College Report 2025

College Report

2024-2025

Visitor, Principal, Fellows, Lecturers, Staff

Fellows

(in order of seniority)

Fiona Stafford, (BA DLitt Leic), MA MPhil DPhil, FBA, FRSE, Professor of English Language and Literature, Tutor in English Literature

Lois McNay, MA, (PhD Camb), Professor of the Theory of Politics, Shirley Williams Fellow in Politics and Tutor in Politics

Luke Pitcher, MA MSt DPhil, (PGCert Durh), Associate Professor of Classics and Tutor in Classics

Simon Robert Kemp, BA, (MPhil PhD Camb), Associate Professor in French and Tutor in French

Christopher Hare, BCL, (MA Camb, LLM Harvard, Dip. D’Etudes Jurid Poitiers), Associate Professor of Law and Tutor in Law

Faridah Zaman, (BA MPhil PhD Camb), Associate Professor in History and Tutor in History

Samantha Sebastian, (PhD Sydney), Associate Professor in Music and Tutor in Music

Michelle Jackson, (BSc PhD Lond), Associate Professor of Zoology and Tutor in Biology

Visitor

The Rt Hon Lord Hague of Richmond, BSc (MBA INSEAD), Chancellor of the University Principal

Jan Royall, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, PC, MA, (BA Lond)

Vice-Principals

Almut Maria Vera Suerbaum, (VP in MT 2024), MA, (Dr phil, Staatsexamen, Münster), Associate Professor of German and Tutor in German

Benjamin John Thompson, (VP from HT 2025), MA DPhil, (MA PhD Camb), FRHistS, Associate Professor of Medieval History and Liz Cooke Fellow in History and Tutor in History

Charles Spence, MA, (PhD Camb), Professor of Experimental Psychology and Tutor in Experimental Psychology

Philip West, MA, (MA MPhil PhD Camb), Associate Professor of English, Times Fellow and Tutor in English

Julie Dickson, (LLB Glas) MA DPhil, Professor of Legal Philosophy and Tutor in Law

Annie Sutherland, (MA Camb), MA DPhil, Professor of Medieval Literature, Rosemary Woolf Fellow and Tutor in English

Daniel Anthony, MA, (PhD Lond), Professor of Experimental Neuropathology and Tutor in Medicine

Michael Hayward, MA DPhil, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Tutor in Chemistry

Beate Dignas, MA DPhil, (Staatsexamen Münster), Associate Professor of Ancient History, Barbara Craig Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History

Natalia Nowakowska, MA

MSt DPhil, Professor of Early Modern History and Tutor in History

Jonathan Burton, MA, (PhD Camb), Professor of Organic Chemistry and Tutor in Chemistry

Charlotte Potts, (BA Victoria New Zealand, MA UCL), DPhil, FSA, Sybille Haynes Associate Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Art, Katherine and Leonard Woolley Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Tutor in Classical Archaeology

Karen Nielsen, (Cand magisterii Cand philologiae Trondheim, MA PhD Cornell), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy

Dan Ciubotaru, (BSc MA Babeş-Bolyai, PhD Cornell), The Diana Brown Fellow and Tutor in Pure Mathematics; Professor of Mathematics

Damian Tyler, (MSci PhD Nott), Professor of Physiological Metabolism

Francesca Southerden, BA MSt DPhil, Professor of Italian and Tutor in Italian

Louise Mycock, (BA Durh, MA PhD Manc), Associate Professor of Linguistics and Tutor in Linguistics

Renaud Lambiotte, (MPhys PhD ULB Brussels), Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems and Tutor in Mathematics

Elena Seiradake, (PhD Heidelberg), Professor of Molecular Biology and Tutor in Biochemistry

Noa Zilberman, MA (BSc MSc PhD Tel Aviv), Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, Associate Professor of Engineering Science, Tutor in Engineering Science

Robin Klemm, (PhD Dresden), Associate Professor in Medicine and Tutor in Medicine

Prateek Agrawal, (BTech Bombay, PhD Maryland), Associate Professor of Physics and Tutor in Physics

Patricia Owens, (BSc Brist, MPhil Camb, DPhil Aberystwyth), Professor of International Relations and Tutor in International Relations

Konstantina Vogiatzaki, (MSc NTUA), MA, (PhD Imp), Associate Professor of Engineering Science, Tutor in Engineering Science

Emily Flashman, (BSc S’ton), DPhil, Associate Professor in Molecular Plant Sciences and Tutor in Biology

Markos Koumaditis, (BA Ionian, MA RHUL, PhD KCL) FCIPD, Human Resources Director

Thaddeus Komacek, (BS BA Chicago, MS PhD Arizona), Associate Professor of Physics and Tutor in Physics

Anastasia Ignatiava, (BA Dub, MSc Edin, PhD Warw), Associate Professor of Statistics and Tutor in Statistics

Professorial Fellows (in order of seniority)

Stephen Roberts, MA DPhil, FIET, FREng, FRSS, MIOP, RAEng-Man Professor of Machine Learning

Steven Simon, MA, (PhD Harvard), Professor of Theoretical and Condensed Matter Physics

Iyiola Solanke, Academic Bencher, Honourable Society of the Inner Temple (BA Lond, MSc, DPhil LSE), Jacques Delors Professor of European Law

Colin Phillips, BA, (PhD MIT), Professor of Linguistics

Administrative Fellows

Sarah Butler, (BA Leeds, MA UCL) MCLIP, Librarian and Head of Information Services

Sara Kalim, MA, Director of Development

Andrew Parker, (BA Liv), MA, ACMA Treasurer

Stephen Rayner, MA, (PhD Durh), FRAS, MInstP, Senior Tutor, Tutor for Graduates and Tutor for Admissions

Senior Research Fellows

Amalia Coldea, (MA, PhD Cluj-Napoca)

Stephanie Dalley, (MA Camb), MA, (PhD Lond), FSA

Colin Alexander Espie, (BSc MAppSci PhD DSc (Med) Glas), CPsychol, FMedSci, FBPsS, FRCGP(Hon), FAASM, Professor of Behavourial Sleep Medicine

Sir Marc Feldmann, AC, BSc (Med), MB BS, PhD, Hon MD, Hon DMSc, FAA, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCPath, FRS, Emeritus Professor of Cellular Immunology

Manuele Gragnolati, (Laurea in Lettere Classiche, Pavia), MA, DEA Paris, PhD Columbia)

Sarah Gurr, BSc MA, (PhD Lond), ARCS, DIC, Professor of Molecular Plant Pathology

John Ingram, (BSc KCL, MSc R’dg, PhD Wageningen)

Joanna Innes, (MA Camb), MA

Muhammad Kassim Javaid, (BMedSci, MB BS PhD Lond), MRCP, Professor of Osteoporosis and Adult Rare Bone Diseases

Patricia Kingori, (BA MSc RHUL, MSc UCL, PhD LSHTM), Professor of Global Health Ethics

Philip Kreager, DPhil

Simon Kyle, (MA PhD Glas), Professor of Experimental and Clinical Sleep Research

Aditi Lahiri, CBE, (BA MA PhD Calcutta, PhD Brown)

Catherine Mary MacRobert, MA DPhil

Nicholas McKeown, (BEng Leeds, MS PhD Berkeley)

Boris Motik, (MSc Zagreb, PhD Karlsruhe), Professor of Computer Science

Frans Plank, (Statsexamen Munich, MLitt Edin, MA Regensburg, PhD Hanover)

Philip Poole, (BSc PhD Murdoch), FRS

Mason Porter, (BS Caltech, MS PhD Cornell), MA

Franklyn Prochaska, (PhD Northwestern University), FRHS

Tessa Rajak, MA DPhil, FSA

Owen Rees, MA, (PhD Camb), ARCO, Professor of Music

Rajesh Thakker, OBE, (MA MD Camb), MA DM, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCPath, FRS

Renier van der Hoorn, (BSc MSc Leiden, PhD Wageningen)

Roman Walczak, MA, (MSc Warsaw, Dr rer nat Heidelberg)

Stephen Weatherill, (MA Camb, MSc Edin), MA

Jennifer Welsh, (BA Saskatchewan), MA DPhil

Matthew John Andrew Wood, (MB ChB Cape Town), MA DPhil, FMedSci

Senior Associates

Caroline Lytton, MPhys

Aaron Maniam, MA, MPP, (MA Yale), DPhil

Jane Robinson, MA

Susan Thomas, (BA Manc, MA Liv)

Alexandra Vincent, MBE, (BA MSc BSc Open)

James Ravi Kirkpatrick, (BA R’dg, MLitt St And), MA BPhil DPhil

Research Fellows

Naveed Akbar, (BSc MSc PhD Dundee), FHEA, Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Science

Siddharth Arora, (BTech DAIICT), DPhil, Healthcare/ Energy

Charlotte Doesburg, (BA Groningen, MA Helsinki, PhD UCL), Music, Leverhulme Research Fellow

Lisa Forsberg, (BA Stockholm), MA, PhD KCL, Philosophy

Pelagia Goulimari, (BA MPhil Thessaloniki, MA Essex, PhD S’ton), Feminist Studies

Jim Harris, (BA MA PhD Courtauld) Ashmolean

Radhika Khosla, BA MPhys, (PhD Chicago), Conservation Biology

Dan Rogers, (MEng PhD Imp) Engineering

Byrony Sheaves, (BSc Card), DClinPsy DPhil, Experimental Psychology

Justin Sirignano, (BSE Princeton, PhD Stanford), Mathematics

Junior Research

Fellows

Andy Anker, (BSc MSc PhD Copenhagen), Chemistry, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Joshua Booth, BA MPhil DPhil (PGCE Gloucester), Linguistics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Maria Caiazza, (BA, MSc Pisa), DPhil, Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Kuang-Yu Chen, (DVM MS National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), PhD Paris), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Amy Chu-Antypas, (BSc MRes Bath), DPhil, Biochemistry, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Lucy Garner, (BA Camb), DPhil, Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Giuseppe Gava, (Meng, MRes, PhD Imp), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Tin Hang Hung, (BSc CUHK), DPhil, FLS, Biological Sciences, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Andrea Kusec, (BA Toronto, MSc McMaster, PhD Camb), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Shiwei Liu, (BEng North China, MEng Harbin Institute of Technology China, PhD Eindhoven), Mathematics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Elizabeth Mary MacGregor, (BA MPhil Camb, PhD Sheff), Music, Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow

Juan Neves-Sarriegui, (BA Buenos Aires, MA Coimbra), MSt DPhil, History, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Raffaele Sarnataro, (Diploma di Licenza Pisa Scuola Normale Superiore), MSc DPhil, Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Lachlan Scarsbrook, (BSc MSc Otago), DPhil, Archaeology, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Thomas Siday, (MSc York, PhD UCL), Physics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Jacqueline Siu, (BSc UBC, PhD Camb), Medicine, Wellcome Trust Early Career Junior Research Fellow

Emma Soneson, (BSc BSc Yale, MPhil, PhD Camb), Psychology, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Jessica Thompson, (BA McGill, MA Dartmouth College, PhD Montreal), Psychology, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

George Ward, (BA MSc UCL, MS, PhD MIT), Economics, Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow

Sarah Woodward, (BMEDSci Western Ontario, PhD British Columbia), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Silvia Zanoli, (BA MSc Milano, PhD Max Planck Institut fur Physik), Physics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Rocco Zizzamia, (BA Cape Town), MPhil DPhil, Economics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

British Academy Fellow

Ammar Azzouz, (BA AlBaath, MSc Salf, PhD Bath), Geography

Early Career Fellow

Aradhana Cherupara Vadekkethil, (BA LLB National Law Delhi), BCL MPhil DPhil, Law, Lord and Lady McNair Early Career Fellow in Law

Career Development Fellow

Fay Probert, (BSc MSc PhD Warw), Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin Career Development Fellow

Emeritus Fellows

Margaret Adams, MA DPhil

Pauline Adams, BLitt MA, (Dipl Lib Lond)

Lesley Brown, BPhil MA

Marian Ellina Stamp Dawkins, CBE, MA DPhil, FRS

Karin Erdmann, MA, (Dr rer nat Giessen)

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey, CBE, BLitt MA, FBA, FRHistS (D. 12 August 2025)

Judith Heyer, MA, (PhD Lond)

Julianne Mott Jack, (MA Edin), MA

Carole Jordan, DBE, MA, (PhD Lond), FRS

Norma MacManaway, (MA MPhil Dub), MA, DEA

Anne Manuel, (LLB R’dg, MA, MSc, PhD Brist), MA

Helen Morton, (MSc Boston, MA Camb), MA

Hilary Ockendon, MA DPhil, (Hon DSc S’ton)

Josephine Peach, BSc MA DPhil

Stephen Guy Pulman, (BA Lond, MA PhD Essex), MA FBA

Frances Julia Stewart, MA DPhil, FAcSS

Richard Stone, MA DPhil, FREng, FSAE, FIMechE

Angela Vincent, (MB BS MSc Lond), MA FMedSci, FRS

Foundation Fellows

Shahnaz Batmanghelidj, BA Oxf, MA Princetown, MBA Havard Business School

Lord Glendonbrook, CBE

Radford Klotz, BA Virginia

Sir Geoffrey Leigh

Vicky Maltby, MA

Melhi Mistry

Robert Ng

Lord Powell of Bayswater, KCMG, OBE

Gavin Ralston, MA

Peggie Rimmer, DPhil

Wafic Rida Saïd

Martin Ritchie

Kevin Scollan, MA

Susan Scollan, MA

Gopal Subramanium, SA, Hon Bencher, Gray’s Inn.

Honorary Fellows (in order of election)

Dame Kiri Jeanette Te Kanawa, DBE, AC ONZ, Hon DMus

Dame Carolyn Emma Kirkby, DBE, OBE, MA Hon DMus, (Hon DMus Bath, Hon DLitt Salf), FGSM

Lady Hazel Mary Fox, CMG, KC, MA (D. 12 July 2025)

Dame Averil Millicent Cameron, DBE, MA DLitt (PhD Lond), FBA, FSA

Onora O’Neill, Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, CH, CBE, MA, (PhD Harvard), Hon DCL, FBA, Hon FRS, FMedSci

Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies, DBE, CBE, MA DPhil, (Hon DSc Victoria Canada), FMedSci, FRS

Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington, PC, BA

Irangani Manel Abeysekera, MA

Paula Pimlott Brownlee, MA DPhil

Dame Julia Stretton Higgins, DBE, CBE, MA DPhil, Hon DSc, FRS, CChem, FRSC, CEng, FIM, FREng

Doreen Elizabeth Boyce, MA, (PhD Pittsburgh)

Ruth Hilary Finnegan, OBE, BLitt MA DPhil, FBA

Janet Margaret Bately, CBE, MA, FBA

Margaret Kenyon, MA

Clara Elizabeth Mary Freeman, OBE, MA

Jenny Glusker, MA DPhil

Ann Rosamund Oakley, MA, (PhD Lond, Hon DLitt Salf), AcSS

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Baroness Neville-Rolfe DBE, CMG, MA

Judith Ann Kathleen Howard, CBE, (BSc Brist), DPhil, FRS

Victoria Glendinning, CBE, MA

Nicola Ralston, BA

Anna Laura Momigliano Lepschy, BLitt MA

Rosalind Mary Marsden, DCMG, MA DPhil

Harriet Maunsell, OBE, MA

Hilary Spurling, CBE, BA

Catherine Royle, MA (MScEcon Wales)

Dame Nancy Rothwell, DBE, BSc, DS, (PhD London), FMedSci, FRS

Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera, PC, BA

Dame Elizabeth Mary Keegan, DBE, MA

Carole Hillenbrand, CBE, OBE, BA, (BA Camb, PhD Edin), FBA, FRAS, FRHistS, FRSE

Dame Angela McLean, DBE, MA, (MA Berkeley, PhD Lond), FRS

Michele Moody-Adams, MA, (BA Wellesley College, PhD Harvard)

Dame Judith Parker, DBE, KC, MA

Dame Esther Rantzen, DBE, CBE, MA

Caroline Barron, OBE, MA, (PhD Lond), FRHistS

Emma Rothschild, CMG, MA

Sir Venkatraman

Ramakrishnan, Kt, (BSc Baroda, PhD Ohio), Nobel Laureate, FRS (President)

Tessa Ross, CBE, BA

Joanna Haigh, CBE, MA DPhil, FRMetS, FRS

Akua Kuenyehia, (LLB University of Ghana), BCL

Alison Wolf, Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, DBE, CBE, BA, MPhil

Lorna Margaret Hutson, MA DPhil, FBA

Caroline Mary Series, CBE, BA, (PhD Harvard), FRS

Sacha Romanovitch, OBE, MA

Alice Prochaska, MA DPhil, FRHistS

Margaret Casely-Hayford, CBE, MA

Dame Elan Closs Stephens, DBE, BA

June Raine, DBE, CBE, BA BM BCh MSc, MRCP

Clair Wills, MA DPhil, HMRIA Farhana Yamin, BA

Julia Yeomans, OBE, BA DPhil, FRS

Bolanle Awe, DPhil, (MSt St And)

Afua Kyei, MChem

Patricia Davies, BLitt

Sir Simon Russell Beale, CBE, (BA Camb)

Kamila Hawthorne, MBE, MA, BMBCh

Anne Makena, DPhil MBA

Emma Smith, MA DPhil

Stipendiary Lecturers

Stephanie Anderson, (BSc MSc Glasgow, BSc Open), DPhil, Medicine

Alice Barron, (BA Nott, MMus RAM), DPhil, Music

Jacob Bird, (BA Camb), MSt DPhil, Music

Felicity Brown, (BA, MA Camb, MA Birm), DPhil, English

Simon Cassidy, MChem DPhil, Chemistry

Esther Cavett, (BMus Lond, PhD KCL), Music

David Chapman, (BA MSc PhD Camb), Engineering Science

Vilma de Gasperin, (Laurea Padua), DPhil Modern Languages

Clea Desebrook, (BA Manc), MSc DPhil, Psychology

Kamel El Omari, (BSc Paris VII, MSc PhD Paris VI), Biochemistry

Andrew Elliott, (BA Camb), MPhil DPhil, Economics

Rachel Exley, (BSc Leeds, PhD Paris XI), Medicine

Helen Flatley, (BA MPhil Camb, MA American University of Paris), History

George Haggett, BA DPhil, (MMus RHUL), Music

Charlotte Hemmings, BA (MA PhD SOAS), Linguistics

John Aaron Henry, BA, BMBCH, MRCP, Medicine

Katherine Hong, MA BPhil DPhil, Philosophy

Matthew Hosty, BA MSt DPhil, Classics

Daniel Jukes, MPhil (MCL Camb), Law

Quentin Miller, (BMath Waterloo), DPhil, Computer Science

Ain Neuhaus, MA DPhil BMBCH, Medicine

Thomas Nicol, (BBMedSc Victoria Wellington, PhD MRC Harwell), Medicine

Isabel Parkinson, BA (MSt Sheff), German

Naomi Petela, MBioChem DPhil, Biochemistry

Matthew Rattley, MChem, Biochemistry

Clare Rees-Zimmerman, (MA MEng PhD Camb), Engineering Science

Nisha Singh, MSc DPhil, Medicine

Graeme Smith, MPhys DPhil, Physics

Kerstin Timm, (PhD Camb), Medicine

John Traill, (BA MMus UEA), DPhil, Music

Damian Tyler, (MSci PhD Nott), Medicine

Timothy Walker, MA MHort, Plant Biology

Elly Walters, (BA Camb), MSt, DPhil, French

Amina Zarzi, (BA, MA Constantine), French

Ruihua Zhang, (BSc Imp, MPhil Camb), DPhil, Statistics

Retaining Fee Lecturers

Susan Anthony, MBBS, MRCP, FRCR, Medicine

Richard Ashdowne, MA DPhil, Linguistics

Ana Sofia Cerdeira, (MD PhD Porto), Medicine

Vilma de Gasperin, (Laurea Padua), DPhil, Modern Languages

Oliver Harmson, (MD Tartu), DPhil, Medicine

Departmental Lecturers

Helen Flatley, (BA MPhil Camb, MA American University of Paris), History

Dean Sheppard, MChem DPhil, Chemistry

College Lecturers

Maddalena Comini, (MSc Parma, PhD Dusseldorf), Experimental Psychology

Hanne Eckhoff, (MA, DPhil Oslo), Russian

Hannie Lawlor, BA MSt DPhil, Spanish

Lecturer in Medicine

Helen Ashdown, BM BCh DPhil, (MA Camb, PGDip (Health Res), DCH, MRCP, MRCGP, Janet Vaughan Tutor in Clinical Medicine

