Professor Stephen Blundell Professorial Fellow and Tutor in Physics Stephen has published a number of research papers this year, including ‘Information and Decoherence in a Muon-Fluorine Coupled System’, which was selected as an editors’ highlight. He is currently working on an edited book, ‘Introduction to muon spectroscopy’, which will be published by OUP in 2021. Stephen was awarded the 2020 Yamazaki Prize by the International Society of Muon Spectroscopy. This prize is awarded once every three years to a scientist whose work has a long-term impact on muon spectroscopy’s scientific and technical applications.
The Revd Sarah Farrow Chaplain
Dr Joe Goodwin Junior Research Fellow in Physics
This year we welcomed Mansfield’s new Chaplain, the Revd Sarah Farrow, to College.
Joe and his colleagues in the Ion Trap Quantum Computing group recently demonstrated a means of producing a faster and more reliable quantum link between separate ion trap quantum computers.
Sarah is originally from New York and New Jersey but has lived in London with her family for over 15 years. In 2016 she was ordained into the Lutheran Church in Great Britain and is an Assistant Minister at St Anne’s Lutheran Church in London. Sarah is also Lutheran Chaplain at King’s College, London, and the Chaplain at the International Lutheran Student Centre. She holds an MA in Theology (St Augustine’s) and an MSc in Theory & History of International Relations (LSE). Prior to ordination, Sarah worked for over 12 years with Boston University’s London Programs, managing its academic programmes and providing academic advice to students.
Recent publications: ‘Information and Decoherence in a Muon-Fluorine Coupled System’, JM Wilkinson and SJ Blundell, in Phys Rev Lett 125, 087201 (2020).
Dr Paul Flather Supernumerary Fellow
Dr Andrei Constantin Stipendiary Lecturer in Physics
Paul is President of The Forum for Philosophy, based at the LSE, which promotes public discussion led by philosophers. He has just completed 20 years as Chair of the Noon Educational Foundation, which has supported more than 200 leading Pakistani scholars at Oxbridge. He has also joined the board of an ecological film festival, and continues his work as Chair of the Oxford Adam von Trott Memorial Committee, based at our College.
Andrei is one of the first nine Stephen Hawking Fellows in Theoretical Physics announced in March 2020. The Fellowship will support Andrei’s work in String Theory, including a new mathematical approach to the quest of connecting String Theory to the physics of elementary particles.
Kate Clanchy MBE Writer in Residence
Paul has spoken at a number of international events including Difficult Dialogues in Goa, plus talks on supporting dissidents in the former central Europe, for which he recently won a Czech Government medal. He has written for The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and is currently co-editing a book on the law in India.
We hope you will join us in warmly welcoming Mansfield’s new ‘Writer in Residence’, Kate Clanchy MBE. Throughout Michaelmas term Kate has been holding weekly nonconformist writing workshops with Mansfield staff and students.
Henry (Nick) Green Front of House Manager
Recent publications: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019). ISBN 978-1-5098-4029-8.
Nick has written a new novel, The Nightwatchman. When John’s wife Peggy and dog Arthur are kidnapped by a mysterious Greek, John is forced to reveal his secret past-life as a spy. John just wants to watch the cricket, but now he must come out of retirement and race against time to free his family.
How to Grow Your Own Poem (Pan Macmillan, 2020). ISBN 9781529024708.
Professor Pavlos Eleftheriadis Tutorial Fellow in Law
The Nightwatchman is an action-packed thriller taking us from Gloucestershire to Greece, full of intrigue, murder, deception and even romance. Bashed out in six weeks during lockdown it is in honour of three big birthdays that weren’t celebrated this year due to the global pandemic.
Pavlos’s latest book, A Union of Peoples, was published in April 2020, presenting an original argument about the legal and political nature of the European Union.
