my wartime service in the WRNS. I must say I found it a wonderful opportunity and stepping stone to an interesting career!’

Our Principal Jan Royall added, ‘It is a privilege to have met Pat and welcomed her as an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College. Her extraordinary life embraces so many historic chapters, through all of which she has evidently moved with the same combination of intellect, integrity and humour that show her to be a quintessential Somervillian.’

Sir Simon Russell Beale is an English actor for television, stage and film, described by The Independent in 2009 as “the greatest stage actor of his generation”.

Sir Simon began his acting career at The Royal Court after gaining a first in English from the University of Cambridge. He then spent 8 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, making a name for himself with both comedic and tragic roles, before joining the National Theatre, where he remained on and off for 25 years.

During the course of an illustrious career on both stage and screen, Sir Simon has received ten Laurence Olivier Award nominations, including three wins for his performances in Volpone (1996), Candide (2000), and Uncle Vanya (2003). On Broadway, he been nominated for two Tony Awards, one of which he won for his performance as Henry Lehman in The Lehman Trilogy (2018). His work in film and TV has been recognised with two BAFTAs, one for the BBC’s Hollow Crown series (2012) and another for A Dance to the Music of Time (1997). In 2019 he was awarded a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to the Arts.

Sir Simon engages with the theatre not only as a performer, but as an editor, author and public intellectual. He is a series editor of the Arden Performance editions of Shakespeare’s plays and his first full-length publication A Piece of Work, published in September 2024, will offer unparalleled insights into a lifetime of Shakespearean study and dramatic craft.

Sir Simon has been a close associate of Somerville College since 2015, when he spoke alongside our Fellow Emerita and Shakespeare expert Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones (1941-2022) at a literary tea. He has since joined us for numerous events, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the College in June 2024 in recognition of this long and fruitful association with the College. 

Sir Simon Russell Beale in ‘The Lehman Trilogy’

Responding to receiving the Honorary Fellowship, Sir Simon said, “I am delighted with this great honour that Somerville College has awarded me. Over the years, and during many visits to the College, particularly through my meetings with Katherine Duncan-Jones and Emma Smith, my affection for the College has grown and I anticipate confidently that it will grow still further. It is marvellous to play a small part in the history of an institution that is so rightly proud of its inclusivity and its sense of adventure.”

An honorary fellowship is the college’s highest recognition of distinction for alumni and associates, conferred annually by our Governing Body. Speaking of the College’s decision to grant Sir Simon this honour, Principal Jan Royall said, “It is delightful to know that, through this association, Somerville College can reaffirm our long-standing commitment to the humanities and anticipate many more such unforgettable encounters with Sir Simon. He is a thoroughly good man, a phenomenal actor and a livewire connection to the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.”

Sir Simon with (l-r) Professor Fiona Stafford, Hon. Fellow Professor Emma Smith (1988, English), and Principal Jan Royall

 

 

I am an NSERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the MCEM group in the Department of Biology.

My main research interest is the use of mathematical modelling to study the dynamics of ecosystems and disease systems to predict mechanistic relationships among system processes and then use that knowledge to inform management policy and design. In particular, I am interested in understanding how movement between discrete patches might influence and inform management of large-scale systems such as coral reefs and national farm networks. In all of my research I work with local stakeholders to develop and parameterize mathematical models to answer pertinent questions about local systems that directly inform their management policy and design.

My website can be found at http://www.arielgreiner.com. 

Hannie Lawlor holds a BA and MSt in Spanish and French from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and completed her DPhil on twenty-first-century Spanish and French women’s writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, under the supervision of Dr Daniela Omlor and Professor Marie-Chantal Killeen. Prior to taking up her current post at LMH and Somerville, she held stipendiary and departmental lecturer posts in Spanish at Oxford and was Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin.

Research Interests

Hannie’s research focuses primarily on women’s autobiographical practices in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. She is particularly interested in comparative approaches, whether it be considering works across languages and cultures or across media. Her first monograph, Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing, analysed intergenerational responses to traumatic loss and her current project builds on these findings to explore what she defines as the impossible conversation as a crucial mode of narrative transmission.

Teaching

Hannie teaches the full Prelims course for students in Spanish at LMH and Somerville College and convenes Introduction to Spanish Film (XI) for students of Spanish Sole. For FHS, she teaches peninsular options in literature and film for the modern period paper (VIII) and special authors including Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Federico García Lorca, and Benito Pérez Galdós for Paper XI. She co-teaches Paper XII ‘Women Writers in Modern Spain’ and supervises extended essays (XIV), bridge essays, and master’s theses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s writing, life writing, film, memory, and trauma. She welcomes expressions of interest from prospective PhD candidates working on related modern peninsular topics.