Academic Office

Becky Cotton-Barratt, MESc, (PhD Warwick), Assistant Senior Tutor (Interim)

Lucy Young, (BA Aberystwyth), Academic Registrar

Richard Brennan, Academic Office Assistant

Ali Davies, Academic Office Assistant

Helen Johnson, Executive Assistant to Fellows and Senior Tutor

Gerda Mickute, Medical Tutor Admin Support

Saphire Richards, Graduate and Tutorial Officer

Alison Shapton, Tutorial and Graduate Admin Assistant

Clare Simmonds, (BA Buckinghamshire New University) Academic Office Administrator

Sam Warburton, BA, BCL, Decanal Officer

Victoria Wilson, Scholarships and Funding Officer

Access and Outreach

Hannah Pack, (MA Camb, PGCE Oxford Brookes), Access and Outreach Officer

Aarthee Parimelalaghan, BA, Access and Outreach Support Officer

Chapel

Arzhia Habibi, (BA Nott, IMICS National Chengchi University), DPhil Chapel Scholar and Director

William Dawes, ARAM, (PGDip RAM, BMus Edin), Director of Chapel Music

Maria Umbert, Kimura Music Support Administrator

Conferences and Catering

Dave Simpson, FBII, Catering and Conference Manager

Richard Vowell, Dining Services Manager

Paul Fraemohs, Head Chef

Azam Akram, Kitchen Porter

Agata Biel, Food Preparation Assistant

Sam Bishop, Apprentice Commis Chef

Kerris Burton, Term Time Terrace/Cafe Assistant

Joanna Carr, Commis Chef (on mat leave)

Chloe Chaplin, Terrace Supervisor

Fidel do Nascimento, Kitchen Porter

Haydon Harris, Senior Catering Assistant

Sandy Jin, Catering Supervisor

Charlie Kirby, Apprentice Commis Chef

Jordan Leclaire, Sous Chef

Laura Lopez, Catering Assistant

Benedito Marques, Kitchen Porter

Viktor Martinek, Catering Supervisor

Ann Miller, Chef de Partie

Maria Oliver, Pastry Chef

Declan Powell-Quince, Senior Terrace Assistant

Ambika Sarkar, Conference and Events Co-Ordinator

Joy Shorter, Catering & Conference Office Assistant

Arnoldas Slepetis, Senior Chef de Partie

Dwayne Titley, Sous Chef

Ben White, Senior Catering Assistant

Hayden Whiting, Senior Chef de Partie

Communications

Matt Phipps, (BA York, MPhil Camb), Communications Manager

Em Pritchard, (BA MA York), Communications Officer

Development and Alumni Relations

Clare Finch, Deputy Development Director

Rebecca Coker, (BA Durh, MPhil Camb), Senior Development Executive

Lisa Gygax, MA, Secretary to the Somerville Association

Honey Hinkson, (BSc Bournemouth) Development and Alumni Events Assistant

Katariina Kottonen, Senior Development Executive (Maternity Cover)

Amelia Smart, Development Assistant

Alex Turchyn, Data Systems and Research Officer

Jackie Watson, MA PGCE, (MA PhD Lond) Joint Secretary to the Somerville Association

Jackie Yip, (BA Card), Regular Giving and Alumni Relations Executive

Estates

Steve Johnson, Estates Manager

Chris Wells, Head of Maintenance

Adam Fisk, Lead Maintenance Operative (multi-skilled)

Alex Fox, Maintenance General Assistant

John Hawkins, College Carpenter

Philip Hinkson, College Plumber Gardens

Alastair Mallick, Head Gardener

Anna Hart, Gardener

Cliff Jones, Horticultural Trainee

Annie Owen, Horticultural Trainee

Housekeeping

Teresa Walsh, Housekeeping and Accommodation Manager

Oluwaseun Alabi, Assistant Housekeeping Manager

Tina Abulime, Housekeeping General Assistant

Titilayo Adisa, Housekeeping General Assistant

Adunni Apakala, Housekeeping General Assistant

Patrycia Cicha, Senior Housekeeping Assistant (Senior Scout)

Dirce Da Silva Barros, Housekeeping General Assistant

Cecylia Gluszak, Housekeeping Supervisor

Marycel Herrera Munoz, Housekeeping General Assistant

Mara-Lane Joel Marcal, Housekeeping General Assistant

Anibal Jose, Housekeeping General Assistant

Beatrice Kasai, Housekeeping General Assistant

Tayo Kilanko, Housekeeping General Assistant

Anzelika Kupcevic, Housekeeping General Assistant

Malgorzata Kurysia, Housekeeping General Assistant

Giovani Lopez Betancur, Housekeeping General Assistant

Saroj Masih, Housekeeping General Assistant

Aleksandra Matejska, Housekeeping General Assistant

Loulieta Michalari, Housekeeping General Assistant

Lina Fernanda Mosquera, Housekeeping General Assistant

Aneta Owczarska-Pirog, Housekeeping General Assistant

Ioana Paraschiv, Senior Housekeeping Assistant (Senior Scout)

Monica Porras Perez, Senior Housekeeping Assistant (Senior Scout)

Songyan She, Assistant Housekeeping Supervisor

Cipriano Simoes do Rego, Housekeeping General Assistant

Olga Smith, Housekeeper to the Principal

Tun Tun Soe, Housekeeping General Assistant

Human Resources

Salome Hughes, PGCE, (BA Staffs, MA Oxford Brookes, ACIPD), HR Manager

Sarah Talbot, Human Resources Administrator

IT

Chris Bamber, Systems Manager

Abdur Razzak, IT Systems Engineer

Lee Gibbons, IT Support Technician

Sam Wetmore, AV Technician

Library

Susan Elizabeth Purver, MA, Assistant Librarian

Matthew Roper, MA, (MA Durh), Library Assistant

Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust

Jessica Mannix, (MA St Andrews), Campaign Director

Claire Cockcroft, MA (PhD Camb), Director of the Thatcher Scholarship Programme

Nursery

Karen Hopkins, Nursery Manager

Paul Chandler-Toal, Deputy Nursery Manager

Megan Baxter, Nursery Nurse (on mat leave)

Amber Connelly, Nursery Assistant

Lesley Douglas, Nursery Nurse

Donna Dover-Griffin, Nursery Nurse (Mat leave cover)

Divine Eluwa, Nursery Assistant (Mat leave cover)

Modupe Fadero, Nursery Nurse

Nimota Ishola, Nursery Cleaner

Josie Panidou, Nursery Nurse (on mat leave)

Lucy Parsons, Nursery Nurse (on mat leave)

Rebeka Power, Nursery Nurse (Mat leave cover)

Asma Talat, Nursery Assistant

Selina Weston, Nursery Nurse (Mat leave cover)

Oxford India Centre

Radhika Khosla, MPhys, (PhD Chicago), Research Director

Siddharth Arora, PhD, Programme Director

Neeraj Shetye, (BA SNU, MSc SOAS), Partnerships and Communications Manager

Narhitya Nawal, OICSD Administrative Officer

Porters’ Lodge

Mark Ealey, Lodge Manager

Agnieszka Rzad, Deputy Lodge Manager

Julian Smith, Deputy Lodge Manager

Manjuma Asheka, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Dylan Ball, Operations Assistant (weekdays)

Suzanna Bikar, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Anna Davies, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Marvin Doondeea, Night Porter/Receptionist

John Forrester, Night Porter/ Receptionist

Jonny Franklin, Lodge General Assistant

Joan Guiste, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Jennifer Inness, Lodge Receptionist

Aanchal Kumar, Lodge Receptionist

Rebecca Lawry, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Harvey Lott, Weekend Operations Assistant

Aleksander Mazurkiewicz, Night Porter/Receptionist

Richard Moss, Lodge Receptionist

Margarita Pavlova, Lodge Receptionist

Tamsyn Prior, Night Porter/ Receptionist

Chris Puffett, Operations Assistant (weekdays)

Carmen Rodriguez Romani, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Jazzala Whitworth-Jones, Weekend Lodge Receptionist

Principal’s Office

Alice Tattersall, (BA Brighton) Executive Assistant/Office Manager to the Principal

Treasury

Damian Clements, College Accountant

Elaine Boorman, Assistant College Accountant

Diane Berry, Payroll Officer

Sue Pedersen, Treasury Assistant

Ian Wooldridge, Treasury Officer (Fees & Battels)

Welfare

Joanne Ockwell, (BA MA Gloucester), Welfare Support and Policy Officer

Jenny Fitzgerald, College Nurse

Tamsin Greene-Barker, Student Welfare Advisor

Chibuzor Ogamba, Student Welfare Advisor

Jisoo Seo, Student Welfare Advisor

Principal’s Report

As I reach the end of my term as Principal, it is a great pleasure to report on another happy and successful year at Somerville.

At the heart of College, our students have again distinguished themselves both academically and pastorally, reflecting Somerville’s abiding ethos of intellect married with principle. Among those to shine academically are graduate-entry medics Frances England (2024), Daniel Radford-Smith (2024), and Caitlin Ashcroft (2025), all of whom have been elected Foulkes Foundation Fellows, an honour awarded only to the most exceptional aspiring clinician-scientists across the UK.

In the JCR, final-year linguist Hannah Williams received both the Gerard Davis and David Gibbs Prizes for her dissertation in French literature, while final year PPE student Wuwen Wong ranked first overall in his cohort. In STEM, Jack Garland (2022, Mathematics and Statistics) was joint-winner of the Gibbs Prize

for Best Overall Performance in Part B Mathematics & Statistics, while Grace Yu (2022, Mathematics and Statistics) was one of only twenty global winners – and the sole UK recipient – of the Bending Spoons’ Women in Science Scholarship, chosen from over 1,600 applicants.

Outside the classroom, Somerville students also made their mark. Undergraduate medic Amrit Rooprai (2023) was a finalist in the inaugural Entente Cordial academic challenge between France and Britain’s top universities with her plan for using blockchain technology to prevent corporate greenwashing. Also in the field of climate science, Somervillians Ben Chung (2022, Mathematics), Harry Stewart Dilley (2023, History) and Mariam Mehrez (2024, Physics) were featured at the Vice-Chancellor’s Colloquium on Climate Change, where their OxGreen app’s use of gamification and psychology to facilitate sustainable behaviours attracted seed funding from the university.

JAN IS PRESENTED WITH HER PORTRAIT BY ARTIST TANIA RIVILIS

Equally impressive are the achievements of our Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust scholars. Our Michael Bishop Foundation Thatcher Scholar Chloe Riley (2022, PPE) co-founded the Oxford Learning Society, which organises events to raise students’ awareness of evidence-backed learning techniques. From the OICSD, meanwhile, our Amansa Scholar Tabina Manzoor (2024, MSc Water Science, Policy and Management) delivered a powerful opening address at the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit in Oxford based on her experiences of trying to raise awareness of water security in Kashmir. Her colleague, the Cornelia Sorabji Scholar Mahek Bhatia (2024, MSc Criminal Justice and Criminology), also secured recognition by winning the Criminology Prize for Best Dissertation.

Somerville’s rich literary tradition continues to thrive among students, with DPhil candidate Corinne Clark winning the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for their powerful poem ‘1929-’. In a parallel domain of storytelling, History students Flora Prideaux (2022) and Sam Martin (2023) jointly claimed half of the available awards from the Geddes Student Journalism Prizes, showcasing the clarity and confidence with which Somervillians articulate their views on culture and politics.

Our Fellows, too, have given us cause for pride. Our Senior Research Fellows Professors Sir Marc Feldmann and Tony Bell were both honoured by the Royal Society, while Philip Poole was made a Royal Society Fellow in recognition of his groundbreaking work in bacterial genetics. Our SRF Professor Aditi Lahiri and our Fellow in Biochemistry Professor Elena Seiradake both had the significance of their research in linguistics and biochemistry, respectively, recognised by the award of ERC Synergy Grants, while Professor Beate Dignas was appointed Einstein Visiting Fellow in Berlin. Closer to home, Research Fellow Jim Harris received both the Teaching and Learning and Research Culture awards from the Vice-Chancellor – a rare and richly deserved double.

Our Junior Research Fellows also continue to shine. Dr Tin Hang (Henry) Hung was appointed a Scholar at the world’s first museum dedicated to climate change, based in Hong Kong. Dr Andrea Kusec and Dr Giuseppe Gava won a Public Engagement Award for bringing neuroscience to life for young students. Meanwhile, Dr Andy S. Anker has been named among

the world’s 30 most promising early-career scientists by the Inflection Award. At a time of deepening social and climate issues, such research from our students and fellows gives us real grounds for hope.

Looking to the future, we have been pleased to welcome several new Fellows to Somerville’s Governing Body. In 202526, we will welcome Professor Dale Dorsey as a our new Fellow in Philosophy, and Professor Francesca Arduini as our new Fellow in Economics. Each brings passion and expertise that will enrich our community immeasurably.

A special strength of Somerville has always been its commitment to fair access and broad opportunity, and this year we made encouraging strides here, too. Our 2024–25 admissions figures reveal that 73.8% of our incoming students were from state schools – well above the University average of 67.3% – and 16% of students came from areas with historically low university progression, compared to the University average of 14.5%.

These numbers affirm the ongoing success of our Access programme, and to them must be added our Access team’s phenomenal efforts over the past year. They have conducted 60 visits to and from schools within our link areas, engaging

JAN WITH STUDENTS WHO DEVELOPED OXGREEN APP

AMRIT ROOPRAI, FINALIST IN THE INAUGURAL ENTENTE CORDIALE CHALLENGE

over 3,000 young people from Years 7 to 12. In addition, Somerville College’s Open Days have welcomed another 3,000 prospective students to our annual ‘Meet the Tutor’ sessions and tours of college with our ever-enthusiastic Access Ambassadors.

Another active update of Somerville’s promise to include the excluded comes in the form of our work with St Frideswide Primary School. Five student volunteers now provide one-toone reading support through the Bookmark charity, and the Y6 class recently took part in a neuroscience workshop led by Dr Kusec and Dr Gava as part of their ‘Making Memories’ programme.

Elsewhere, our commitment to supporting scholars from diverse and global backgrounds remains unwavering. This year we celebrated two new Astrophoria Scholars joining in History and PPE, and attained the milestone of welcoming 20 displaced students from around the world as Somerville Sanctuary Scholars. The Oxford India Centre and Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust each passed 60 fully-funded scholars, forming two distinct yet powerful bodies of thinkers and change-makers in the world beyond Somerville.

Meanwhile, College life has been just as vibrant as ever. The Somerville Choir went on tour in the United States, performing in Texas, New York and Vassar College, and launched a luminous

Catherine Royle has been elected Principal of Somerville College, succeeding Baroness Jan Royall, whose distinguished leadership spanned the years from 2017 to 2025.

An alumna of Somerville, Catherine read Philosophy, Politics and Economics in the 1980s, serving as JCR President during the tenure of then-Principal Daphne Park. Her lifelong dedication to public service and international diplomacy began shortly thereafter, when she completed a Master’s in Strategic Studies and joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Catherine’s early diplomatic career took her to Chile during its transition from dictatorship to democracy, followed by key policy roles in London focused on Iraq. Her subsequent appointment as First Secretary for EU and Economic Affairs in Dublin positioned her at the heart of European relations. From 2001 to 2003, she led the Policy Unit supporting the UK’s engagement in the Convention on the Future of Europe and advised the ministerial representative, Peter Hain, in shaping what would become the Lisbon Treaty.

In subsequent years, Catherine held senior posts across Latin America, serving as Deputy Head of Mission in Buenos Aires and British Ambassador to Venezuela, where she played a vital role in fostering UK business interests and advancing anti-narcotic partnerships.

Her diplomatic career culminated in two significant appointments in Afghanistan: Deputy Ambassador in Kabul and Head of the Secretariat of the International Police Coordination Board, where she spearheaded strategic

new album – ‘Divine Light’ – which offers a vibrant expression of the Indian Choral tradition.

Also enjoying a golden year was the Somerville College Boat Club. The W1 team took blades in Hilary’s Torpids for the first time since 2019, then followed this up with a historic triple-blade victory in Trinity. These are not just sporting achievements, but a testament to determination, unity, and the irrepressible Somerville spirit.

Finally, Somerville has taken important steps in governance and infrastructure. We introduced new policies on academic freedom and launched the RISE Campaign to support our newest development: the Ratan Tata Building. This inspiring addition will help us sustain our mission for education – one that is inclusive, future-facing, and intellectually bold.

As I look back on a year of ambition and inspiration, I feel nothing but gratitude to the students, staff, fellows, alumni, and friends who made it possible. Somerville has always stood for advancing knowledge and extending its benefits to others. Thanks to all of you, I know this dual promise of Somerville will continue for years to come.

JAN ROYALL , Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, Principal of Somerville

reforms in Afghan policing. Most recently, Catherine served as Political Adviser to the Commander of NATO’s Joint Force Command, Brunssum, where she continued her work on Afghanistan before transferring to Eastern European defence planning in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Returning to Somerville, Catherine brings with her a wealth of international experience, strategic acumen and resilient leadership at a time of global uncertainty. Her deep personal connection with the College, combined with a lifetime of service, makes her uniquely placed to lead the next chapter in Somerville’s history.

Treasurer’s Report

At the time of writing we are still a month away from our year end. Indications thus far are that our endowment is holding steady at around £100m, although the current levels of global political instability mean this must be subject to fluctuation. Our management accounts are looking good. Costs have been well controlled, and our income is on target, with conference income looking good. Unrestricted donations this year have been strong and are forecast to be £1.3m, £0.4m better than budget. This will flow through to the bottom line and will help us fund additional capital expenditure.

Looking forward, 2025-26 is going to be tight. We need to find an additional £0.5m in capital expenditure to fund investment in our IT infrastructure, on top of the £0.5m we have invested this year. Employee costs are becoming a particular issue. For the last five years or so we have been paying the living wage and more recently the Oxford living wage. This has been the right thing to do, and hourly rates for our lower paid staff have increased by 40% in that period, but the need to maintain differentials through the wage structure means that it has also been expensive. This pressure had been exacerbated by the Chancellor's decision to lower the threshold for employers’ national insurance at the same time as increasing the rate. This will add an estimated £200k a year to our payroll costs and will particularly affect the cost of employing our lower paid staff. Overall, our headcount has increased by 8% over the last five years (with undergraduate numbers broadly constant) but our payroll costs have gone up by 43%, fuelled by the living wage and the rise in employers’ national insurance. It is becoming expensive to employ our staff and we will need to manage our payroll carefully in 2025 - 26.

Plans for our new Ratan Tata building are developing apace. The planning application was submitted at the end of June with the enthusiastic endorsement of the council’s planning officers and with good feedback from the public consultation. It is possible it might go through on delegated powers, but if it does go to full committee, we are hopeful of receiving planning permission by mid-September. Then follow the finer details of design, the appointment of the main contractor and the development of a logistical plan to service what is a small and constrained site. Construction is expected to start in March 2026 with the building delivered in May/June 2027. Fundraising continues apace, and at the moment we have secured £11m of the £13m required.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that we are in the early stages of engagement with a government-backed company who are planning to build a heating network in Oxford that would supply sustainably heated water to university buildings and colleges by 2030. The water would be hot enough to run with our existing radiators, pipes and insulation, obviating the need to install air source heat pumps and expensively retrofit our buildings to improve thermo performance. The cost would be a fraction of the £45m we estimate it would cost over the next twenty years to make our site zero carbon using air source heat pumps. Many a slip between cup and lip - but twenty-five colleges and the university are expressing a strong interest, and this is the most feasible route to making Somerville environmentally sustainable that we have seen.