Recent publications: The Nightwatchman (2020). ISBN 9798664034677. Ebook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08C1MLX7B
Recent publications: A Union of Peoples (Oxford University Press, 2020). ISBN 9780198854173.
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During his three years at Mansfield he divided his time between teaching in College – on Islam and ways of thinking about religion in society – and research trips to Jordan where he investigated the new religious institutions that are redefining the place of Islam in the Middle East. In Hilary term he hosted a popular series of visiting speakers at Mansfield to discuss cutting-edge critical and decolonial approaches to ‘religion’, out of which conversations he is putting together an exciting new volume, Seeing Through ‘Religion’: A Practical Handbook of Critical Approaches. Alex can be reached at ahenley@iis.ac.uk.
By interfering single photons emitted by ion qubits at each node of the network, the qubits can be entangled with one another without ever coming into contact, allowing a large quantum computer to be built from networks of smaller devices.
Recent publications: ‘Islam as a Challenge to the Ideology of Religious Studies: The Failure of Religious Studies in the Middle East’, in Implicit Religion. Issue 3, Vol 22 (2020), 372-389.
Recent publications: ‘High-Rate, High-Fidelity Entanglement of Qubits Across an Elementary Quantum Network’, LJ Stephenson, DP Nadlinger, BC Nichol, S An, P Drmota, TG Ballance, K Thirumalai, JF Goodwin, DM Lucas, CJ Ballance, in Physical Review Letters, 124, 110501.
‘Islamic Authorities and Mosques in Jordan during the Corona Crisis’, in the Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant, forthcoming.
The Revd Professor Andrew Gosler Fellow in Human Sciences
‘Religion and the Study of Religious Leadership’; and ‘Who Defines Religion in the Colony?’, in The Critical Religion Reader, ed M Barbato, C Montgomery and R Nadadur Kannan (Studio Dreamshare Press, 2020).
Andy’s Ethno-ornithology World Atlas (EWA) project has hosted four international meetings (two at Mansfield, two in the University of Pittsburgh). It then published in the groundbreaking volume that is the major output of Creative Multilingualism (an AHRC-funded venture exploring the links between creativity and language; see https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/). The conferences brought linguists, ethnobiologists and conservationists together with indigenous scholars to focus on common concerns.
‘Mashyakhat al-‘Aql: The making of a modern Lebanese Druze institution’, in The Druze Millennium, ed A Abu-Husayn and M Rabah (American University of Beirut Press, forthcoming).
Lukas Hensel Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Development Economics Recent publications: ‘Coronavirus Perceptions and Economic Anxiety’, T Fetzer, L Hensel, J Hermle, and C Roth, in The Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming).
After ordination in 2019, Andy was invited to lecture in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he spoke in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin on faith, conservation and human rights. In 2020, using funds otherwise unspent due to the pandemic, EWA supported Amazonian indigenous communities to document their knowledge. The EWA Research Group based across Zoology, Anthropology and Geography now has seven graduate students (see also https:// ewatlas.net/who-we-are and https://ewatlas.net/news).
‘Does Party Competition Affect Political Activism?’, A Hager, J Hermle, L Hensel and C Roth, in Journal of Politics (forthcoming).
Professor Peter Keevash Professorial Fellow in Mathematics
In October 2020, Andy was made a Professor, and is, we think, the world’s first Professor of Ethno-ornithology. We proudly congratulate him on this academic distinction. He also holds a joint position between the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (Zoology Department) and the Institute of Human Sciences (School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography).
This year Peter was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. His project entitled ‘Combinatorial Applications of Random Processes and Expansion’ tackles a variety of challenging open problems in Pure Mathematics, many of which concern networks and are inspired by real life phenomena. This includes understanding mathematical models of phase transitions, the flow of fluid, or the spread of information or disease throughout a network.
Dr Alex Henley Stipendiary Lecturer in Theology and Marie Curie Research Fellow Alex left Oxford in summer 2020 for a position at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, heading its MA in Islamic Studies.
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