As a former first-generation student from a non-selective state school, Hannie is keenly committed to access and outreach initiatives. She is Schools Liaison representative for the Spanish Sub-Faculty and eager to receive applications from students from schools who do not have a history of sending students to Oxbridge.

Aarthee graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 2024, with a degree in PPE. As a student she was the JCR Access and Admissions Officer, as well as a college, and university, student ambassador, working at many of Oxford’s outreach events. She joined the Somerville College access team in 2024, and having benefitted from many access programmes herself, strives to continue to expand Somerville’s impact in making Higher Education and Oxford open to any and all students, regardless of their background.

Aarthee’s office hours are 9-5 Monday-Friday, and she can be found in the Access Office in House.

My current research examines English translations of a selection of German language novels, from Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen and Gilgi to Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Ausser Sich. I focus on consciousness narratives whose authors have attempted to (and sometimes struggled to) articulate the mind of a gendered subject, and investigate how, and how successfully, these attempts have been translated into English. I am particularly interested in how creative, radical translational decisions seem especially suited to recreating the force and flavour of the original text.

I have a particular interest in teaching translation from German to English, at all levels and in a variety of ways. Recently I held a feminist translation micro-conference with second years, in which students workshopped German extracts together and presented their findings in the form of lightning talks. Other recent classes have focused on the translation of wordplay, children’s books, newspaper reports, and prose poetry. I also teach the core German Literature paper, and offer modules on Psychoanalysis, ‘Postwar Restoration Frenzy’ in Austria, Representing Trauma, as well as Goethe, and the Enlightenment.

I design and deliver outreach sessions for the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty, to promote progression to languages A-Levels and GCSEs. I am working with schools in the North of England as part of the Faculty’s VOx programme, and have developed and led sessions around tactile translations of German poetry, the bilingual identity, and English-to-English translation classes.

Charlotte is a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College and a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music.

Her research focuses on the transnational region of Karelia, which is partially in Finland and partially in Russia. Given the region’s tumultuous past and current events, issues of national, regional, and identity and belonging are complicated. Metal music artists on both sides of the border continuously negotiate questions of identity and belonging in their music through referrals to Karelian nature, significant historic events, and adaptation of folklore. The multiple languages in which lyrics are written – Karelian, Finnish, English, and Russian – give further expression to identity negotiations and how these are communicated with the outside world.

Charlotte finished her PhD at University College London (UCL) in 2022. Her thesis analysed the adaptation of Karelian Finnish folk poetry and the epic, the Kalevala, in metal music from Finland and connections to national identity in the lyrics. At UCL, she also worked as a postgraduate teaching assistant teaching various modules in sociology, history, and Finnish culture. She completed her master’s studies in Finnish language and culture at the University of Helsinki (2016) and her undergraduate studies in Finno-Ugric languages and cultures at the University of Groningen (2014).

She has co-organised conferences on multilingualism in metal music and the cultural, literary, and historic significance of cats. The latter conference was in conjunction with an exhibition organised by librarians of Senate House Library, London.

Stephanie Dalley is a British scholar of the Ancient Near East and Fellow of the Institute for Ancient and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), where she taught Akkadian and Sumerian for almost three decades.

She is best known for her investigation into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and her proposal that it was situated in Nineveh and constructed during the rule of Sennacherib. Her other achievements include her work on the Sealand Dynasty.

Dr. Shiwei Liu is Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Somerville College. He is also a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Oxford. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. with the Cum Laude from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 2022. His research goal is to leverage, understand, and expand the role of low-dimensionality in neural networks, whose impacts span many important topics, such as efficient training/inference/transfer of large-foundation models, robustness and trustworthiness, and generative AI. His current main research interest focuses on improving the efficiency and accessibility of LLMs, making them accessible tooling to everyone. Dr. Liu has received two Rising Star Awards from KAUST and the Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL). His Ph.D. thesis received the 2023 Best Dissertation Award from Informatics Europe. Personal Website: https://shiweiliuiiiiiii.github.io/

Alison assists the Graduate and Tutorial Officer in the Academic Office.

Damian Clements is the Somerville College accountant. He joined Somerville in January 2024 after working at All Souls College, Oxford, and supporting a comprehensive transformation of the 18^thCentury stately home Harewood House in Yorkshire.

Damian first trained as an accountant with Deloitte in Jersey after reading PPE at Trinity College, Oxford. He then worked for several years in TV and for the BBC before deciding to concentrate his energies on charities including London Zoo, the Royal Court Theatre, Leeds Culture Trust and the aforementioned Harewood House.

Despite going to Trinity, Damian has a strong Somerville connection; his mother and two close family friends read zoology here, as did his cousin and older sister. Now Damian is keen to help Somerville increase its financial management and love of Excel spreadsheets. Outside work, Damian listens to many hours of radio drama and audiobooks while going on long walks to pubs, normally with a play script in his pocket to read when he gets there