ANDREW PARKER

JUNE 2025

ANDREW PARKER, COLLEGE TREASURER. PHOTO: JOHN CAIRNS

Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities

Biochemistry

Elena Seiradake’s lab won a large research award (ERC synergy) that will fund research on cancers in early childhood. These paediatric tumours represent a challenge in the landscape of cancer research. Unlike adult cancers, they typically originate from embryonic cells, from which they inherit characteristic embryonic features. This is exemplified by neuroblastoma, the most common solid tumour in young children. Neuroblastoma is a heterogeneous cancer with aggressive metastatic forms, which emerges from neural crest cells. These cells normally undergo a complex migratory process that depends on the functions of cell surface signalling receptors. In a recent, ground-breaking study they found that neuroblastoma cells co-opt one specific family of these receptors (UNC5) and the ligand GPC3 to disseminate (Akkermans et al. Cell 2022). Disruption of this interaction in vivo impacted on cell cohesion, migratory properties and redirected tumour localisation. In the SUNRISE project, Elena and her team build on these results and unpublished data analysis, suggesting that an entire UNC5 interaction network, involving multiple different ligands besides GPC3, is at play in malignant neuroblastoma. Understanding the mechanisms driving neuroblastoma cell aggressive behaviours requires investigation of this network in the embryonic context. A key strength of the proposal is SUNRISE’s unique approach bringing molecular/ structural biology to in vivo experiments. The strategy maximises the use of targeted, structure-based perturbation experiments, where we control the activity of individual receptor interaction precisely, in vivo. SUNRISE also have the necessary access to patient samples and will use them in combination with our innovative avian xenograft model, which recapitulates the embryonic environment of neuroblastoma. In a final work package of the project, SUNRISE will apply their strategy, developed with a focus on neuroblastoma, to two other paediatric cancers where UNC5 is expressed. In sum, the results of

SUNRISE will produce a first detailed picture of the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ UNC5 network interactions drive paediatric cancer biology, and could lead to new therapeutics, for example, using nanobody technology.

Classics

Luke Pitcher published his monograph Appian (Oxford University Press, 2025). This is the first comprehensive study in English of the Second Century Greek historian Appian of Alexandria, on whom Luke has been working since he joined Somerville as a graduate student a quarter of a century ago. He also published a study of Plutarch’s essay ‘On Talkativeness’, which is available here: https://histos.org/index.php/histos/ article/view/705.

Engineering

Stephen Roberts’ interests lie in the theory and methodology of intelligent algorithms for large-scale, realworld problems. Collaborative work, using machine learning to improve oceanographic measurement, has seen high-profile exposure in Nature Communications. New major projects include research in AI security, funded by the Oxford Martin School and bioacoustic monitoring for invasive species detection, funded by the UKRI. He continues as lead of the Schmidt AI in Science Programme, which has recently extended its outreach with Africa & India Faculty Fellowships.

History

In the past year, Natalia Nowakowska has continued to work on her forthcoming publications on the Jagiellonian dynasty of Renaissance Central Europe. She went on research trips to Saxony and to Brandenburg, looking at artwork, material culture and architectural evidence relating to Polish-Lithuanian princesses who were consorts in these areas in the 16th century. This has involved a lot of walking in Renaissance hunting estates in

the forests outside Berlin, and train trips deep into the Saxon mountains! She has given a public lecture to the Guildford/ North-East Surrey Historical Association about her research. Natalia has also enjoyed being on the History Finals Examination Board, and being personal tutor this year to our wonderful cohort of Finalists.

Faridah Zaman continued researching and writing on several areas of interest this year. The first explores the presence of Indian Muslims in interwar Europe, a project that has so far resulted in a book chapter published last year in an edited volume on religious internationalism, and an article recently published in the Journal of Global History. The latter makes use of an extraordinary photographic archive located in Paris, and Faridah was able to include several portraits from this collection in the final piece. Faridah also continued work on the history of the first generations of Muslim students to study in Oxford following the 1871 abolition of all religious tests – this has also led to a forthcoming book chapter in an edited volume, and an article forthcoming in the English Historical Review. Finally, Faridah is involved in a special issue on the theme of world tours. Her contribution focuses on the travel diaries of a little-known figure who undertook a tour of Asia and the Pacific in 1900, during which he crossed paths with numerous eminent Indian political and intellectual figures. Faridah presented her research in several forums this year, but was particularly honoured to be asked to deliver the keynote lecture at the London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, held at the LSE this year. She is also currently serving as the Director of the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History.

Law

Julie Dickson was fortunate enough to have sabbatical leave in Michaelmas 2024, and during that time presented a paper at a conference in Bristol bringing together scholars in analytical legal philosophy, and in critical legal theory.

This was very rewarding, and an edited collection of essays from the conference will be published later in 2025.

Iyiola Solanke organised the first Conference on Decolonising EU Law, which was held in July 2025. She was also invited to deliver a Compact Seminar at the College of Europe in Bruge in March 2025, and published a Research Paper for the College of Europe on forced evictions based on race under Danish law.

Linguistics

Louise Mycock has had three chapters accepted for publication this year. Two of these chapters continue her work on ProTags in historical varieties of English; the other examines the morphosyntactic properties of Indian English. The manuscript of her book The Typology of Constituent Questions

was also completed and submitted to the publisher. She is proud to have supervised both winners of the 2025 Philological Society’s Robins Prize. The winning submissions were “Word Order Variation as Differential Object Marking” by Chen Xie and “Neutral forms of ‘be’ as default forms: The utility of underspecification and blocking in a Welsh morphosyntactic phenomenon” by Frances Dowle. Two years ago, Louise led a UNIQ+ project on “The Meaning of ‘Meaningless’ Pronouns”. UNIQ+ research internships are aimed at talented undergraduates from underrepresented groups, who would find continuing into postgraduate study a challenge for reasons other than their academic ability. She was thrilled to hear that one of the interns on her project will begin his DPhil studies at Oxford in Michaelmas Term 2025. This year Dr Naijing Liu secured a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral

Fellowship to continue her study of Tsum, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal, under Louise’s supervision. Dr Liu arrives in Oxford in the autumn. Linguistics undergraduates from Prelims students to Finalists were involved in the College’s Open Day events this year. Visitors commented on their enthusiasm and helpfulness. They were excellent ambassadors for Somerville and for Linguistics.

Colin Phillips’ enjoyed a fun-filled year in which he took on the Head of Department role for Linguistics (“Faculty Board Chair”) just a few months after arriving in Oxford. This role turned out to be a great crash course in How Oxford Works. In addition to the day-to-day business of the Faculty, Colin spent a lot of time fostering connections between language experts from across the university, and preparing for the Faculty’s move to the Schwarzman

Centre. This move is Big News, as it will be the first time in 800 years that Oxford’s linguists will be (mostly) under one roof. (Yes, 800 years. Already in the 13th century, figures such as Bishop Robert Grosseteste, first chancellor of the university, and Roger Bacon, a.k.a. Doctor Mirabilis, were doing cuttingedge linguistic scholarship in Oxford.) It’s also a big deal for Somerville, as this is all happening in our back yard.

Colin enjoyed a busy year in research, exploring topics ranging from the relations between humans and large language models to the planning of ‘switch reference’ phenomena in an indigenous language spoken in Amazonia. He mostly divided his time between Oxford and Maryland, where the US side of his research team worked to survive the chaos that has unfolded in Washington and in US higher education. But he also was able to give talks in diverse settings, ranging from the Arctic Circle in Norway to Beijing, to GCHQ in Cheltenham, where he gave a keynote speech to a conference for Five Eyes intelligence agencies.

Medicine

Robin Klemm received a Discovery Award from the Wellcome Trust, which will provide eight years of funding for his program on the role of lipids in control of metabolic physiology.

Modern Languages

Simon Kemp chaired the working group on admissions reform for the Modern Languages Faculty this year, looking to develop their admissions process to make it rigorous, fair and moving with the way the subject is changing at school and university. He also ran the Opportunity Oxford humanities course, the university’s pre-sessional bridging course for offer-holders from less advantaged backgrounds, for the final time this year, before handing the reins over to a colleague. He leaves the bridging programme in good shape, growing year on year and this year with over 300 students enrolled across all subjects, plus a further 300 invited to the online version of the course over the summer.

In Michaelmas, Francesca Southerden began a three-year term serving as

Chair of the Sub-Faculty of Italian and has enjoyed the opportunity to work closely with colleagues and students in this role. She also had the pleasure of teaching a broad range of medieval Italian papers to undergraduate and Masters students during the academic year. She has moved forward with several research projects which engage with medieval literature from an ecological and posthuman perspective. Together with Prof. Manuele Gragnolati, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville, she has continued work on a coauthored book which reads works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio through a posthuman lens, the first chapter of which they presented at a colloquium in honour of Prof. Almut Suerbaum which took place in Freiburg in February. Francesca has also started research for a new monograph, provisionally entitled Plant Love: Desire and the Vegetal Imaginary in Medieval European Lyric, material for which she presented at an international conference in Boston. An article related to the project - ‘Reading for Atmosphere: Pleasure, Lyric, and Community in the cornice of Boccaccio’s Decameron’ - was just published in Italian Studies

For Almut Suerbaum, the highlight of the year was an international colloquium on ‘Multivocality and Responsiveness. Medieval Literature in Dialogue’ in Freiburg in February which colleagues had organised around her work. The opening concert, a re-interpretation of plainchant liturgy by two young musicians, set the tone for a wonderful and intense day of interdisciplinary discussions. In Trinity Term, Carlisle leave enabled her to take up invitations to visiting professorships in Munich and Tübingen to collaborate with colleagues, post-docs and graduates in the research clusters on ‘Cultures of Vigilance’ and ‘Alternative Aesthetics’.

Music

Samantha Sebastian began work on a new research project titled ‘Voicing Global Labour Migration: The Songworlds and Livelihoods of Overseas Filipino Workers’, during her 2024–25 sabbatical. Funded by the Humanities Impact Leaders Scheme, a John Fell Fund Small Award, and TORCH’s Participatory Research Fund, the project examines migrant workers

in sectors dependent on international labour mobility – particularly in health and aged care, domestic work, and maritime industries – and how they use music and voice to navigate and articulate their experiences. Through a combination of multi-sited ethnography and participatory research, Sam has partnered with civil society organisations to explore how songs, singing, and voice function in migrant workers’ everyday lives, as forms of care, service, solidarity, advocacy, and, at times, resistance. Following three months of fieldwork in Manila, she organised a stakeholder forum in collaboration with the Center for Migrant Advocacy. The event brought together lived experience experts, researchers, NGO representatives, lawyers, and officials from the Philippine government’s Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, as well as the International Labour Organization, to discuss preliminary findings and future directions for the project. This work now continues in the UK and Europe, with the next phase already underway in London in partnership with the migrant domestic workers charity Kalayaan.

Politics

Patricia Owens’ new book, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, was published this year with Princeton University Press and launched at Somerville College.

Psychology

Professor Charles Spence continues to work on the multisensory perception of food with world-leading chefs and academics from around the world. His latest book, Digital Dining: New Innovations in Food and Technology, written with former student Carlos Velasco, has just been published with Springer Nature and is available here: https://link.springer.com/ book/9783031910494. At the same time, the Spanish and Korean markets have just negotiated the rights to reprint the 2017 Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating. Three of the PhD students in Prof. Spence’s group are currently based in Somerville. They continue to research food-related matters (Tianyi Zhang and Ruoqi Huang), as well as the haptic augmentation of cinema (Yang Gao).

Subject News

This year we also invited academics to share news from their subjects at Somerville. Although not all subjects are represented here, we hope to build on this in future years.

Biochemistry

We had excellent part I exam marks, with 4 out of 5 students achieving a first class result.

Elena Seiradake

History

This has been a wonderful year for the History School at Somerville, where our students have continued to work hard and engage deeply with their studies. The teaching team this year has included tutorial fellows Benjamin Thompson, Natalia Nowakowska, and Faridah Zaman, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medieval History, Helen Flatley. We also welcomed for the year Juan Neves Sarriegui as a Fulford JRF in History. While achievement is not measured solely by exam results, we were delighted that our Finalists’ efforts were rewarded with excellent marks this summer – eight Firsts out of a cohort of fourteen. Particularly gratifying was the number of students who achieved First-class marks in their theses. This year’s projects covered a particularly wide range of topics, reflecting the eclecticism of students’ interests and their creativity. There were studies of the emotional lives of seventeenthcentury scholars in the Republic of Letters, women in Prohibition-era New York, ethnographic photography in the Russian Empire, imperialism in Edwardian schools, food transgressions in fifteenth-century monastic houses in England and Germany, Afro-Asian solidarity in the mid-twentieth century, and a microhistory of a waste ground in East London, to name just a few. Many of these students were supported in their research by awards from the Alcuin Fund. This and other College grants have enabled students to undertake a range of trips to broaden their historical horizons. This summer, a student is travelling to the US to learn more about their family history (and conduct some thesis research!), and several others are travelling around Europe to explore art, architecture, and archaeology. Back in Oxford, students have enjoyed a range of events arranged by the Somerville History Society throughout

the year, which included evening talks by Professors Senia Paseta and Matthew Cook, and, of course, our annual fancydress dinner, attended by graduate and undergraduate students.

Faridah Zaman

Law

Our law students have continued to do great things in addition to their law studies. For example, one of our final year students is this summer taking part in the Nuremberg Moot Court international mooting competition finals. The Law Faculty of the University continues with its curriculum review process which may, in time, result in innovative changes to the Oxford undergraduate law degree.

Julie Dickson

Linguistics

Linguistics continues to thrive as a subject at Somerville. Six Prelims students began their course in Michaelmas Term 2024 and our Finalists produced very pleasing results at the end of Trinity Term. Our current third year Psychology and Linguistics students move on in the academic year 2025-26 to become part of the first MSci Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics (PPL) cohort. As well as the annual Linguistics subject dinner, a termly Linguistics afternoon tea is held to which all undergraduate and postgraduate students of Linguistics at Somerville are invited. These regular events offer an informal opportunity for students to meet each other and have become central to building and maintaining the supportive Linguistics community in College.

Louise Mycock

Linguistics at Somerville is about to get even better, with the opening of the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities right next door to Somerville. As one 17-year old asked at a recent subject open day in Exam Schools: “If you want to do linguistics, is there any reason to apply anywhere other than Somerville?” That is a fair question!

Colin Phillips

Junior Research Fellows’ Activities

As always, a particularly vibrant part of the Somerville College Community is our collection of Junior Research Fellows, who are pursuing postdoctoral research in a huge range of topics.

Andy Anker’s research focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of inorganic nanomaterials, with a particular emphasis on integrating machine learning and robotics within a self-driving laboratory. At Oxford, he is working on integrating energy calculations into his modelling tools for scattering data and using energy calculations to provide prior information about which chemical compounds are stable under various synthetic conditions. This can guide the self-driving laboratory in achieving controlled synthesis of materials with tailored functionalities.

Maria Caiazza works in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, using stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease to understand how calcium behaves inside cells since calcium is central to cell function. Maria is working with AstraZeneca to find treatments that can help nerve cells in Parkinson’s patients function normally again.

Amy Chu-Antypas works at the Centre for Medicines Discovery, part of the Nuffield Department of Medicine. She helps search for new molecules that could be developed into medicines to treat different diseases. Using advanced lab techniques, she can quickly test thousands of small molecules to see how they interact with proteins in the body that play a role in disease. Amy also supports other scientists by running

these tests for their research. Her own work focuses on finding new treatments for Type 2 Diabetes, liver cancer, and diseases that affect the immune system.

Charlotte Doesburg is a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music. She is working on a project exploring identity negotiations by metal bands from the transnational region of Karelia, located on the Finnish Russian border. The Karelian minority identity has been variously repressed, ridiculed, and erased. Charlotte studies how metal musicians with Karelian roots revitalise the culture and language which is in danger of disappearing altogether through a combination of factors, not least the current political climate.

Lucy Garner works in Paul Klenerman’s group in the Nuffield Department of Medicine. Lucy’s research employs advanced omics approaches to study how the human immune system responds to infections and vaccinations. Her recent work uncovered the networks of cells and molecules underlying distinct early immune responses to adenoviral vector and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Lucy also collaborates with the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam to study major infectious diseases in Southeast Asia, with the goal of developing new vaccines and treatments.

Giuseppe Pietro Gava joined Professor David Dupret’s Group at the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit (BNDU) as a Postdoctoral Neuroscientist in October 2021. He obtained his DPhil from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Neurotechnology at Imperial College London, where he also graduated in Biomedical Engineering. He aims to use concepts from network science, topology and information theory to understand the complex neural circuitry and dynamics that shape memory and cognition.

Tin Hang (Henry) Hung’s main research concerns the adaptation and genomics of forest trees, from tropical forests in Southeast Asia, to temperate forests in Europe and North America. He also conducts research in Wytham and Blenheim in Oxford. He co-chairs the Ecological Genetics Group and serves on 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.

Andrea Kusec’s research focuses on developing accessible mental health interventions for adults with various types of brain injury. A recent paper from Andrea and her team showed that standard ‘talking therapy’ for depression can be less effective with brain injury patients, and that adjustment to the standard therapy could significantly improve outcomes for these patients. This year, Andrea secured several awards and funds, including an NIHR Development and Skills Enhancement Award, the NIHR Undergraduate Internship Fund, and the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund. Andrea conducted several public engagement activities with Somerville, and cowon the NDCN Public Engagement Award.

Shiwei Liu is a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at Oxford. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his PhD with Cum Laude from Eindhoven University of Technology. His research goal is to leverage, understand, and expand the role of lowdimensionality in neural networks for scalable and efficient AI. Shiwei has received two Rising Star Awards from KAUST and the Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL). His PhD thesis received the 2023 Best Dissertation Award Runner-up from Informatics Europe.

Elizabeth MacGregor is the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow in music education. During her research into the positive and negative impacts of school music-making – or ‘musical vulnerabilities’ – Elizabeth has worked with teachers in three schools to develop responsive and inclusive classroom pedagogies. This year saw the publication of her first book, Musical Vulnerability: Receptivity, Susceptibility, and Care in the Music Classroom, and her co-edited volume, Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School (4th ed.), will be released next year.

Raffaele Sarnataro is a Fulford Junior Research Fellow and a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Neuroscience, working in the Miesenböck group at the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. His research investigates how sleep-control neurons operate and how sleep need is physically encoded in their molecular machinery and circuitry network dynamics, and is aimed at unveiling the mystery of why we need to sleep.

Lachie Scarsbrook is a geneticist in the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network.

Lachie utilises ancient DNA to reconstruct ancestry and selection throughout the ~20,000-year evolutionary history of domestic dogs. His current research projects are focused on identifying shared coevolutionary histories of humans and dogs, and understanding the drivers and consequences of strong artificial selection in dogs over the past two centuries.

Emma Soneson works in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, focusing on ways to try to reduce the incidence prevalence and impact of child and adolescent mental health difficulties. Emma is especially interested in public health approaches, the intersections between education and mental health, and how we can support schools to take a central role in mental health promotion and prevention. This year Emma was highly commended in the Research Culture category at the ViceChancellor’s Awards alongside her colleague Dr Galit Geulayov, for their outstanding commitment to mentoring future researchers via the inaugural NIHR Undergraduate Internship Programme.

Jessica Thompson works in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Jessica is working on developing a formalism to develop computational theories of human cognition. Notably, Jessica has been focusing on visual relational reasoning, which is the way the brain interprets visual information to draw conclusions about the relationships between objects. Jessica has developed an AI model based on our understanding of the human/primate relational reasoning which successfully accounted for the results in a new eye-tracking experiment.

Sarah Woodward is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology and a Fulford JRF at Somerville. Her research involves studying the interaction between vaccine-induced antibodies and sugar structures commonly found on the surface of gut bacteria, to understand how the immune system can recognize harmful pathogenic microbes and distinguish them from ‘good’ gut-resident microbes which promote human health. Her active research collaborations investigate the role of microbes in enteric disease, childhood malnutrition, and asthma development.

Silvia Zanoli is a theoretical physicist working in the field of collider phenomenology. The main goal of Silvia’s research is improving the accuracy of theoretical predictions of particle interactions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in order to obtain cutting-edge results that can be directly compared to data. In the next few years, the LHC will undergo a substantial improvement, which will lead to experimental data with an unprecedented level of precision. Correctly interpreting the upcoming data will be possible only if precise and realistic theoretical predictions are available.

Rocco Zizzamia works in the Economics Department, using experimental methods to test the effectiveness of innovative economic interventions around the world. One project aims to test whether it is more effective to provide anticipatory support for people in disaster-prone areas rather than rely on emergency relief after a disaster occurs. Rocco’s team is studying the impact of anticipatory cash transfers in the Jamuna River Basin in Bangladesh, where flooding is likely to occur in the forthcoming monsoon season. Other projects relate to the impact of repeated rejection on job searching in South Africa and Group Coaching projects in Bangladesh, Uganda and the Philippines.

