News from Hughes Newsletter for Hughes Hall members
November 2009 Issue 11
Perspectives Educational, Linguistic and Historical We continue to highlight the academic interests of the Hughes Hall community. From the broad and diverse range of subjects of our students, we now feature a small selection of the research of our arts and humanities PhDs. Lee Nordstrum – Education in South Africa
My research centres on education supply and demand in postApartheid South Africa. Historically, schools have charged fees for basic education and a major reason for non-attendance is direct costs; recent finance policy (No Fees Schools) has tried to address this issue. Using secondary data, I am constructing a demand model to explain education consumption based on costs, household characteristics and school quality. I will then observe enrolment patterns to see if attendance responds to policies designed to lessen household costs. 1 Ziyin Mai – Linguistics and Language Acquisition
My subject is second language acquisition. I focus on the acquisition of Chinese (Mandarin) as a second language by English and Japanese speakers. In second language learning, learners rely on the cues in the input to reconstruct their grammar. I am hoping to discover whether syntactic or semantic cues are easier for English and Japanese learners of Chinese to notice and ‘absorb’. I have just carried out my pilot study, to test my research design, at Peking University in Beijing. 2
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society of the early Abbasid period, but his religious-political treatises have often been dismissed as contradictory. My objective is the study of these seeming contradictions. I am following a contextualist approach, avoiding traditional generic divisions. 4 Joanne Waterhouse – School Leadership Practices
I have set up a research project to study leadership practices in three secondary schools in the UK. The focus is on leadership activity understood in its particular context, taking into consideration factors such as policy, time, relationships and culture. I draw on the literature of distributed leadership; school culture and relational trust are important themes, and I explore the significance of context for shaping and constraining leadership practice. 5 Christos Tsirogiannis – Archaeology and Collectors
I am researching the international illicit antiquities network, which is destroying our global cultural heritage. Museums, private collectors, auction houses, galleries, archaeologists and scholars form part of a large group which causes the destruction of dig sites and the irredeemable loss of valuable archaeological information. Financial profit, social prestige and the passion for collecting are responsible for the loss of unique pieces of human history. My aim is to analyse the illicit international network, and provide proofs for the repatriation of antiquities in several countries.
Benjamin Woodford – 17th Century English History
My research focuses on Oliver Cromwell, the kingship crisis, and print culture in the 1650s. I have two objectives: to explore the relationship between print and politics in the 1650s; and to demonstrate that the kingship crisis was not a topic debated only in parliament, rather it was a subject that was discussed broadly in print culture. I examine pamphlets printed during Oliver Cromwell’s reign as Lord Protector and Cromwell’s speeches to Parliament, and focus on the variations between each script. 3
Alex Coke-Woods – 9th Century English History
My research focuses on vernacular historical texts produced during the late 9th century, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Old English Bede. I am evaluating the potential relationship of these texts to the cultural and political agenda of Alfred, King of Wessex (871–99). Faced with pagan invasion, Alfred sought to Ignacio Sanchez – 9th Century Middle Eastern History appease God by increasing Christian wisdom among his subjects, My research deals with a 9th century Abbasid author, al-Jahiz, and to unite and encourage those whom he ruled. My research and his texts on the religious leadership of the Muslim community. questions whether these historical texts were part of a courtHe was a belletrist, theologian and philosopher, follower of the sponsored response to these issues. rationalist school. His writings are a source for the study of the November 2009 Issue 11