People

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.

Anna’s first career was in infrastructure and security, where she acted as a freelance project manager for multiple government bodies and FTSE 500 companies. Thirteen years ago, she decided to turn her lifelong passion for gardening into a second career, retraining at Jesus College, Oxford.

Anna has since worked in several large estate gardens, including Dorney Court and Denham Place, as well as offering freelance garden design and consultancy. At Somerville, she looks forward to supporting Head Gardener Alistair Malick in bringing the Somerville gardens into the 21st century, whilst delivering a beautiful and sustainable garden (featuring as many alpine plants and clipped shrubs as possible in order to fulfil her passion for niwaki/bonsai and mountain plants).

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey CBE FBA FRHistS is a British medieval historian.

She was the joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize in 1993 for her book Living and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience, which examines the lives of monks at Westminster Abbey, one of England’s greatest medieval monasteries. In 1982 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

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. 

My research interests are in cardiac metabolism and how this can be imaged using advanced cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) techniques. I am interested in understanding how the heart produces and uses energy to pump and how this becomes deranged in heart failure.

My previous work has focused on the metabolic derangement induced by the chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin in a rodent model of cardiotoxicity, showing early derangements in myocardial energetics which precede overt systolic dysfunction. More recently I have investigated the ability of novel therapeutic agents to alter myocardial metabolism in the setting of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). I have also used advanced CMR to define the novel cardiovascular phenotype of inflammatory conditions such as IgG4 related disease and to assess changes in cardiac remodelling which occur following bariatric surgery. I am project lead on JeFF: Jersey Fighting Failure which seeks to revolutionise heart failure care on Jersey and has been selected as pilot project for the British Society of Heart Failure’s 25 in 25 initiative. 

I also have experience of large-scale clinical trials through my involvement as a research assistant on the ChAdOx-1 COVID-19 vaccine trials. I also have experience working with large databases such as QResearch.

Background

I am an Academic Clinical Fellow in Cardiology at Oxford University Hospitals and an Honorary Research Fellow at Jersey General Hospital. I am also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College, University of Oxford, where I was an undergraduate student. Outside clinical, research and teaching activities I have a keen interest in rugby union, having gained 4 Rugby Blues at Oxford and played in the Universities World Cup in Japan in 2019.

Hey! I’m Dylan (he/him) and I’m a second year studying Maths and Computer Science. This year I’m serving as the JCR’s IT & Communications Officer. My role mainly involves managing the JCR website and social media presence, so if you follow the JCR on Instagram (@somervillecollegejcr), chances are you’ll see things that I’m posting!

In my spare time I love tinkering with technology and software so I’m really excited to be serving in this role this year. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve on the IT side of things, please feel free to get in touch with me – I’d love to hear from you!

Dame Julia Stretton Higgins, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology at Imperial College London.

Higgins was the former chair (1998–2003) of the Athena Project, which aims for the advancement of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) in Higher Education. She is now the Patron of the Athena Swan Awards Scheme. Between 2003 and 2007, she was chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Higgins was president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers 2002–3, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 2003–4. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was its Foreign Secretary 2001–6. She was Chair of the Royal Society’s State of the Nation Report Steering Group. Most recently she chaired Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME). (2008-2012) She currently Chairs the Royal Society project (funded by BIS) on increasing diversity in the scientific workforce

She is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the City and Guilds of London Institute, of which she is also Vice-President. She is also an honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Somerville College, Oxford. She was awarded a CBE in 1996 before being named a dame in the 2001 Queen’s Birthday Honours list.She holds honorary degrees from a number of UK Universities ans also from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Her scientific work has concentrated on the investigation of polymers with neutron scattering. She co-authored a monograph on that field (Higgins & Benoit 1997). In 1999, she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. She was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She is a Chevalier de la Legion D’Honneur

Carole Hillenbrand was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. She was appointed Professor of Islamic History in 2000 and served as Head of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, from 1997-2002 and from 2006-2008.

She has been Professor Emerita of Islamic History at Edinburgh since 2008. She was awarded an OBE for services to Higher Education in 2009. She was Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA in 1994 and 2005, at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands in 2002, and Visiting Professor at the University of St Louis, USA, 2011 and 2013.

In 2005 she was awarded the King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies, 2005 (the first non-Muslim to be awarded this prize). In 2015, she was given the British Society for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Award for Services to Middle Eastern Studies. In 2016 she was awarded the British Academy/ Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding.

She has been Islamic Advisory Editor at Edinburgh University Press since 1983 and Editor of the series entitled “Studies in Persian and Turkish History”, published by Routledge since 1999.

Her research interests include the Crusades, the Seljuqs of Iran and Turkey, and medieval Muslim political thought, especially the work of al-Ghazali.

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

Salome manages all aspects of HR for academic and support staff including policies, reporting, recruitment, appointments and compliance. Any HR queries can be directed to human.resources@some.ox.ac.uk

HR hours are Monday – Friday 8.00 a.m. – 4.00 p.m. and either Salome or her colleague, Sarah, will be happy to help with any HR questions you have.

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.