JCR Report

Marked by strong values of friendship, community and academic excellence, this has been a year of joy and excitement for the Junior Common Room. We began the academic year with freshers’ week, where student helpers facilitated with the settling in of new students and organised events for cultivating friendships. Our yearly ethnic minorities formal and LGBTQ+ formal are testament to a diverse student body, speaking to Somerville’s legacy as an inclusive college. Through the JCR prescription, gender expression and disabilities fund, we endeavour to provide students with support during and beyond term time.

The JCR renovations to the Terrace bar have been warmly received and have revitalised it into a social space for Somervillians. The JCR entertainment team has also hosted well-attended open-mic nights and bops, while other JCR events like Arts Week, Lunar New Year celebrations and the termly Welfare Week provide chances for students to get together. Trinity term was celebrated with our Somerville-Jesus ball, its theme ‘La Belle Époque’, promising a night of happiness – which was indeed delivered by the ball committee. Other highlights of term include sports cuppers and all three of the women’s teams winning Blades in Summer Eights.

As always, we are committed to a vision of nurture and collaboration within and outside of Somerville. We have conducted a JCR constitution review with input from the student body to ensure that students’ interests remain a priority in the JCR’s work. In widening access, our college Access Ambassadors remain crucial in tours and open days. The JCR-run access roadshow also visited 10+ schools, encouraging students from underprivileged backgrounds to apply to Oxford.

Through our charities ballot, we have supported Oxford Mutual Aid, Somerville Ghana Library Project and Usikimye Charity.

These initiatives would be impossible without the JCR committee members’ dedication and expertise. Their passion for what they do is infectious and a constant inspiration. Furthermore, Somerville is a thriving community because of the wider JCR and I am grateful always for their kindness and enthusiasm. On behalf of the student body, I extend my gratitude to the college staff and academics for their support in our endeavours. We will miss Jan Royall’s heartfelt leadership, and we look forward to welcoming Catherine Royle as our new principal. I wish the 2024/25 Leavers the best and am excited about the work of the incoming President and the JCR committee.

JAMIE SEE, JCR President

JCR AND MCR PRESIDENTS JAMIE SEE AND DAVID CAO WITH JCR

LGBTQ REP LUCY POLLOCK

THE JCR COMMITTEE IN MICHAELMAS 2024

MCR Report

250+ ATTENDEES IN THE TWO-WAY SOMERVILLE-GIRTON EXCHANGES

30+ WINE AND CHEESE SECOND DESSERTS

12

INTER-COLLEGE FORMAL DINNER EXCHANGES

With a whole year of hard collaborative work by the most dedicated Committee team, together with close collaboration with the College office and wider Association, the MCR has significantly enriched the College experience of Somerville’s graduate students, enabling them to achieve their full potential in a vibrant, friendly and inclusive community.

The academic year kicked off with a series of successful freshers’ events – Friends at Somerville was held to help people meet, the Terrace Bar Quiz to share Somerville fun facts, the “Brat” themed BOP to celebrate the one and only “Brat summer 2024”, and the welfare brunch to provide refreshment after the BOP. Throughout the year, we hosted Second Desserts after each Guest Night Dinner, celebrated numerous festivals (Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid), and organised a number of intercollegiate formal exchanges, culminating in the epic SomervilleGirton exchanges, which reached a historic attendance of 250+ from both colleges.

Somervillians continue to excel in their fields of focus and interest – graduating from DPhil programs with highest departmental dissertation awards, publishing papers in highimpact journals, winning best poster awards in various academic conferences, among many other accomplishments. Beyond the outstanding study and research, our students shone brightly in

6

JOINT WELFARE EVENTS WITH 3 OTHER COLLEGES

2

JOINT MEGA BOPS COLLABORATING WITH 7 OTHER COLLEGES

a myriad of sports events and competitions, notably winning three Blades in the Summer VIII Rowing Contest and the Tennis Cupper, among others. Somervillians continue to realise their full potential in their pursuit of excellence.

The MCR continued significant welfare schemes such as the NHS prescription reimbursement and flu vaccination subsidy, as well as welfare events such as 15-min massages and intercollegiate high tea exchanges. As regards EDI initiatives, some of the year’s highlights include the International Women’s Day celebration with a Woman Career Development Panel, an EDI-themed brunch and a calming choral contemplation. A supportive and accessible environment has been cultivated in our MCR.

Nothing is achievable without the unwavering effort by the exceptional Committee Team and the support from the wider MCR cohort, for which I have always been truly grateful. As Confucius wrote, “Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.” I sincerely wish that the driven and inclusive community that we have established together can give all Somervillians the strength to strive for a peaceful and thriving world.

DAVID (ZHEYI) CAO, MCR President

Library and Archives Report

Often the measures of success of a service revolve around numbers and statistics. For the library and archives we consider how many books have been borrowed, how often study rooms have been booked, how many visitors made use of the collection, and so on. If we look at the raw numbers from the past academic year, some have gone up and some have gone down. What is more difficult to quantify is the value placed upon a service. This year the library and archives undertook an exercise to agree policies for acquisition, donations and withdrawals. Through the newly-formed Library and Archives Working Group, the true value of the library as the heart of the college was reaffirmed, and the resulting policies reflect the library and archives’ objectives, not only to remain central to teaching and learning, but also to ensure that the history of the college is preserved for future generations of Somervillians.

Our Collections

This year we added 1,561 items to the library collection: 1,313 purchased books, 162 donated books, 14 DVDs and 72 offprints (all bar one donated). We received a particularly sizeable collection of books from Somervillian and Honorary Fellow Onora O’Neill. Not only did the library benefit from a number of new titles from this collection, but those items not selected for the library were offered to other Oxford libraries and our staff and students, and were snapped up with gratifying speed.

In addition to the regular Somerville users of the collection, the library welcomed 31 external visitors to view items in the collection, and three researchers made use of the John Stuart Mill collection. The archives also welcomed its fair share of visitors, with 22 researchers consulting the special collections and 15 researchers consulting the archives, spending an average of 6.5 hours consulting the collection. As well as facilitating visits to the archive, the archivist was also very busy answering enquiries: 64 queries regarding the special collections, and 91 about the archives.

The work to catalogue the Mary Somerville Shell Collection was successfully completed during the summer of 2024. Images of the collection and a detailed list of its contents are now available on the library website. The collection is housed in the library, and is available by appointment for research purposes. Simply contact the archivist on archives@some. ox.ac.uk.

If you want to learn more about what the library and archives are up to, our website at https://library.some.ox.ac.uk is a good place to start. We have started adding more information about our exhibitions and collections, as well as launching a listing of duplicate copies of books available for sale.

Our Space

The library continues to be a popular place to study for students throughout term time. Doubling our group study rooms (to two!) proved a sensible move at the beginning of the year as bookings have demonstrated a consistent demand.

The exhibition space continues to be a useful area of the library. This year, in addition to the Oxford Open Doors exhibition discussed below, we curated exhibitions on the college’s wild flora and fauna, the art of Ornella Reni (showcasing the donation of artworks made by Rosemary FitzGibbon), and an exploration of College during the world wars, in support of the launch of the new memorial garden for the contributions of Somervillians to both wars). Our archivist also mounted several exhibitions in Green Hall, and our assistant librarian highlighted several of our rare books collection in her termly ‘Book of the Term’ (which you can find on the library website).

Our Activities in the Wider Community

This May saw the inaugural Multidisciplinary Mill(s) one-day conference, which provided the opportunity for a select (and eminent and enthusiastic) group of Mill scholars to discuss not only the work of John Stuart Mill, whose Blackheath home library the college owns, but also the work of his father, James Mill, his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor. As its title suggests, although Mill is known (arguably) primarily as a philosopher, the conference brought together different disciplines influenced by Mill’s work, including economics, history and political science.

For those interested in the history of the women’s colleges, or in Somerville’s famous alumni, the librarian continues to host tours, providing an overview of the history of the college and the context in which it was established. The librarian also facilitates the college’s participation in Oxford Open Doors,

PHOTO: FISHER STUDIOS

which provides an opportunity for those who live and work in Oxford (and visitors) to explore some of the places they perhaps do not get a chance to visit very often. Last year’s theme was Connections, which we took as a chance for our archivist to highlight the many wonderful connections Somervillians make. This year the theme is Architecture, which is a fantastic opportunity to show off the diverse architecture which makes Somerville so special. The library’s 1904 building, designed by Basil Champneys, is featured in a book recently published by OUP, Oxford Libraries Architecture (Geoffrey Tyack, 2025).

As ever, items in our art collection remain of interest to those mounting exhibitions in the UK. This year the college’s portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin made its way to Cumbria and then across the country to Sunderland. It contributed to the exhibition Shelia Fell: Cumberland on Canvas, put on by Tullie House in partnership with Sunderland Museum and Winter

Gardens. Tullie reported back that the exhibition had been very successful indeed, and the college is delighted that it continues to be able to contribute to such successes.

The library also featured significantly in this year’s OxCam Librarians’ Conference (which, as the title suggests, brings together the librarians of both Oxford and Cambridge), with our college not only hosting the event, but our library assistant serving on the organising committee and facilitating the day. However busy we get there is always capacity to take on more, it seems!

All of the achievements outlined here would be impossible without the hard work of our library and archives team, Kate O’Donnell (Archivist), Susan Purver (Assistant Librarian) and Matthew Roper (Library Assistant), alongside Sarah Butler (Librarian). Huge thanks to the team as ever!

SARAH BUTLER, College Librarian

List of Library Donors 2024-2025

Anonymous donor

Jane Anstey (History, 1973)*

Linda Appleby (Jones, PPE, 1975)*

Angelika Arend (Manyoni, DPhil. Med. & Modern Languages, 1977)*

Ena Blyth (Franey, Maths, 1954)*

Bodleian Library Publishing (book of Oxford Libraries, containing a chapter on Somerville – available in the library loggia)

Helen Brock (Hughes, Classics, 1956) and Ruth Davis (Hochwald, English, 1956)

Kay Brock (Stewart Sandeman, Modern Languages, 1972)

Gillian Butler (Dawnay, PPE, 1962)*

Dona Cady (Archaeology, 1979)*

Averil Cameron (Sutton, Lit. Hum., 1958)*

Sarah Chambers (Horton-Jones, English and Modern Languages, 1987)*

Corpus Christi College Library

Julia Dale (English, 1965)*

Kathryn Ecclestone*

Uxue Rambla Eguilaz (CAAH, 2012)

Exeter College Library

Clara Farmer (English, 1992) (book for which she was Production Editor)

Flammarion (publishers, on behalf of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman)*

Julia Gasper (English, 1979)*

Claire Harris (Maths, 2010)

Hertford College Library

Family of Sophy Hoare (Haslam, Modern Languages, 1965)*

John Hounam*

(Family of) Mary Alison Kershaw (English, 1946)*

Christa Laird (BLitt. Med. & Modern Languages, 1975)*

Alexia Lay (Classics, 2017)

Sarah LeFanu*

Naomi Lightman (Claff, English, 1962)*

Anne Madden (History, 1994)*

Jacqueline Mitton (Pardoe, Physics, 1966)

Elaine Moore (Chemistry, 1967)*

Roz Morris (History, 1966)*

Bernadette Nelson (Music, 1974)*

Rosie Oliver (Rogers, Maths, 1976)*

Onora O’Neill (Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, PPE, 1959) (some of her own books, as well as a larger donation of material for us and other Oxford libraries and our students)

Susan Reigler (Zoology, 1977)*

Helen Rice (PPE, 1995)*

St Catherine’s College Library

Jacques Schuhmacher (DPhil History, 2010)*

Liz MacRae Shaw (Masters, History, 1966)*

Kathleen Sheppard*

Philippa Tudor (History, 1975)*

Wolfson College Library

Catherine Wright (Oates, Maths, 1966)*

* Indicate’s donors own publication

Somerville College Choir on Tour in the United States

Ursula Batchelor (2022, Medicine) reports on the Choir’s most recent international trip.

On the 21st of March, 32 singers and two organists were set to fly out to Houston Texas for the start of a ten-day trip taking in Tyler, Houston and New York. Alas, this coincided with the Heathrow substation fire which grounded flights for a day, sadly cutting our trip short.

Five days later however, we successfully departed from London Heathrow, bound to Houston Texas. Arrival at the St Philip Presbyterian Church was slightly surreal, with most of us in dire need of coffee after nearly 16 hours travelling. We were greeted by our wonderful hosts we had planned to stay with in Tyler, who had arranged the most fabulous welcome. We had a great time singing for them and at the end of our informal concert, Tissa Hibbs had arranged for the Mayor of Tyler to declare an official ‘Somerville College Choir Day’ such that our trip be permanently immortalised! Following this we had a spectacular meal at a local Mexican restaurant where we had a lovely time talking to our American friends.

“It was so lovely to get to know our wouldbe hosts! Even though we were only in Texas for less than 24 hours, they went above and beyond to make us feel accommodated.

Chatting to Somerville alumni is always a treat as well – I loved comparing experiences with them.”

Kaia Cochran (2021, Physics)

The next morning, we boarded a coach to Dallas airport to catch our flight to New York, complete with our airhostess quoting Chaucer over the tannoy, if things weren’t bizarre enough! Once arriving in New York, we embarked on a group dinner at a wonderful pizzeria just along from our hotel, and partook in some rather comical karaoke to round off our first night in NYC.

THE CHOIR ARE WELCOMED IN TEXAS

The next morning, we embarked in smaller groups to explore the Big Apple, with people walking the highline, visiting the Met, MOMA and Central Park! We all then gathered at the Church of our Saviour near Grand Central Station for our rehearsal before our first official concert of tour. Getting used to such a wonderful acoustic was a real treat, especially when we are so used to our own chapel’s sound. As always, we had a tremendously diverse programme, with music from Victoria, to Rutter and Bach, to the Beatles. Following this wonderful concert around half the choir attended the reception with alumni, and the other half enjoyed watching a big band at Dizzy’s Jazz Club.

“I suggested visiting the Metropolitan Opera, and someone else recommended a jazz club in Times Square – both became some of the happiest experiences of my life!”

Anna Samosudova MPhil (2024, Music)

Our next free day saw individuals once again seeing the Big Apple in their own way, with people taking the ferry to Staten Island, seeing the Natural History Museum, visiting New York Zoo, Times Square and the Stock Exchange. A dozen of us also attended the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a fascinating tour of historical instruments. Choir members made the most of our last night in New York, taking great advantage of the theatre and music scene, with a few

people attending the Magic Flute at The Metropolitan Opera House, or watching The Book of Mormon on Broadway!

The following day we embarked to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. It was very exciting to join up with the choir of Vassar to give our final concert of the tour. We sang a great range of music together, from Verdi to Balfour-Gardiner and McDowall, before finishing with the American Folk classic Shenandoah which received a standing ovation. It was wonderful to see the college and speak with the students there. It was lovely to learn about the history of the college, which chimed well with Somerville’s own, as a former women’s college!

The final morning of the tour was particularly exciting, as we were off to sing in St Thomas Church on 5th Avenue. It was joyous to sing in such a well

renowned venue, and fantastic to join up with the choir there. We performed movements from the Lassus Missa Bell’ Amfitrit’ altera mass, Bach’s B-Minor mass and Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus.

“It was a privilege to sing at St Thomas 5th Avenue under Jeremy Filsell, where uniting Somerville and his choir yielded a glorious rendition of the Lassus mass. The bubble of serene sanctity offered in the midst of hectic Manhattan astonished me and, while occasionally disturbed by the rumble of subway trains underneath, I felt transported into another world.”

Ben Carter (2023, Computer Science)

After a successful service, we had one final afternoon in New York to make the most of, and people squeezed in trips to the Guggenheim and the New York Public Library (far be it from Oxford students ever to avoid a library trip). Then, slightly less bright-eyed and bushy tailed than five days prior, we advanced to the airport ready for our flight home after a week of much singing, sightseeing and spectacular antics. Needless to say, I think we are all very much looking forward to our next tour!

THE CHOIR AT ST THOMAS CHURCH, NEW YORK

The Somerville Association President’s Report 2024-2025

The past academic year represented the last year of Baroness Jan Royall’s tenure as Principal of Somerville College. Given Jan’s multitude of important contributions to Somerville, as well as the University, the year has been marked by numerous celebrations. On a number of these occasions, it has been my honour to raise a glass to Jan on behalf of the Somerville Association thanking her for exceptional stewardship of Somerville during the past eight years which included the pandemic with its unforeseen challenges. Here is a vignette that I have enjoyed relating. Having been lucky enough to have been amongst the first wave of Somervillians to be introduced to the newly appointed Jan, I was quizzed, “what’s the new Principal like?”. My instant response was “she is marvellous” to which the discerning questioner asked, “why?”. When I answered simply, “she calls me darling”, Liz Cooke, who was within earshot, retorted, “she calls everyone darling.” With time we all learnt that our new Principal not only called us all darling, but also truly meant it, in that each of us, alumni, fellows, college staff, members of Oxford University, donors, supporters, the Vice Chancellor and most importantly every single student was the recipient of Jan’s care, support and friendship. She devoted her energies to not only heading up our college, but also building further foundations for Somerville to thrive in the decades ahead. Having enjoyed the privilege of watching Jan do so in college and with alumni, supporters and donors on multiple continents, I salute the enormous contributions that Jan has made to Somerville and Somervillians the world over. For that, Jan has our longstanding sincere gratitude.

As we eagerly look forward to the Principalship of Catherine Royle (1982, PPE), I am struck by the superb calibre of women that we have attracted to step into this mantle. Jan’s predecessor Alice Prochaska and those before her represent women with extra-ordinary careers who have chosen to serve as Somerville’s Head of House. This is a huge tribute to Somerville and what our college continues to stand for notwithstanding the passage of 147 eventful years. Let’s always be mindful of the fact that we are very fortunate to benefit from the leadership and dedication of our remarkable principals and be part of this very special college with its lifelong community. I warmly invite each one of you to

fully engage with Somerville and our community of fellow Somervillians, and to participate in the busy and varied events calendar.

On behalf of the Somerville Association, I wish Baroness Royall much fulfilment in her future endeavours, with many decades of good health and joyous times. Whilst we enjoy Jan’s gorgeous portrait in hall, I hope that she will continue to be a close friend of Somerville and Oxford University such that our paths will cross again and again.

DR

NERMEEN VARAWALLA (1989, Clinical Medicine)

DR NERMEEN VARAWALLA

Somerville Association Officers and Committee as of March 2025

President

Dr Nermeen Varawalla (1989, DPhil Clinical Medicine)

Joint Secretaries

Lisa Gygax (1987, PPE)

Jackie Watson (1986, English)

Committee Members

David Blagbrough (2008, PPE)

Chris Broughton (2014, Modern Languages)

Clare Latham (1985, PPE)

Hilary Manning (1977, History)

Judy Moir (1974, Jurisprudence)

Virginia Ross (MCR, 1966)

Zoe Sprigings (2004, History)

Fellows Appointed by the College

Luke Pitcher

(Fellow and Tutor in Classics)

Francesca Southerden (Fellow and Tutor in Modern Languages)

Fiona Stafford (Fellow and Tutor in English)

Benjamin Thompson (Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History)

Horsman Awards

The Alice Horsman Fund was established in 1953. Alice Horsman (1908, Classics) was a great traveller who wished to provide opportunities for former Somerville students. The award’s purpose is (a) to provide alumni with opportunities to travel in order to broaden their experience of other countries or carry out research and (b) to support alumni in a significant career change. Applications are accepted each term. More details are on the Somerville website or from the Scholarships and Funding Officer (scholarships.funding.officer@some.ox.ac.uk).

The Somerville Senior Members’ Fund

This Fund is intended to facilitate attendance at College events for alumni who would otherwise be unable to attend for financial reasons, by subsidising event tickets and travel. Please do not hesitate to call upon the Fund, for yourself or a friend. We are always grateful for donations to this Fund. Applications for grants should be addressed to development.office@some.ox.ac.uk

Alumni Reunions

Every year, Somerville's alumni team host a range of reunions. To find out more, visit our website or email development.office@some.ox.ac.uk

1964 Diamond Reunion

5 SEPTEMBER 2024

(less of a gaudy, more of a natter)

Q: What do a wine maker, an international economist, a doctor, a concert viola player turned graphologist, political advisors, a social worker, business professionals, a magistrate, teachers, an actor, a distinguished academic, a lawyer, civic worthies - and proud grannies have in common?

A: All Somervillians who matriculated in 1964, who assembled in September 2024 in what we knew as the JCR for a 60th reunion.

Time slipped away as we talked and talked. Some of us had kept in contact over the years, while it was a delight to spend time with others whom we had hardly seen for decades. Some of us had felt intimidated by the success of others when we were younger, when we were at home with young children, or gingerly starting out on career paths, or working part-time to fit in with our family circumstances. But now, in our maturity, these differences disappeared. We saw each other as we were 60 years ago, reflecting on Somerville memories: climbing in over walls topped with broken glass before keys were issued, Dame Janet, tennis and croquet on the lawns, toast and jam collected for tea from the kitchens, wine at a formal hall to celebrate Dorothy Hodgkin's Nobel Prize…

It was a real pleasure to meet up again, have dinner, stay in College, and natter!

Sue Griffin and Jill Hamblin

1974 Golden Reunion

19-20 SEPTEMBER 2024

Last September, we celebrated a huge milestone: 50 years since our matriculation! Looking back, our golden reunion was a joyful time.

We were made so welcome, and our two-day programme was enjoyable, stimulating and informative. There were changes: where were the bar (!) and the pigeonholes? And where is the old West? (Oh, it’s now called Park…). Looking to the future, Somerville will be hugely convenient for the new Schwarzman Centre for Humanities. A definite plus for those who struggle to get out of bed in the morning!

It was astonishing how some people didn’t seem to have changed at all and how easily we caught up with old friends. We were able to connect with some that we hadn’t really known 50 years ago, and to hear about everybody’s half century not out! We also discovered treasures that were new to us, such as the paintings in the Reading Room adjacent to the dining hall.

It was so satisfying to hear how Somerville is looking forward to a future in a strong financial position with a dynamic leadership team. Finally, our event coincided with an Open Day, and it was wonderful to connect with current and potential students; we are, after all, living ambassadors for the Somerville experience.

To anyone who is doubtful about signing up for a reunion, our advice would be “go for it”. If you can’t make the date, contact the Alumni Team. They will put you in touch with people you would have liked to have seen.

Judith Forshaw, Clare Hatcher and Sue Williamson

Life Before Somerville: Susan Owens

Susan Owens (1990, English Language and Literature) is a writer and art historian. Her books include The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, which won the 2024 Apollo Book of the Year award, and Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape (2020). Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons will appear in January 2026. As Curator of Paintings at the V&A, a post she held until 2013, Susan had responsibility for the national collection of works by John Constable. She lives and writes in Suffolk.

I grew up in rural Derbyshire, but my parents were both Lancastrians. Because of this I always felt like a bit of an outsider and I think it made me look at things in a slightly different way from other children. It introduced me to different landscapes, too. A great treat was to drive north to visit my grandmother, Hannah Woolfenden, who was wise and capable, kind and sharp: there was always a little lemon with the sugar. She lived on the very edge of the moors that separated Lancashire from Yorkshire and walked there with her dogs in all weathers. I swam with my cousins in the peaty beck that ran beneath her house and we rambled for miles over the tussocky ground, inventing stories about buried treasure and only going back to be fed. There was

no adult supervision. We were always trying to find a landmark called Robin Hood’s Bed, though I can’t remember whether we ever got there. The moor was a magical place to me, and only got more so in memory.

There was plenty of adult supervision at home, but I could escape to wild and strange places in the pages of books. Once a fortnight my mother took me and my brother to the library in our local town, Belper. It didn’t take long for me to read my way through the children’s shelves, after which I was turned loose in the adult section. I read hungrily, but more or less at random. I was devouring Dick Francis when I should have been reading Dickens. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, though: that freedom to

wander, whether over the moors or in the worlds of books and ideas, sank deeply into my mind and has served me well.

I loved drawing and making things. The sixth form art block was a wonderful place, with an atmosphere of cameraderie and an exuberant sense of possibilities. As soon as I was allowed to, I would get on a train to London where I would make a bee line for the V&A and gaze at 19th-century paintings. I never imagined that one day I would be looking after them: I didn’t know about curators, still less about how to become one. I thought about going to art school but I adored books so much that, in the end, there was no competition. I remember being asked: ‘what do you want to go to university for if you’re only going to get married and have children?’ It was like that then in Derbyshire. When I arrived at Somerville and met female Fellows with their intense seriousness of purpose, it felt like the beginning of a new and marvellous kind of life.

Constable’s Year is out January 2026

SUSAN OWENS BEFORE COMING TO SOMERVILLE

Life After Somerville: Helen Grant’s

Tale of Three Cities

After leaving Somerville, Helen Grant (1927, Spanish and French) spent time in Spain, befriending left-wing intellectuals including Federico García Lorca. In 1937, she returned as an interpreter, assisting with Quaker aid efforts during the Spanish Civil War. Toby Bainton, later Helen's student, examines her work on that trip.

On the evening of 11 April 1937, a young woman in civilian clothes emerged in pouring rain from a military car in the centre of Madrid, after a long, hazardous drive from Valencia. She and her companions then spent several days in a badly damaged hotel on Madrid’s Gran Vía: her bedroom had no glass in the windows. The civil war in Spain had been raging for nine months. The socialist Spanish government still controlled most of the city, but Francisco Franco’s rebel forces had been camped on its western side since November, and the population

was under constant bombardment.

The young woman, Somervillian Helen Grant, was there as interpreter to a pair of British Quakers on a month-long official mission to Spain, assessing how to organise aid to refugees fleeing the fighting. Madrid was the last of three cities they visited.

It was also the toughest. But regardless of the local conditions, they succeeded equally in Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid, in inspecting many ‘colonias’ –residences where orphans, and children separated from their parents, were being

looked after. At the end of their stay, the delegation was able to advise that in the government-controlled zone of Spain, the ‘colonias’ were efficiently run, but needed milk, and money. A flow of funds and dried milk soon followed from Britain as a major Quaker relief effort.

Their tour had begun in Barcelona, where Helen had been struck by the air of normality. Apart from a nocturnal blackout, the only obvious change from peacetime was the new livery of the taxis, now repainted in the colours of the leading anarchist trade union, which had taken over all the public transport. However, food was poor, bread scarce, and in restaurants, only one fixed hour was allowed for lunch.

After a few days the trio moved to Valencia, the temporary capital while Madrid was under siege. Valencia was even more untouched by war, apparently prospering from the presence of the government offices. The delegation was keen finally to visit Madrid, where the refugee situation was totally unknown. Thanks to Helen’s negotiations with a colonel in the high command, they managed to reach it by travelling in an army car on its way to the front line. This shows something of Helen’s determination. For a woman, a foreign woman at that, to inveigle her way into the wartime army headquarters was a real achievement. Even more extraordinary, she secured vital permission to enter a war zone.

How had Helen, an atheist, become involved in a rather risky expedition with two middle-aged Quakers? Lively and adventurous, she had already had some interesting experiences, including office-work in Brussels connected with economic espionage, and a spell as secretary to Walter de la Mare.

HELEN GRANT, 1971.

With permission from the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge

Without ever having visited Spain, she had become so fascinated by Spanish language and culture that she matriculated at Somerville ‘determined to do Spanish as my main subject, against the advice of that grand old lady of French philology the late Professor Mildred Pope’ (as she put it). After graduating, she became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where she met Francesca Wilson, a schoolteacher. In 1937 Francesca Wilson became the leader of the Quaker delegation to Spain, and invited her to join her party as interpreter.

Francesca Wilson could not have foreseen that Helen was to provide far more than interpretation: she had connections with members of the Spanish government. She owed them, ultimately, to Vera Farnell, Dean of Somerville and also her tutor. When

Helen graduated, Vera Farnell had introduced her to prominent figures in one of Madrid’s independent institutions of higher education, the Residencia de Estudiantes, where she made many friends. A few years later, some of them held ministerial appointments. Without Helen’s acquaintance with key politicians, the Quaker delegation would have had far more difficulty with their wartime travel, and almost certainly would not have reached Madrid.

Thirty years later, Helen Grant was my Spanish tutor at Cambridge. Amongst my teachers she was the most fun. She laughed a lot, even when lecturing, and had everyone in awe when she described knowing personally Antonio

Machado, Manuel de Falla, and Federico García Lorca. On my unexpected return to Cambridge, as curator of Spanish collections in the University Library, I came to appreciate her warm support not only of a young librarian but also of her research students. She made sure we were invited to social occasions of the Spanish department, where she was always at the centre of conviviality – finding her otherwise would have been difficult, because she was quite a small person. In 1975, when Franco’s dictatorship ended, she threw a grand party at her own house so that everyone could drink to the future of Spain. It was a touching example of her lifelong generosity and her love for the Spanish people.

HELEN GRANT’S READER CARDS FOR THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE (PARIS), 1952, AND THE BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL (MADRID), 1960. With permission from the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge

A Young Lady in the Provinces: Vera Brittain before Somerville

In her recent book, Testament of Lost Youth, Kathryn Ecclestone argues that Vera Brittain’s later printed account of her upbringing may well not reflect how she thought about it at the time. Ahead of an event on the book in Somerville in November, Somerville Association Secretary Jackie Watson (1986, English) looks at the role of politics and source material in this fascinating account.

It’s almost as if writer Kathryn Ecclestone had heard of the College Report and had set out to write a ‘Life Before Somerville’ piece. Inspired by living in Vera Brittain’s childhood home, the former education professor has written a book that explores the Somervillian’s early life and shines a spotlight on the years leading up to her time in Oxford.

Those of us familiar with Brittain’s famous memoir, Testament of Youth, which looks at her early years and her experience during and immediately after ‘the Great War’, will perhaps remember how she viewed Buxton, the spa town in Derbyshire where she was raised. In the sixty pages (of the memoir’s six hundred) where Brittain describes ‘her provincial young ladyhood’, she is clear in her views: ‘I felt trammelled and trapped’, she remembers. ‘I hated Buxton … with a detestation that I have never felt since for any set of circumstances’.

Yet, as Ecclestone shows us, by comparing systematically the published memoir with the letters and diaries Brittain wrote at the time, this is not the whole story. We are introduced first to the fashionable Peak District town and its history. Built by the Devonshires of nearby Chatsworth as an ‘estate resort’, the late nineteenth century saw the speedy development of baths and a health spa, cultural buildings and gardens, hotels, comfortable family housing and schools for wealthy residents. As we find out about its growing appeal to the aspirant middle classes by the beginning of the twentieth century, it becomes obvious why the Brittain family, making their money from paper making and previously living in Macclesfield, made the move there.

The young Vera grew up in this comfort and provincial opulence. We find out about her family, her schooling, her friends, and her early loves, from the diaries and letters she wrote at that time. Ecclestone glosses this with information and direct comparisons giving a clear picture of the social context. Middle-class life, such as that led by the Brittain family, relies on the labour of others, and servants are vital elements in this. The kind of class consciousness felt by a twenty-first century reader is understood as we are told: ‘Domestic servants earned very little. Vera’s annual school fees of £45 and her £30 dress allowance cost Arthur [her father] more than the yearly wages for their three servants’.

The impact of her wartime experience, and her progressive politics, led Brittain, as she wrote Testament of Youth in the 1920s and 30s, to show a growing disapproval of this earlier privileged existence. As well as condemning the snobbishness of Buxton, she writes of her young life’s ‘utter futility’, only given ‘occasional respite’ by her ‘desultory reading of George Eliot’. Yet, as Ecclestone convincingly points out, this later recollection does not entirely match the evidence of the time.

One week in Vera’s 1911 diary, for instance, recounts a trip to Manchester to the pantomime; a party for ‘grown-up unmarrieds and “flappers”’ with a treasure hunt and a musical romance competition; reading poetry while her brother played his violin; playing bridge; and designing a painted scarf for her mother. It may be utterly futile, but she doesn’t sound to have been unhappy!

Testament of Lost Youth exposes some inconsistencies too between the contemporary manuscript records of her early life and the account in print of her ‘“battle royal” to be allowed to apply to university against her parents’ wishes’. What Ecclestone characterises as her ‘single-minded feminist revolt’ is rather opposed to the facts of her father paying for, and her mother finding, Latin and mathematics tutors ahead of the Somerville entrance and Oxford Senior Local examinations she would need to take. The famous account in Testament of Youth of the young Vera meeting Emily Penrose in 1913 (and wearing an inappropriate evening dress for her preliminary interview ‘in accordance with the sartorial habits of Buxton’) is clearly set up in antithesis to her later academic success: her admittance to Somerville against the odds with which her upbringing had provided her. But, as Ecclestone shows, this isn’t quite how it actually happened.

Testament of Lost Youth does not attempt to undermine Vera Brittain or her hugely important and influential 1933

memoir. Indeed, Ecclestone’s clear affection for her subject is only accentuated by the revelation of previously untold details such as the joy that the teenage Vera felt for clothes or the social events of pre-war middle-class life. In the end it’s a matter of genre. Testament of Youth has a political purpose, and it has successfully achieved that now for almost a century. To do this, Brittain’s text needs to set up a protagonist who fights against gender inequality, her family’s attitudes, and provincial mores to succeed in the wider world. Undoubtedly, there is some truth in that overarching narrative, but perhaps that protagonist had a little more fun than she later reveals as she grew up.

We are delighted to welcome alumni and their guests to ‘Vera Brittain’s Early Life: Foundations of a feminist wife, mother and grandmother’, a conversation between Kathryn Ecclestone and Rebecca Williams in College at 2pm on Saturday 15 November. Booking is now open on our website.

Members’ News and Publications

If you have a news item which you would like to appear in the next College Report, please send in your contribution before July 31st to development.office@some.ox.ac.uk

1951

Jenifer Wates (née Weston) writes: Our environmental education trust and organic farm in Kent will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026. When my husband and I set it up in 1976 everyone thought we were mad, but since then many thousands of children from disadvantaged backgrounds have discovered the joys of nature, and hundreds of adults have sampled regenerative agriculture or been inspired by a creative visit. Our hope is that this experience will contribute to the desperately needed change of mind and heart about the way we live now.

1954

Virginia Kennerley writes: Still living in Dalkey, Co Dublin, continuing to edit SEARCH - a Church of Ireland Journal Also continuing to conduct occasional church services and the monthly Celtic Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral. Still missing my deceased husband, L.A. screen-writer and Merton graduate Edward Taylor, who died twelve years ago.

1956

Helen Brock has had ten publications since 2010, mostly on beads and seals from the Cretan Bronze Age (Minoan Civilisation). She also wrote the obituary of Nancy Sandas, FBA, in the Bibliographic Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy XIX 2020/21. She is working with a colleague in Poznań on English edition of his book Bursztyn w Kulturze Mykeń skiej on finds of Baltic amber in the Greek Bronze Age.

1962

Stephanie Reynard writes: I have been researching an important (in his time) but forgotten artist born in my home town of Harpenden in Hertfordshire (my home now but not where I was born) but forgotten over the decades. This project was sponsored by our local History Society and Arts Society and driven partly by the return to Harpenden of his great-niece, a friend of mine. I’ve

delivered several local presentations to different groups and developed a trail guide through the town featuring those artworks remaining here and the houses he lived in. He was called Francis Owen Salisbury (known as Frank).

Marion Macalpine (née Witting) writes: I published a book, Write at once and in detail: The re-creation of Mimi and her family, in 2023. I think it would be of interest to many alumni, especially those interested in photography/memoir/ memory/migrants/Jewish studies etc. More about the book:

“When there is a silence in a family about its history, the urge to know can become intense. Marion’s mother Nolly was born near Vienna in 1916. In 1936 Nolly went to England to learn the language and lived there for the rest of her life. She never called herself Jewish, and never spoke about her mother Mimi, her father Edmund, or her brothers Hans and Otto. So Marion knew almost nothing about her grandparents or her uncles. Nolly kept a large bundle of letters closed up in a big hatbox. One day when Nolly was in her 90s, Marion found a mass of shredded letters in a bag in the dustbin. What would you have done?

This book raises the question of who has the right to know and who has the right to keep silent. It is also a detective story which gathers clues from multiple sources, as well as an elegant photobook. Marion has pieced the shreds together and made sense of them. She now has an archive, a chronology and a history. She has also got to know the urgent, ironic, sometimes trenchant voices of her family members. She writes: ‘I have now assembled the shreds into almost breathing, almost speaking individuals.’ This book shows Mimi and her family emerging from the shreds.”

Contact marion.macalpine@gmail.com to buy the book or for more information: http://www.marionmacalpine.org.uk/ write-at-once-and-in-detail.html

Gillian Butler writes: I published my first novel, The Golden Gate, in March

2025 (aged 82) and I had a thoroughly enjoyable book launch in the Mary Somerville room, thanks to the College.

1963

Lesley Brown writes: I was delighted that so many former pupils came to the Philosophy Day which celebrated my eightieth birthday, and at which I gave a talk about Somerville’s two great philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. As Foot’s literary executor I have recently become a go-to person to talk about her life and works, in a handful of podcasts. Wearing my ‘ancient Greek philosophy’ hat I gave a talk in Athens and a virtual one in Rome and welcomed the publication of a couple of my papers on Plato.

1964

Alison Skilbeck writes: To celebrate Jan’s much lamented departure I finally got to perform the Janet Vaughan monologue; she had suggested it to me just before the pandemic. It was daunting but rewarding to perform it after the Supporters’ Lunch to family, friends, and alumni, who all had their own memories and views of the Great Dame.

I am about to revive my ‘Mrs Roosevelt Flies to London’ at Edinburgh; my small blow against Trump and Co. I continue to perform my other shows, and teach Communications Skills to non-actors. Husband Tim Hardy also acts and teaches; our six grand-children range from 7 to 15 and give us joy.

1966

Kathy Henderson writes: In spring 2023 my book My Disappearing Uncle. Europe, War and the Stories of a Scattered Family was published here by the History Press. Soon after, I was invited to go to Kőszeg in Hungary in May and asked if I could bring other family descendants to celebrate the first ‘Philip Schey Memorial Day’ and the beautiful synagogue this ancestor had built in 1859. Abandoned since 1944, near derelict when I first came upon it

but now at last restored, it was reopening as a cultural centre. In the end there were 19 of us, cousins from different parts of the world, five, six and seven generations on from this interesting man who none of us had known anything about until I stumbled into the town in 2011, entirely by accident.

The day was full of cultural and musical events including, significantly, a ceremony (with speeches from the Mayor, the head of iASK, the university there, and myself on behalf of the family) to return Philip Schey’s name to the street from which it had been removed in 1948.

In England I spoke about the book at a number of events including one at the Austrian Cultural Forum and a Conference on ‘Writing Jewish Women’s Lives’ at Wolfson College Oxford.

Later that year I was offered a scholarship by iASK, the Institute of Advanced Studies KŐszeg, to research and write an additional chapter as a postscript for the Hungarian edition of the book. I spent three weeks there: interesting time, beautiful town, richly interdisciplinary faculty, fascinating conversations, difficult and painful material. It took several months to write - not easy.

This spring, the Hungarian edition of My Disappearing Uncle was finally published by Gondolat and iASK and I have been asked to go to Budapest in October to present it at the book fair.

Far away I was delighted to hear that another of my books – Lugalbanda, the Story of a Boy who got caught up in a War (Walker Books 2006) also published

as Little Prince, An Epic Tale from Ancient Iraq (2013) has at last been translated into Arabic and is available in Iraq for the children it really belongs to. This book would not have been possible without the Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature http://etcsl.orinst. ox.ac.uk at what is now the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the many kind people who advised me, particularly the late Jeremy Black, Stephanie Dalley and fellow student and storyteller Fran Hazelton.

Roz Morris writes: Based on my longand continuing - career as a broadcaster, journalist and media trainer I have published my book The Visual Revolution Guidebook which is packed with advice on how to build the skills we all now need to succeed in the new visual economy of the 21st century. Writing skills are no longer enough in this digital age. We are all broadcasters now and we need to know how to look professional on screen in meetings, videos, presentations and media interviews.

1967

Deborah Bowen (née Hewitt) has this year collated and published an anthology of contemporary environmental poetry based in the area around the western tip of Canada’s Lake Ontario: Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion (Guernica Editions, 2025). The volume includes a geographical and historical introduction, some lovely photographs, and interviews with all 43 poets featured in the collection, who range in age from 17 to 70, and from Indigenous Canadian, African Canadian, and Asian Canadian to white settlers of many different backgrounds.

In June, Deborah was also delighted to be able to introduce two of her grandkids to a quick visit to Somerville!

Rachel Berger writes: After years of enjoyable retirement, pursuing my interests in music, spinning and weaving and botanical art as well as grandparenting, I have in the last year found opportunities for getting more actively involved with work (voluntary) linked to my last paid role, which was helping to support communities affected by climate change to be resilient and adapt their lives to the changing reality. It has become clear in the last few years that we are living in a period of climate breakdown, and resilience and adaptation now are buzz words in many circles. I am working with the Climate Majority project, https://climatemajorityproject. com/, on their campaign ‘SAFER’ (Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience) which was launched in early July this year, and on a practical level in my home town of Bradford on Avon, which is prone to flooding, and was cut off for 36 hours in November 2024. This has raised local awareness in the town and in local government, and I will be helping ensure that our Neighbourhood Plan embeds resilience and adaptation into its structure. Our future will be challenging, but I am excited to feel I can contribute my experience and skills in various ways.

Jennifer Barraclough writes: The subject of my recent short novel No Good Deed can be summed up in the tagline ‘Marriage. Memory. Medicine. Malice’. The plot was very loosely inspired by my experience as a medical student at Oxford in the 1960s.

1970

Sabina Lovibond writes: In June 2025 I took part in a workshop in Zürich on ‘showing’ in twentiethcentury philosophy, giving a talk on Wittgenstein. Also in June, I gave one of two plenary lectures at a ‘pre-doctoral’ conference in Cambridge (i.e. largely for undergraduates and early-stage postgraduates) on the ‘Wartime Quartet’ of women philosophers - Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. My contribution was about Foot’s Natural Goodness (2001). I also published ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Collingwood's New Leviathan?’, in David Collins and Christopher Williams (eds), Interpreting R. G. Collingwood: Critical Essays (Cambridge, 2025).

MY DISAPPEARING UNCLE BY KATHY HENDERSON

THE VISUAL REVOLUTION GUIDEBOOK BY ROZ MORRIS

1971

Dorothy McCarthy (née Yamamoto) writes: As Mariko McCarthy I’ve just published a detective novel, a departure from my usual books about animals in culture. It’s called The Knitting Needle Murder, and is available on Kindle as well as in print.

1973

Penelope Gardner-Chloros writes: My new announcement this year is just the publication of my book, Bilingualism, with MIT press. Intended for the general interested reader, it covers all the main aspects of the subject in an accessible way: social, cognitive, psychological, educational and political.

1974

Alison Cadle (née Cowley) writes: When the 50th reunion for our year came along, I thought I really should make the effort to attend! I was disappointed not to see more mathematicians, but I had good chats with Irene Moroz and Hilary Ockendon, and met many interesting people who I didn't know back in the day! It was a great experience, and I got to stay overnight in the new ROQ building. Since then, I've been back for a Penrose Society lunch with my granddaughter (15), and also had lunch in college with a group of ex Open University maths editors. Highly recommended.

1975

Karen Rose writes: I never had a life plan. When I left Somerville in 1978 with a degree in philosophy and theology, I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than to save the world. I took a job as an auxiliary nurse at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London while I thought about what to do and eventually completed my nursing training. I specialized in palliative care, completed an MSc in medical social anthropology at Keele University, a PhD in nursing at Manchester University and worked for many years in health care research, focusing on quality of life issues for patients and families. In 2005, I came to the USA to work on a research paper and stayed at Saint Benedict’s Monastery, St. Joseph, Minnesota. Two years and several visits later, I entered the monastery and made final profession as a Benedictine sister on July 11, 2012. I was elected prioress in 2023.

Carmella Meyer (née Peake) was the inaugural recipient of the ‘Jon Jones

Award’ at the National Fruit Show 2021, awarded for a notable contribution to the UK fruit industry, for her work, both with her own company (Peake Fruit) and on behalf of the industry on the Board of British Apples & Pears, and her other industry roles, which have been highly praised.

1977

Cindy Gallop continues to battle and overcome considerable obstacles to grow her business MakeLoveNotPorn. This year the value of Cindy’s work and the importance of funding it was recognized by Baroness Bertin in her UK Government Independent Porn Commission Review report, where she said of MakeLoveNotPorn, ‘The growth of best-practice platforms should be encouraged; investment could encourage the change required to address emerging harms and risks.’ Cindy’s SXSW London keynote in June on ‘How Sex Education Can Help End Gender Violence And Bring Back Love’ was very well received. This fall Cindy and her team will launch MakeLoveNotPorn Academy in response to demand from parents, teachers and young people. MakeLoveNotPorn Academy will be an aggregator hub for the best of the world’s 0-18 and beyond sex education, effectively 'the Google of sex ed' at a time when sex educators are being blocked, censored and deplatformed everywhere.

1978

Angela Bonaccorso writes: The highlight of the last year was a trip to Oxford in April 2024, on the occasion of dear Liz Cooke memorial. I enjoyed visiting old friends, Sachi Hatakenaka and her husband Quentin Thompson, Judy Rorison and Chris Ovenden from my years at Theoretical Physics, Mrs Brink, the wife of my former supervisor, Sue Cashman, and of course Clare Finch and Sara Kalim from College.

In April 2025 we spent a few days with our son Mahiko at his nice new apartment in Paris, XX arrondissement (Ménilmontant, Belleville, Saint-Fargeau, Père-Lachaise). This is not a touristic area but it is very Parisian and “très à la mode” lately. Full of history and cultural activities. I strongly recommend visiting it if you already know the more famous areas of the city.

Other than that I do quite a lot of referring, organization of school and conferences, cooking, gardening, mixing Physics with home activities.

1980

Margaret Casely-Hayford writes: A year of change: I came to the end of my term as Chair of Shakespeare’s Globe, as a Co-op Group board member, and I’m delighted to have been appointed to the Department for Education’s Board, made Patron of Girls’ Brigade

CARMELLA MEYER WINNING THE JON JONES AWARD

CINDY GALLOP DELIVERING THE KEYNOTE AT SXSW IN JUNE 2025

Ministries, and to have been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by Coventry University as I stepped down from the Chancellorship after seven years. I was also given a Lifetime Achievement Award by HACSA Sankofa for promoting diversity and for charity work.

1984

Fiona Forsyth writes: I published the second in my murder mystery series cantered on the Roman poet Ovid in exile. Death and the Poet is set in 14 CE as the Roman world holds its breath - the first Emperor Augustus is dying. Meanwhile, in his exile home of Tomis on the Black Sea, Ovid investigates the death of a vegetable seller…

1986

Diana Havenhand writes: I have just graduated from Art Academy London with a degree in Contemporary Portraiture. I have a painting in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition this year for the second year in a row, and exhibited at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries in November. Recently, I have also become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Jackie Watson writes: I was pleased to see the publication in June of Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities (Palgrave, 2025), which I co-edited with Emma Rhatigan from the University of Sheffield. Continuing the research I began in my ‘mid-life crisis’ PhD, alongside working with Somerville alumni, is a joy!

1987

Suzanne Heywood writes: I received my CBE last October, which was a lovely event with my children all there. And my book, Wavewalker, about growing up at sea for a decade and then making it to Somerville, has come out in Slovakian, French and German. We have also signed a writer for the mini series, Jack Thorne who wrote Adolescence, and the actor James Norton is due to play my father. Tamsin Roques (née Sylvester-Bradley) continues to live in Norwich where she manages the Family & Domestic Abuse team at Norfolk Community Law Service. Sarah Bax Horton had her second book Arm of Eve: Investigating the Thames Torso Murders published in October 2024 by The History Press. It explores a serial killer who was a rival to Jack the Ripper, one arguably more sadistic

and mercurial who hunted his victims along the River Thames. Arm of Eve won the 2024 Ripper Book of the Year award from Ripperology Books And More. Sarah introduced her book at November’s Somerville Creates event and very much enjoyed meeting other Somervillian authors.

1991

Naomi Hossain writes: I recently moved back to England after around 20 years living in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the US, and am now a Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. So far I’ve only caught up with Jenni Borg but hope to see other London-based Somervillians at some point!

1992

Sophie Agrell writes: My life is not a typical Somervillian life. My wife and I continue to develop our smallholding in Ayrshire, where we keep sheep, goats and poultry. My joy is breeding and showing goats, especially English goats (rare breed on the RBST watchlist). I was especially proud to have extensive success at Scotland’s biggest show, the Royal Highland Show, where Kenside Lillie won the English milker class for the third consecutive year with her homebred daughter in second place (see photo). Lillie’s niece Elvira won the goatling class and has had success in numerous Scottish shows.

derives from learning through cultural experience. https://global.oup.com/ academic/product/learning-to-listenlistening-to-learn-9780198848004

1997

Oliver Rosten writes: I made a significant contribution to a major C++ language feature - Contracts - adopted for C++26: https://isocpp.org/files/ papers/P2900R14.pdf

1999

Caroline Lytton writes: In April 2025, I returned to Oxford as COO of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, bringing my 22 years of City experience to help take the impact of the School’s research and teaching to the next level. I’m also thrilled that I’ve been welcomed into the Somerville SCR as a Senior Associate, although I haven’t got used to eating on high table yet! Katerina Kaouri writes: I am delighted to share that I was recently awarded the Hedy Lamarr Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement and leadership in knowledge exchange in Mathematical Sciences. It is awarded biannually to a mathematician in the UK. It includes a medal, a certificate and a cash given in a ceremony where I will give a talk about my work. More details are here: https:// ima.org.uk/27042/dr-katerina-kaouriwins-hedy-lamarr-prize-2025/

(Also, I have been elected for a Visiting Professor position at the Mathematical Institute https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/ people/katerina.kaouri).

2000

Alistair Fair is co-author of a substantial new book about the post1945 Scottish new towns, Building Modern Scotland, which looks at the architectural and social histories of East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine. The book has been published in print by Bloomsbury but is also available freely online as an Open Access e-book.

2002

1994

Marcus Pearce writes: My book Learning to Listen, Listening to Learn has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book examines how the human capacity to take pleasure in listening to music

Helen Mccabe writes: I’ve been promoted to Professor of Political Theory (official from 1st August 2025) at the University of Nottingham. I’m still working on John Stuart Mill (among other things), the focus of my DPhil at Somerville.

SOPHIE AGRELL AND THE AWARDWINNING KENSIDE LILLIE AT THE ROYAL HIGHLAND SHOW

2004

Kat Gordon writes: My third book, The Swell, an exploration of motherhood and women’s rights set in Iceland in 1910 and 1975 has been acquired by Manilla Press (the literary imprint at Bonnier Books). And they have also bought my workin-progress, a novel about the marriage between Charles and Catherine Dickens. The Swell was published in January 2025, and the as-of-yet-untitled fourth book probably in 2026!

2010

In June 2025, Penguin published Daniel Yon’s first popular science book A Trick of the Mind: How The Brain Invents Your Reality. Picked as Book of the Day by The Guardian, in it he argues that your brain is like a scientist: generating its own theories to understand the world, other people and itself. This has bold implications for neurodiversity, mental health, and how we understand each other and ourselves. From January 2026, he will be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

2011

Rebecca Gardner (née Mkie) writes: Little Jack Gardner was born in February 2024 and so is now a happy bouncy 1.5 year old. We haven’t yet taken him to visit Somerville but hope to do so in the near future (the Gardner’s always enjoy seeing the beautiful Somerville Gardens!) I have written a fantasy novel since leaving Somerville but am still attempting to get published so watch this space... Youlin Yuan writes: In January 2025, I transitioned from private practice in U.S. litigation and international arbitration to join Temu as Director of External and Legal Affairs, U.S. Based in Washington, D.C., I am responsible for legal and regulatory matters, government affairs, and strategic stakeholder engagement. While my primary focus is on the U.S. market, I also contribute to legal and regulatory issues in the U.K., EU, and other global jurisdictions.

2015

Dr Tomos Evans has been appointed as the Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. From 2024-26, Tomos is undertaking research at Princeton’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies where he is completing his first monograph, Advocating Greece’s Liberation in the Seventeenth Century

2017

Gergo Csegzi writes: I have a career change that I’d like to express gratitude for as I met my cofounder while studying at Somerville (though he was in Keble). We started a company together called Parsewise (https://www.parsewise.ai/) that was selected into the Y Combinator Spring 2025 cohort. We are looking forward to paying the opportunities forward by welcoming interns and engineers in the future. For anyone who would like help with manual data entry tasks that used to be too complex to automate, we'd be more than happy to help!

2018

Madison Milne-Ives writes: I recently was awarded my PhD from Newcastle University with no corrections and received the Doctoral College Thesis Prize. My thesis title was “Mapping the process of engagement with digital health interventions: an exploratory multiple case study”.

2019

Gauri Chandra writes: I started working with the Boston Consulting Group as a subject-matter expert in Behavioural Science on a public-sector consulting project in the GCC in May 2024. I graduated in May 2025. And I started working with Leiden University in the Netherlands as a Visiting Research Fellow.

2021

Fran Dakin writes: Following the completion of my DPhil Primary Health Care in early 2025, I continued as a Qualitative Digital Health Researcher at Oxford’s Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. I have recently been awarded a Mildred Blaxter Fellowship by the Society for the Sociology of Health and Illness to fund my research into AIenabled access and triage technologies in general practice. I will be joining St Anne’s College as a Junior Research Fellow in their Centre for Personalised Medicine from October 2025. I also worked on twelve publications including ‘Navigating change and crisis: An ethnographic case study of the digitalisation of general practice work between 2020–2024’. Persephone Papatheodosiou writes: After completing the MSc in Sleep Medicine in 2023, I developed my dissertation into a PhD project, which I am now pursuing at the University of Athens. I run a weekly clinic for insomnia and circadian rhythm disorders, and in May became certified as a Somnologist—Greece’s first psychiatrist to do so under new legislation requiring formal training in Sleep Medicine. Life is full: I spend four afternoons a week after 4 p.m. with my two sons—Philip (4), born during my MSc, and Billy (2), born just after I graduated. This time with them remains my most important and rewarding role.

Publications by Somervillians

A non-exhaustive list of recent publications by Somerville alumni

Jennifer Barraclough (1967) No Good Deed (2025)

Sarah Bax Horton (1987) Arm of Eve: Investigating the Thames Torso Murders (2025)

Sarah Bilston (1995) The Lost Orchid (2025)

Deborah Bowen (1967), Editor. Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion (2025)

Gillian Butler (1962) The Golden Gate (2025)

Marian Dawkins (1963) Who is Conscious? A Guide to the Minds of Animals (2025)

Alistair Fair (2000) Building Modern Scotland (2025)

Fiona Forsyth (1984) Death and the Poet (2025)

Penelope Gardner-Chloros (1973) Bilingualism (2025)

Kat Gordon (2004) The Swell (2025)

Kathy Henderson (1966) My Disappearing Uncle. Europe, War and the Stories of a Scattered Family (2023)

Francesca Kay (1975) Book of Days (2025)

Sabina Lovibond (1970), ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Collingwood’s New Leviathan?’, in David Collins and Christopher Williams (eds), Interpreting R. G. Collingwood: Critical Essays (2025)

Marion Macalpine, née Witting, Somerville (1962) Write at once and in detail: the re-creation of Mimi and her family (2023)

Dorothy McCarthy, née Yamamoto (1971), as Mariko McCarthy, The Knitting Needle Murder (2025)

Roz Morris (1966) The Visual Revolution Guidebook (2024)

Marcus Pearce (1994) Learning to Listen, Listening to Learn (2025)

Nick Pullen (2008) The Black Hunger (2024)

Michèle Roberts (1967) French Cooking for One (2024)

Alexander Starritt (2004) Drayton and Mackenzie (2025)

Jackie Watson (1986) Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities (Palgrave, 2025), coedited with Emma Rhatigan

Isobel Williams (1972) Switch: The Complete Catullus (2023)

Daniel Yon (2010) A Trick of the Mind: How The Brain Invents Your Reality (2025)

Births

Burr

To Sacha Burr, née Wason (2007) and Steve Burr, a son, Zachary, born 9 June 2024.

Gardner

To Rebecca Gardner (née Mckie, 2011), a son, Jack Gardner, born February 2024.

O’Shea

To Laura O’Shea (née Jennings, 2011) and George O'Shea (2011), a son, William Jude O’Shea, born September 2024.

Shuttleworth

To Sydney Spencer and Beckie Shuttleworth, daughter of Christine Shuttleworth (1958), a son, Huxley Frankie John Shuttleworth Spencer, on 26 July 2024.

Spence-Cheng

To Sophia Spence-Cheng, née Cheng (2008) and Robert Spence-Cheng, née Spence (2008), a daughter, Arabella Spence-Cheng.

Wu-Khor

To Jonathan Wu-Khor (2014) and Chantel Khor-Wu, a son, Rafael Danqi Wu-Khor, on 29 December 2024.

BURR

O'SHEA

SPENCE-CHENG

WU-KHOR

Deaths

Fellows and College Lecturers

Everett

Barbara Maud Everett on 4 April 2025, aged 92. Senior Research Fellow in English.

Fox

Hazel Fox, née Stuart (1946) on 12 July 2025, aged 96. Lecturer in Jurisprudence; Fellow; Honorary Fellow

Harvey

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey (1946) on 12 August 2025, aged 97. Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History.

Peters

Catherine Peters on 12 January 2025, aged 94. Lecturer in English.

Alumni

Allison

Patricia Elizabeth Allison née Johnston (1958) on 27 February 2025, aged 84. History.

Balfour

Corinna Mary Balfour (1964) on 9 July 2025, aged 79. PPE.

Beck

Shirley Mary Beck née Clayton (1950) on 19 December 2024, aged 92. Physics.

Blackburn

Chloe Marya Blackburn née Gunn (1950) on 26 June 2024, aged 93. History.

Blundell

Sylvia Mary Blundell née Lee (1951) on 4 November 2024, aged 91. Mathematics.

Broodbank

Hannelore (Hanna) Broodbank née Altmann (1943) on 18 July 2024, aged 100. Modern Languages.

Caniato

Mary Alison Caniato née Kershaw (1946) on 29 May 2024, aged 96. English.

Chapman

Penelope (Penny) Jane Chapman (1970) on 16 October 2024, aged 64. History.

Clarke

Marieke Cambridge Faber Clarke (1959) on 20 February 2025, aged 84. History.

Crawford

Linda Joan Crawford née Robertshaw (1967) on 22 February 2025, aged 75. Physics.

De Falbe

Emma Rose (Rosie) De Falbe (1974) on 13 December 2024, aged 69. Modern Languages.

Gardner

Judith Mary Gardner, née Adams (1958). Modern Languages.

Gibson

Victoria Jane Gibson (1976) on 1 December 2024, aged 67. English.

Glennerster

Ann Dunbar Glennerster née Craine (1953) on 18 December 2024, aged 90. PPE.

Glover

Janet Glover née Hebb (1954) on 10 March 2024, aged 88. Literae Humaniores.

Goldfinch

Judith Goldfinch, née Oldham (1964) on 19 April 2025, aged 79. Mathematics.

Harrison

Pauline May Harrison née Cowan (1944) on 28 May 2024, aged 99. Chemistry.

Hayward

Gillian (Jill) Hayward, née Todd (1950) on 28 March 2025, aged 94. Mathematics.

Hoare

Sophy Ann Hoare née Haslam (1965) on 22 January 2024, aged 76. Modern Languages.

Houlder

Jacqueline Briony Houlder née Hibbert (1971) on 12 April 2024, aged 71. Geography.

Hunt

Jane Mary Hunt née Williams (1966) on 13 June 2024, aged 75. Jurisprudence.

Jones

Josephine Mary (Mary) Jones née Tyrer (1965) on 13 January 2025, aged 77. Mathematics.

Kay

Teresa Jane Kay née Dyer (1947) on 10 June 2024, aged 98. English.

Khin Zaw

Jane Khin Zaw (1956) on 10 July 2024, aged 87. PPE.

Lindley

Virginia Kirwan Lindley née Dickinson (1970). English.

Mackney

Helen Clare (Clare) Mackney née Humphreys (1975) on 4 July 2024, aged 67. Geography.

Maclean

Christine Louise Maclean (1942) on 21 March 2024, aged 100. English.

Mainprice

Clare Mainprice (1974). English.

Marks

Margaret Wendy (Wendy) Marks née Frazer (1951) on 5 September 2024, aged 91. Geography.

Miller

Helen Josephine (Josephine) Miller, née Hamilton (1945) on 27 July 2025, aged 98. Modern Languages.

Milton-Daws

Richenda Milton-Daws, née MiltonThomas (1975) on 4 July 2025, aged 68. English.

Murphy

Jose (Jo) Agnes Murphy née Cummins (1950) on 6 December 2024, aged 92. Chemistry.

Newman

Jennifer Mary Newman née Hugh-Jones (1950) on 7 February 2025, aged 93. Zoology.

Oliver

Marianna Oliver née Egar (1943) on 27 January 2023, aged 93. Modern Languages.

Orrom

Elspeth Anne Orrom, née Oliver (1949) in March 2025, aged 93. Mathematics.

Petford

Corinne Petford née Chambers (1951) on 8 June 2025, aged 93. Physics.

Rattenbury

Judith Burgoyne Rattenbury (1958) on 18 May 2024, aged 84. Physics.

Ridge

Irene Ridge née Haydock (1961) on 5 February 2025, aged 82. Botany.

Sciama

Lidia Dina Sciama (1970) on 31 May 2024, aged 92. Anthropology.

Senior

Diana Elizabeth Senior (1962) on 20 March 2024, aged 80. English.

Smith

Bethany (Bee) Anne Rebecca Smith (2019) on 30th July 2025, aged 23. Biology.

Street

Denise Melbourne Street née Fraser (1961) on 14 March 2024, aged 80. Biochemistry.

Sturridge

Marie Elizabeth Sturridge née Thomas (1950) on 28 December 2024, aged 93. Modern Languages.

Taplin

Pamela Jean (Kim) Taplin née Stampfer (1962) on 29 March 2024, aged 80. English.

Tsouderos

Virginia Tsouderos (1942) on 11 June 2018, aged 93. PPE.

Turk

Dorothy Turk née Armitage (1947) on 16 November 2024, aged 94. Geography.

Turpin

Barbara Joyce Turpin née Edwards (1946) on 11 December 2024, aged 96. Physiology.

Watts

Janet Isabel Watts (1963) on 17 July 2024, aged 79. English.

White

Carolyn Margaret White (1970) on 8 March 2025, aged 81. Diploma in Social Administration.

Wiggins

Jennifer Wiggins (1958) on 28 June 2025, aged 85. Mathematics.

Willis

Margaret Stella Willis née Andrews (1940) on 24 November 2024, aged 102. Modern Languages.

Obituaries

FELLOWS

Barbara Everett: College Lecturer in English (1965-1971); Senior Research Fellow (1971-1998)

Barbara often described her earlier education in wartime as largely spent in the London under-ground, attributing gaps of knowledge in later life to ongoing air-raids during the blitz. She nonetheless went up to St Hilda's, Oxford, as an exhibitioner to read English, then, as lecturer, on to Hull, without completing the DPhil she started on Shakespeare’s aphorisms; then to Newnham, Cambridge. These earlier times were often recalled fondly, via valued friendships. Barbara and my father were in the same year as undergraduates and rivalled one another in their finals results; but their friendship developed at a later conference in Liverpool, fuelled by their shared passion for Shakespeare; they married and Barbara moved from Newnham to Somerville, Oxford. It has been lovely to read the many warm and vivid memories from exundergraduates, whom I would on my return from school often find perched in the hallway of our house in Plantation Road, rereading their essay before the tutorial; I would postpone homework by engaging them in (to me, if not to them) interesting conversation.

stairs and apparently breeding. She had at least ten copies of each Barbara Pym novel; and perhaps more surprisingly, also many copies of Ed McBain and Dick Francis. She loved detective fiction, especially in this last decade. If anyone has a dry empty property, preferably the size of Blenheim palace, Barbara’s library is looking for a home. One wing will be needed for Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers and Raymond Chandler.

When Barbara’s health began to decline and she needed to move to St Luke’s in January, I brought across suitcase loads of books, which she would rapidly appraise on receipt, silently returning those she found too familiar. Occasionally, she would nod, and pronounce it a ‘good batch’. She began to write a last article on Hamlet and I was charged with ferreting out preferred editions; despite her dwindling physique, the essay retains her characteristically expansive and self-possessed style. When we assured her on the last day, having then read and enjoyed it, that we would see if it could be published, she nodded in understanding and, I think, approval. Although Barbara became well known in her sphere and perhaps reached a wider public through her literary journalism and the Al Pacino film Looking for Richard, she was in many ways defiantly uninterested in the outside world. But in the last months, she began to surf the TV channels in her room and found in them a brave new world, delighting in finding a resemblance between the Australian Snooker player Neil Robertson and Hamlet, and in lamenting the shortcomings of a service from Westminster Abbey.

From Hull, Barbara remained friends with Prof Ray Brett and with Philip Larkin, who continued to visit us; academics and writers, including Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, were frequent visitors. Into the eighties, however, a change of direction emerged. Barbara started to review regularly for the LRB, under Karl Miller and Susannah Claps’ dynamic editorship, and this allowed her brilliance and quixotic writing gift to flourish more consistently once again. In time this led to the Clark and Northcliffe Lectures, to tours of the US, Italy and Sweden, and several volumes of essays. My father delighted in her success. In the course of these later years, several wonderful books of essays on poetry and on Shakespeare were published. Much later, she started to write and publish poetry of her own. These were happy years for her where her wonderful creativity burgeoned. Barbara’s dedication to reading, writing and to the life of the mind could be ferocious; she held out almost completely against radio, television, computer, photocopier, mobile phone, any form of technology, regardless of inconvenience. Books remained her greatest love and after Emrys died, books got close to taking her over, piling up the

Barbara spoke in paragraphs, holding the listener’s attention not just with a steely eye, but making them wait for the main verb: ‘Once, when I was with the clever but not first rate, a trifle bombastic, a little eccentric and not entirely trustworthy Mr X, we visited’ etc. She also formed swift impressions and pronounced with oracular certainty. We managed once to get her to Winchester, where I was then working. Blinking at first at the world beyond Oxford, she quickly found it unsatisfactory. Her disdain for the A34 will be shared by many. But a swift look at Winchester’s old stones, touristy cobbles and slightly claustrophobic charms left Barbara with an instant sense of distrust. ‘This city is not quite at ease with itself’, she announced, severely. In the car back, she loudly read off the diminishing mileage to Oxford from the road signs, as true civilisation beckoned her home.

But Barbara greatly enjoyed the opportunities given by the presence of children to share her love of books, and also other toys and games. As grandparents, she and my father were often wonderful companions; lively, affectionate, playful; and/ but they took no prisoners in terms of dinner table conversation. Her grandson Barney remarks, that a visit could feel like a difficult but inspiring tutorial; or it could feel like leaving the ring after a boxing match with a faster competitor, and that the two feelings were often simultaneous. He recalls

BARBARA EVERETT

grandma’s keen and fierce sense of fun, but also that this was not without limit. When a Scalextric toy was bought for the seven-year-old Barney one Christmas, Barbara obligingly and eagerly took the wheel for a round, then lost it. Turning away from the track with a dark look, she declared, ‘there is nothing intellectual about this game’, and left the house. But Barney also remembers his grandparents’ wit and love of repartee, for example, trading musical animal puns over their dinner table on another Christmas day: Emrys contributed ‘Purdhi’ and ‘Poochini’, but Barbara won the game with, yes, ‘Bach’. Their humour and energetic fun were unique, inspiring and cross-fertilizing.

Living next door to her grandma for the past four years while pursuing postgraduate study in Classics and English, Constance saw another side to Barbara than she had in childhood. Grandma was not won over by Constance’s love of ancient Greek drama (it fell short of Shakespeare) but was nonetheless keen to nurture Constance’s interests in English poetry, and especially, the right poets. Bridging the role of teacher and grandmother, she was always willing to share a thought or opinion, often sharply acute, even if she did vigorously describe one of Constance’s chosen DPhil authors, HD, as ‘an ass’.

I remember with gratitude her enthusiasm in many of my earlier childhood occupations, whether birthday parties, school plays, or trips to Stratford. She encouraged my own

passion for music, without sharing this herself; and tolerated my engagement with the church and then ordination, with kindness. And she seemed to find my later roles as first woman Dean of Chapel in Winchester College and then Rector of Witney as sources not only of interest but even pleasure.

The last four months might have been dismal, but in the almost daily phone-calls, which began with my father’s death, and in increasingly more frequent visits, I was struck that she seemed content in this later stage, albeit now in very difficult circumstances. She often spoke of her gratitude during this time; and particular latent qualities, clarity of mind, generosity of engagement, and vigorous courage, really came to the fore as death approached, unsoftened by pain relief or sedative, which my mother continued to decline. I accompanied her to some hospital appointments and was as often, admiring of her capacity for such intelligent and robust challenge of medical assumptions, even at that dire point, always prefaced by a courteous caveat, ‘I have always admired medicine, and indeed considered becoming a doctor myself, but….’ And right up to the last few days, despite increasing deafness, she continued really to love talk, and to be, essentially, herself. Her example of mental freedom and passionate commitment to literature and to the word, I am deeply grateful to have experienced.

This is a slightly adapted version of the oration delivered by Barbara’s daughter, Hester Jones, at Barbara’s funeral.

Hazel Fox, née Stuart (Jurisprudence, 1946): Lecturer in Jurisprudence (1953-58); Fellow (1977-1981); Honorary Fellow

Hazel Mary Stuart was born in Maymyo, near Mandalay, in what was then Burma, on 22 October, 1928, and was the second of four children, one of whom died in infancy. Her father, John Stuart, was an engineer, and married Joan (née Elliott Taylor). With her siblings, Pauline and John, she returned to Britain, and her father died in 1942. After three years, her mother married Sir Alfred “Tom” Denning, later Lord Denning, a widower Margaret Thatcher called ‘probably the greatest English judge of modern times’.

At Roedean, Hazel throve academically and became Head Girl. Along with the school she was evauated to Keswick in Cumbria during World War 2. From there she initially read Modern Languages at Somerville, but changed her course to Law and gained a first. On graduation she was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the Bar in 1950. After practising for four years, she married Michael Fox, who later became Lord Justice of Appeal. While her four children were young, she served as a magistrate at Tower Hamlets juvenile court, and when they had grown up, she resumed her career.

Over the course of a long and distinguished legal career, Lady Fox served as Director of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and in that role from 1982 she began running events, lectures and conferences, using her network of contacts to attract major figures in the field. She also established groups on issues of international law, one of which was the BIICL’s armed conflict group, seeking to persuade the British government to ratify sections of the Geneva Convention establishing standards for humanitarian treatment in war. This it eventually did in 1998.

She was General Editor of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, a member of the Institut de Droit International, a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, a Barrister at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square and a member of the International Law Association Committees on State Immunity, Diplomatic Protection, and Reparation for Victims of War Damage.

A noted legal academic, Lady Fox was the author of many books, from International Arbitration: Law and Procedure (1959) to her final work Law of State Immunity (1st ed. 2002, reprinted 2008). Her writings, especially on state immunity, are still regularly cited by leading courts around the world.

Returning to Somerville, where she’d been a lecturer in the 1950s, she was to be Somerville’s first Law Fellow and became an Honorary Fellow in retirement. As Nemone Lethbridge (1951), who was to be an early female barrister

herself, remembers how, at that stage with no resident Law Fellow at Somerville, ‘Hazel Stuart a barrister practising at Fountain Court in the Temple, would come up and give us a tutorial’. Her tutor was a trailblazer as women were, at that time, ‘largely persona non grata at the Bar’. Another one of her students, Margaret Casely-Hayford (1980) comments that ‘Lady Fox leaves at Somerville an incredible legacy of lawyers inspired and taught by her.’

Influential in a wider field, she was involved in various bodies including the London rent assessment panel, the London leasehold valuation tribunal and the 1963-65 Home Office committee on jury service.

After Michael’s retirement, they moved fully into their second home, Nuthanger Farm in North Hampshire, which had been the setting of Watership Down. Outside the law, Hazel’s passions were gardening and reading. In later life she cared for her husband, who struggled in his final years with blindness and Alzheimer’s disease.

Barbara Harvey (History, 1946): Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History (1955-1993)

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey was born in Teignmouth, Devon, in 1928. An undergraduate and graduate student at Somerville between 1946 and 1951, she returned to succeed her own tutor, May McKisack.

Barbara was a distinguished medieval historian. Her work was based on a lifelong engagement with the rich archives of Westminster Abbey, through which she creatively illuminated a wide array of features of medieval (and later) social and economic life. An early work, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (1977), was praised by one reviewer as allowing readers to see the abbot and monks of Westminster Abbey “as if they were characters in a Trollope novel”. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1982 and appointed CBE in 1997; and she won the Wolfson Prize for History in 1993 for her work, Living and Dying in Medieval England (OUP, 1993). She won coverage in the international press for this work, including her calculation, based on data from the abbey’s kitchen records, that a 16th-century Benedictine monk had a food and drink allowance of 7,375 calories a day – nearly three times the requirement of an active male today! The prize was a fitting end to her active career at Oxford, although she continued to research and write until the end of her ninth decade, editing the medieval sections of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and producing further works on the Westminster records.

At Somerville she was one of the most engaged and reliable fellows over nearly four decades, holding with diligence and integrity many of the major offices that fellows were then

HAZEL FOX

BARBARA HARVEY

required to fill, above all Vice Principal for an unprecedented three separate terms. She always contributed calm wisdom to discussion of the many issues which confronted the college throughout that period. She was also very kind to younger fellows, befriending and supporting them as they began their careers.

And she was a similarly supportive tutor, including to our previous Principal, Alice Proschaska, who remembers the deep interest and respect with which she treated all her students from day one: she made medieval history come alive for her pupils, guided them through the shoals of undergraduate life with judicious encouragement, and became friends to many once they had gone down.

Throughout her life she cared deeply about the college, her colleagues, its staff and its students. Joanna Innes, Barbara’s tutorial colleague in her last decade in post, writes that “she was a very kind, thoughtful, resilient person, who took seriously her responsibilities to her friends and colleagues, the profession and its institutions. A punctilious, imaginative historian. Always very erect in posture, bluntish in manner, self-deprecating, and with a ready, slightly cheeky smile.”

A College memorial for Barbara will be held in Hilary Term. Further recollections of Barbara will appear in next year’s College Report.

Catherine Peters: Lecturer in English (1981-1991)

Catherine Peters, born in London to literary agent AD Peters and his first wife, Helen MacGregor, did not go to university until she was 46 – but when she did, reading English at St Hugh’s, she achieved the top first of her year. From Francis Holland school in London, during the second world war the family moved to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, and she went to the local village school, where she enjoyed helping the younger children learn to read. An avid and precocious reader herself, she had read Jane Eyre by the age of eight. But she was not protected entirely from the war in Somerset; she lost her older brother, Richard, fighting in Burma.

cause to see all these characteristics as she came to teach at Somerville through the 1980s. One such, was Professor Emma Smith (English, 1988), who wrote the following for Catherine’s memorial service at Somerville in April 2025.

There’s a nice line at the end of a review of Catherine Peter’s biography of Wilkie Collins, from the Guardian, which talks about Collins’ decline into laudanum addiction: ‘Catherine Peters follows him scrupulously but with compassion.’

I think that would be a good description of Catherine as a tutor. Definitely scrupulous, she would not let anything past – not a slack phrase, or an irrelevance, or a grammatical snafu. Our essay margins were full of lines, crossings out, arrows moving material, and terse criticism. I realise now she approached her marking not as a schoolmistress but rather as an editor, or as an extension of her work in publishing. She was certainly a very different reader from the teachers I had been used to before coming to Somerville. But she was also compassionate. Not excessively, not intrusively – but she kept an eye on us. She had us round for drinks in her beautiful north Oxford garden after our first year exams. She encouraged me, as I finished my degree, to put myself forward for a scholarship which, quite simply, has changed my life. I don’t think I would have done that without her.

Catherine was the first person I’d ever really met who’d written a book – and of course I still have the copy of her Thackeray book she gave me: ‘To Emma Smith from Catherine Peters’. The generosity of that gift was almost bewildering to me at the time – I wasn’t even all that struck on Thackeray, although I didn’t mention that – but I later understood it as an invitation. This is the world of books and writing and thinking that you can enter, if you want to. I did – and I will always be grateful for her introduction. If she was different from the teachers I’d previously had, she was also a bird of a different feather in Oxford, I think: not least her commitment to writing for the general educated reader, a scholarly position absolutely ahead of its time.

Catherine married John Barton in 1952 and they had four sons before their divorce thirteen years later. While working as a publisher’s reader at Jonathan Cape, and bringing up her sons on her own, she faced the enormous sadness of the death of one of those sons before she married Anthony Storr in 1970.

Her oldest son, Matthew, notes in the obituary he wrote for the Guardian that his mother was ‘[a]n indomitable survivor’ with ‘an uncompromising honesty and critical acuity that could sometimes be unnerving, but these were tempered by great courage, kindness and generosity’. Many Somervillians had

There was always something more-than-Somervillianly stylish about Catherine. Rumours abounded – she had written some wildly successful children’s books – (it was a different Catherine Storr) – she had been the muse for the illustrations to The Joy Of Sex (Lord knows where that one came from). These myths capture the sense Catherine somehow trailed mysteriously behind her that there was more than one life going on. She was a sort of well-connected cosmopolitan intelligence not a bluestocking – a talent in the university but perhaps not quite of it. She had often shared taxis or been to parties with the authors we were studying. Have you ever met him? she asked me once, after I read out my essay on Tom Stoppard.

Catherine had personal and intellectual glamour that we were all in awe of. I felt at the time I would never know as much as she did, with the confidence that she exuded. Now I’m the age she was when she taught me, I know that’s true. But I am grateful to have the chance to acknowledge her as a formative tutor, and to reckon with that enviable, sometimes demanding, always compelling, combination of scrupulousness and compassion.

CATHERINE PETERS

ALUMNI

Margaret Willis, née Andrews (Modern Language, 1940)

Margaret was born on 18th December 1921 in Fulham, the only child of Stanley (known as Brod) and Stella Andrews. For the first ten years of her life, the family lived with her maternal grandmother in a flat in Fulham and she shared a room with her parents. In autumn 1931, Mahatma Gandhi visited London. Margaret and her friend Josie (later Hattie) Jacques were in a dance troupe that danced for him.

Moving in 1932 to a brand-new house in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Margaret did well at school. She studied languages and spent 6 months in 1938 in Germany, declining to say Heil Hitler in school, but learning some quite alarming songs. At the outbreak of the war, she decided to apply to Oxford. Thought safer out of London, she was evacuated to Surrey before her unhappiness led to her return.

At Somerville, Margaret read French and German, and she spent most of the war there. She made many lifelong friends and loved the city. She lodged in Lady Margaret Hall, when rooms in Somerville were lent to US medics from the Radcliffe Infirmary, remembering that life was mostly cold, with fire

watching duties at the university museum and very few men. Though she also recalled the joyous peeling of bells over Port Meadow after the battle of Alamein in 1942. To be able to afford her studies she had to apply for funding from various agencies, one of which stipulated she should use her degree for teaching after graduation. So, she became a teacher. She taught in Maidstone, and met John Helsby, lodging with her parents. They both loved music and, at a concert at Wigmore Hall, she felt a coup de foudre. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. She said yes and they married on in December 1946. Her wedding dress was leased from Ealing Studios and had allegedly been worn by Vivien Leigh.

From Lindholme in Yorkshire and to Stradishall in Suffolk, they moved to Fulham and had their first child. Then John found a dental practice in Beaumont Street and the family moved to Oxford, with three more children arriving. For the rest of her life, Margaret lived in North Oxford, teaching nearby and enjoying local music. She sang in the Oxford Bach choir, became a magistrate, was involved with the National Council of Women. Losing John to bowel cancer in November 1972, Margaret carried on and about 5 years later was introduced to Terry Willis. Both widowed with adult children, they had a wonderful life together, travelling extensively. Terry continued his scientific life in Oxford, cycling to and from his office in the metallurgy building. They were lucky enough to grow old together and to be mutually supportive. Terry died in January 2018 at the impressive age of 90. Margaret, by then 96, eventually moved to the Lady Nuffield care home. She died peacefully in the JR, after a very brief, nontraumatic decline, at 102. A long life, well lived!

MARGARET WILLIS

Christine Maclean (English, 1942)

Christine grew up in Accrington after her father moved there from the Isle of Skye in order to work. She attended Accrington Grammar School and applied to Somerville in the middle of the war. There were travel restrictions and no interviews. She always said humorously that she wouldn’t have passed these due to her Northern accent, but as she worked hard on the higher Latin papers she needed at that point, she was accepted to read English. On her first day in College, she was taken by the porter to the attic room where her luggage had been predelivered; she had never felt so homesick. Fortunately, there was a knock on her door and she met other women, settling in quickly and growing to love Oxford. The parks, flowers and river were in sharp contrast to the mills of Accrington in wartime.

Her degree in English Literature led to Christine’s lifelong passion for the arts. She became a literature teacher, most notably in Stafford and later Stretford as Head of Department. Hundreds of girls benefited from her expertise during her 30year career, and she made many teaching friends, whom she joined for cultural events.

Christine bought the house in Trafford and lived there alone for more than 40 years. Very independent, she had a good circle of friends whom she visited often until she had to give up driving due to her eyesight in her late 80s. Reaching her 100th birthday meant that, at the end, she received a lot of support with shopping, cleaning and paperwork. Wonderful neighbours shared Christine’s love of cats and also often cooked a meal for her, and others cared for her when she fell. When she was taken to the hospice in her final years, one of the few personal possessions she took with her was her Oxford Alumni Card. Her love of Oxford stayed with her to the end.

Marianna Oliver, née Egar (Modern Languages, 1943)

Marianna E. Oliver passed away after a long illness on 27 January 2023. She was a resident of Westport, Connecticut, for over 70 years, and she worked as a translator, writer and editor for the United Nations as well as other international governmental organizations (IGOs) her entire professional life until retiring in her 80s.

Marianna was born in Burnley, Lancashire, almost a hundred years before, in November 1924. Reading Modern Languages at Somerville, she graduated with a First at the end of the war. She married Thomas Wood Oliver two years later, and they moved to the USA to work for the newly formed United Nations, first in Lake Success, Long Island, and then in Manhattan following the completion of the U.N. headquarters. Initially, she worked full-time as a translator of French and Spanish and later as an editor until some time after the birth of her two children, Thomas and Griselda, in the early 1950s. For the next five decades she was in much demand by the U.N. and by other IGOs, including ECOSOC (the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council), PAHO (Pan American Health Organization) and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) as both a translator

and précis writer. She did these many jobs part-time, dividing the rest of her time between the family’s townhouse in Albufeira on the southern coast of Portugal and the family home in Westport.

Soon after its founding in the 1950s, she became a member of the Westport Weston Community Theater, and over the next six decades, had many leading and supporting roles in the theatre’s productions, among them the early “The Lady’s Not for Burning” in the mid-1950s and culminating in her final role at the age of 90 in Agatha Christie’s “The Unexpected Guest.”

She loved all kinds of literature and read avidly and widely, was a keen gardener and birdwatcher. Predeceased by her husband of 48 years in 1995, Marianna was a loving wife, mother and friend.

Pauline Harrison, née Cowan (Chemistry, 1944, and DPhil)

Professor Pauline May Harrison CBE, DSc died on 28 May 2024, aged 97. During her long and influential scientific career, she was responsible for ground-breaking discoveries on fundamental mechanisms of iron metabolism through her pioneering structurefunction studies on the ironstorage protein, ferritin. Her major contribution to science is illustrated by the impressive 151 publications she wrote, spanning more than five decades, so far accumulating more than 12,000 citations. She played an integral role in the development of the field of ‘bioiron’ as illustrated through her part as co-organiser of the first ‘International Conference on Proteins of Iron Storage and Transport’ at UCL in 1973, which led to the eventual formation of the current International Bioiron Society. She was awarded a CBE in 2001 for services to science education, was elected honorary member of the British Biophysical Society in 2000 and received an Honorary DSc from the University of Sheffield in 1997.

Born in 1926, Pauline’s mother, Adeline May Organe (1912), was a Somervillian Botanist and her father the Assistant Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Her prewar childhood in Edinburgh was close to that Garden, which she loved and where she spent much of her spare time. Her interest in chemistry was greatly stimulated through her reading of Young Chemists and Great Discoveries by James Kendal. She attended St Trinnean’s School for Girls (famously parodied in Ronald Searle’s St Trinian's School comic strip) located near Arthur’s Seat, where education was progressive and class sizes small, then (as an evacuee) at Dunbar Secondary School: her only experience of coeducation which did little to improve her ‘rather low opinion of the boys’!

At Somerville reading Chemistry, Pauline benefited from tutorials with Dorothy Hodgkin – she “especially enjoyed structural inorganic chemistry with ‘Mrs H’” (a title later

PAULINE HARRISON

also assigned to Pauline by her own students). During her research project, she was unnerved when an unattended distillation experiment exploded! This incident appears to have contributed to her wish not to continue as an organic chemist and instead to pursue her love of biochemistry. On graduating, she was a research assistant with Dorothy Hodgkin before her DPhil work. She described her time under her gentle supervision as ‘a wonderful experience’, providing her with a grounding in key concepts and methods before a Nuffield Fellowship at the Physics Department at King’s College, alongside Rosalind Franklin.

Pauline married to Royden John Harrison (a pioneer of labour history studies and workers’ education’) in 1954 and had two daughters. In 1955, she moved to Sheffield where she was to teach and research for the next 36 years, gaining international repute for her work. On her retirement, the University of Sheffield created the Harrison Chair in Structural Biology in her honour, and we were delighted to welcome Professor David Rice, the first holder of that Chair, to Somerville for our Commemoration Service in June.

Mary Alison Caniato, née Kershaw (English, 1946)

Mary was born in London on January 6, 1928 and died in Venice on May 29, 2024, survived by her four children Giovanni, Michele, Tommaso, and Caterina, and five grandchildren.

Growing up in Hampstead surrounded by her large maternal family, she was 12 when WWII broke out, and she relocated to the countryside, initially going to school in Yorkshire before moving to Sherborne. She shared a passion for poetry with her father and retained throughout her life a dreamy child-like streak coupled with a serious scholarly propensity.

While reading English at Somerville she first travelled to Italy with her friend, historian Josie Eckhardt, and returned after graduation, first to Asolo and then to Venice, where she married Lanfranco Caniato in 1954, enjoying a marriage of almost 60 years. Alison worked as a tutor and then taught English for many years at the University of Ca` Foscari. In addition to caring for their children, they enjoyed extensive travel, art, lectures, rowing out on the lagoon, and hosting numerous friends and relatives from all over the world. Alison enjoyed horseback riding and swimming during vacations, and hosted book clubs with her son and friends and colleagues from the university.

Alison travelled frequently to the US to visit family, and lived independently until she reached 90, when, helped by a live-in carer, she continued to see her large family. She was active in the parish of Sant’ Stefano where she lived most of her life, volunteering with the elderly and Alzheimer's patients and she enjoyed looking after her terrace garden. Alison wrote poetry

prolifically in her youth and college years and continued to do so into adulthood; only later in life was the full extent of her writings understood, some of it shared in the book Spears of Sun.

Alison remained sharp until the end. She was a talented woman who could readily recite Shakespeare and other poets. Always up to date on current events and international news, she read the Economist and attended lectures and conferences. While there was a philosophical side to her, she could easily fall into side-splitting laughter at all kinds of impromptu humour. Ever curious, one of her sayings was: ‘Everything is interesting, if you think about it’.

Barbara Turpin, née Edwards (Psychology, 1946)

Born in Kendal, Barbara’s family settled in Oswestry where she spent the majority of her childhood, growing up there during the war, and overcoming the disappointment of having three evacuated teachers billeted with her family rather than the contemporaries she had hoped for. She was a top-grade student across the board at school, with the exception of drill (PE) where she was deemed to be ‘fairly good’. After reading Psychology at Somerville as a Scholar, she went on to complete her clinical medical studies at University College Hospital, London. After qualifying she undertook a series of hospital jobs in and around London and met John, who became her husband in 1956. They moved to Newtown where he entered general practice and she undertook part-time medical work before starting their family.

Their move to Mid Wales brought them to a part of the country that Barbara loved, and she was always thankful for living in such a beautiful area. She enjoyed travelling with John, particularly to Italy, but was always happy to be at home, where she was able to enjoy her love of the natural world, of walking and of animals. She was a keen walker, with a succession of much-loved dogs. She helped John with his beekeeping for decades and pursued her own hobby of keeping a small flock of (mainly Texel) sheep. She supported both children and grand-children with their riding, deriving huge enjoyment from caring for horses.

She took great pride and pleasure in the personal and professional achievements of her family, and was emotionally and practically supportive. Kind, tolerant and perceptive, she took a broad and intelligent view of almost any situation, and she found pleasure in small things. Drives to Aberystwyth had always been a favourite, and some of the last few car journeys she made were in beautiful weather through the Welsh or Shropshire countryside which she much enjoyed. She enjoyed quietly watching the birds and the squirrels in her garden, and the seasons change.

MARY CANIATO

BARBARA TURPIN

Teresa Kay, née Dyer (English, 1947)

Teresa was born in 1925 in Mumbai, India, one of the seven children of Joseph and Elfrieda Dyer. At the age of seven she was sent to a convent boarding school in Darjeeling; as the train journey there took three days, the children only went home once a year. But her memories of school were happy ones, as were all her memories of childhood. She left school at an earlier age than is usual and continued her education at Sophia College in Mumbai, which was then run by the Sacred Heart order of nuns. Her voluntary service during the War was in support of British soldiers in transit to Burma, and Italians interned in Mumbai. It seems to have included quite a lot of dancing.

Dorothy Turk, née Armitage (Geography, 1947)

Dorothy was born and brought up in Lancashire. In 1952 she married Patrick Richard Turk, known as Richard, who was also studying Geography, at St Edmund Hall at the same time she was at Somerville. Although she trained as a youth employment officer immediately after graduation, both she and Richard went on to work as Geography teachers, mostly in the Manchester area, and they had their children, Helen and Stephen. The proximity to the Peak District meant they could both indulge their enthusiasm for hearty hill-walking. On their retirement they moved south to be nearer family and Richard died in 2009. Dorothy is survived by two children, three grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

Shirley Beck, née Clayton (Physics, 1950)

In 1947, having travelled alone to England by sea, Teresa took up her place at Somerville to read English. The three years she spent there were in many ways the happiest of her life. She loved her tutor, the redoubtable Mary Lascelles, she loved her studies, and she loved Oxford. Watching cricket in the Parks, discovering pubs, swimming at Dame’s Delight and exploring the English countryside – known to her until then only from the poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had a special place in her heart. She often spoke of her first experience of snow, in the bitter winter of 1947. She had seen snow on Himalayan peaks, but at a distance, and she was surprised that few in freezing Oxford shared her enthusiasm for building snowmen.

Somerville was also where she met Bernard, who was reading Classical Chinese at Wadham. It was a chance encounter, she said; if she hadn’t reluctantly agreed to help a friend serve coffee, their paths would never have crossed. She and Bernard were married in 1957. They had three daughters and eight grandchildren.

Bernard’s career as a British diplomat inevitably impinged upon Teresa’s own but, having taught at the University of Bombay before their marriage, she went on teaching at university level where she could. In each of Bernard’s postings she was a considerable asset. When they returned to London for good, she taught English as a foreign language and was much loved by her students.

All through her life Teresa remained deeply interested in language, history, natural history, religion and current affairs. To the end she was on Facebook daily, used email and enjoyed conversation, in person or, if necessary, online. In her late 90s she faced physical challenges, but she never lost her intellectual powers. Hers was a long life lived fully.

Francesca Kay (English, 1975), Teresa’s daughter

The youngest of four daughters of an engineer and a teacher, Shirley was born in Wembley in 1932. During the war school days were often spent in air raid shelters, back bent round the wall of the concrete pipe, trying to learn or singing and knitting until the all-clear sounded. While at Harrow County School for Girls, a former pupil invited Shirley to visit her at Somerville and she fell in love with the place instantly. Desperate to study there, she worked incredibly hard and achieved the offer of a place to study Physics. Once there, she found herself one woman amongst fifty older men, back from their national service. Coming from a girls’ school, and being naturally shy, she found this very difficult. On her first day at Somerville, as a physics student, she met a chemistry student, a biology student and a zoology student, and the four remained firm friends throughout her time there. She was very active in the two religious societies and also took up a hobby – bellringing –which remained a passion for the rest of her life.

After Somerville she taught Physics at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls. After a few years she got married to a curate and became a vicar’s wife and the mother of four children, living first in Loughborough and then at Church Crookham in Hampshire. She played an active part in church life, and threw her energies into giving her children the best of care. A television programme about Millfield School brought the family to live in Somerset – it was obvious to her that this was the sort of environment to bring out the intellectual potential of her rather unusual eldest child, and she wrote to the headmaster and arranged an interview. As part of the arrangements for his enrolment, the headmaster suggested she should teach Maths at the school. This she did, and remained there for over 20 happy years. She took full advantage of the musical and cultural opportunities at

TERESA KAY

SHIRLEY BECK

the school, and was fortunate enough to fall in with a group of fellow teachers who introduced her to the joys of winter mountain walking in Scotland.

Throughout her life she embraced the learning of new skills – calligraphy; tapestry; how to make the most of the newfangled things called computers, how to record all the historical items in a church, and much more besides. She was enchanted by the natural world and went on many walking holidays to see the landscape or to study the birds and flowers of the area. She loved culture and visited many famous places in St Petersburg, Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice and many more. She lived a full and happy life, proudly sporting a thick head of shining white hair until she peacefully passed away aged 92.

Chloë Blackburn, née Gunn (History, 1950)

James, Chloe’s son, recalls that his mother Chloë Blackburn helped hundreds of people through difficult times. She was a fount of tea, wine, sympathy and solutions, to friends, relatives and acquaintances. “There is so much to celebrate in the joy of knowing Chloë,” wrote one correspondent soon after her death. “How to live life to the full, how to be gracious, and most of all, how to be kind!”

The daughter of Sir James Gunn, a noted painter, and his wife, Pauline (née Miller), Chloë was born in London. She and her younger brother, Paul, had a childhood of adventure and travel: living in a succession of exciting locations, near-death encounters with scarlet fever and diphtheria, and wartime evacuation to a Scottish fishing village.

They also experienced little formal education. Their beloved German governess, Elizabeth, taught them to speak and write fluent German, but little else. Yet, after a couple of years at Mayfield convent school, Chloë won a place to study history at Somerville College, Oxford. Weeks before she went there, her mother died after years of illness, during which Chloë had been a devoted carer. This harrowing experience formed her fundamental philosophy: that it’s ultimately about what you do for others. “Because what else is there?”

At Oxford, she became reacquainted with a childhood friend, Crispin Tickell, who was studying modern history at Christ Church and would go on to become a diplomat. She was a dazzling bride at their 1954 wedding, which started years of foreign postings, and she was ever the perfect diplomat’s wife, forming lasting friendships wherever they went, as they brought up their three children, Oliver, Oriana, and James.

Ultimately the marriage ended in 1976. With resilience, Chloë picked up her life and ran with it, settling in London and becoming a talented sculptor. She specialised in quarter-size bronze figures, and could strike an excellent likeness, mostly selling or giving her work to family and friends. She took

her work seriously and, at her studio in St John’s Wood, she experimented with a range of media and techniques.

In 1985 Chloe married a lawyer, Bill Blackburn, and after his death in 2002, continued to sculpt and entertain family and friends until age and frailty began to slow her down. Dying at 93, she is survived by her children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Based on the obituary in The Guardian, by James Tickell, Chloe’s son

Gillian (Jill) Hayward, née Todd (Maths, 1950)

Jill was born in 1931 in Bristol before being evacuated to Yorkshire. Returning to Bristol after WW2, she went to grammar school, Colston Girls’, and with tutoring from her father, a prominent mathematician at Bristol University, she obtained a place to read mathematics and statistics at Somerville.

While there, she was invited to a tea party and met a handsome young man called Robin, wearing a pale blue Wadham College cravat. Shortly after this tea party in 1951, Jill’s bicycle lamp fell off and caused her to lose balance and fall off her bicycle. The road was made of rubber so she wasn’t hurt, but the handsome Robin, handily there to help, commiserated and asked her out, after which their romance blossomed.

After graduation, Jill began her mathematics teaching career at Banbury Grammar School, then at Headington School. She and Robin married in 1954 and two years’ later, moved to Leeds where Robin, a chemist, was working at the Brotherton Research Laboratory researching flare technology. He moved to the GEC Hirst Research centre, based in North Wembley where their three young children grew up.

In 1967 Jill happened to spot a poster in Harrow Library for a performance by the Harrow Philharmonic Choir of JS Bach’s St John Passion. She enquired about joining, then remained a faithful soprano member, and later chairman, for 49 years. When her children had all started school, Jill went back to teaching mathematics part time, working first at Heriots Wood School then at the Sacred Heart School in Harrow, remaining until her retirement in 1989.

Jill survived two serious illnesses, including brain haemorrhage, to enjoy many trips abroad in retirement, the first to their son’s wedding in Sydney. Travel was important to Jill and Robin and they also travelled twice to Arequipa in Peru where Robin was tutoring.

A very accomplished seamstress and knitter, she hand-made a full set of wedding attire for her daughter, Jane. She was a very accomplished cook and the family have fond memories of being entertained and fed at many fine meals in Wembley. She developed a keen interest in history and art, and pursued

CHLOE BLACKBURN

GILLIAN HAYWARD

this with her longstanding friend Sylvia for many years, taking full advantage of their ‘twerly passes’ to visit galleries and exhibitions in London.

After Robin’s death in 2022, Jill moved to Edward House in Hertford to be closer to Jane, where she was well looked after and cared for, and made friendships with residents and staff. She engaged happily with life there for three years before her death shortly after her 94th birthday.

Jose (Jo) Murphy, née Cummins (Chemistry, 1950)

Jo was born in Southampton in 1932 and had a modest but loving upbringing. Her parents both worked for the Post Office telegraphy service, and she wrote that they were clever people who had not had the opportunity of higher education. They used to communicate via Morse code if they didn’t want people to know what they were saying.

Jo had siblings (Edgar and Barbara) who were older than she was and she looked up to them. Education was important in her family; Edgar won an exhibition to Queen’s College, Oxford and Barbara an exhibition to Girton College, Cambridge, and both worked at Bletchley Park during the war. Jo was evacuated from Southampton but her parents soon brought her back despite the bombing, as they were concerned about her education; she was at home during most of the blitz. Southampton Grammar School for Girls was itself evacuated in 1942 to Bournemouth but Jo returned home at weekends.

Studying at Somerville in 1950, Jo was inspired by the first woman Nobel prize winner, Marie Curie, and her tutor Dorothy Hodgkin, the first British woman to win a Nobel prize in Chemistry. She met her husband Steve at Oxford. A young Welshman from a working-class background who had never left Wales before university, after graduation Steve did National Service and Jo worked as a research chemist with May and Baker in London. Steve worked for ICI for many years, and they moved to Poulton le Fylde near Blackpool where daughters Helen and Sarah were born. Then they moved to Welwyn Garden City where Hugh joined them.

Keen to return to work once the children were at school, Jo became a part-time science teacher at a local primary school, then started work at SmithKline Beecham where she forged a successful career in Research Analysis.

Retirement meant travelling widely, including to Egypt and Africa, India, Nepal and Tibet, USA and Canada as well as Europe. After Steve’s stroke, they took cruises and river trips that were accessible for him, and after he died, she continued to travel, joining study tours, mainly to Italy; her last was when she was eighty. Jo loved classical music and went to the local cinema for live relays of Opera and Ballet. She went to the Chamber Music Festival at Hatfield House and to The London Mozart Players weekend. Music, and puzzles, accompanied her to a retirement development in Welwyn Garden City and she learned to play Mah-jong, as well as being on the residents’ committee. She enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren, and was thrilled to meet her four great-grandchildren.

During her last year, Jo’s health deteriorated, and she moved to a care home where she was uncomplaining through her difficult last months. She was a quiet person but made many good and long-lasting friendships, and was well liked by work colleagues, neighbours, and staff wherever she lived. She had a great sense of humour and fun and was always game for joining in. Kind, clever, modest and loving, she was a loving Mum, Grandma and Great-grandma.

JOSE MURPHY

Jennifer Newman, née Hugh-Jones

(Zoology, 1950)

Jenny was born in Woodstock near Oxford, in February 1931. Her father was a Fellow in Economics at Keble and her mother studied Law at Oxford, and joined the WRNS, before becoming a social worker and a probationary officer. Jenny’s early years were peacefully uneventful up to 1940 when the threat of German invasion prompted Yale University to offer to foster children of Oxford academics. Following a heartbreaking departure from Oxford railway station, the Hugh-Jones children set sail from Liverpool to Quebec, before Jenny and her sister were fostered by the head of Hunter College in New York, and the two girls went to school there. Walking through Brooklyn and the Bronx with its ethnic diversity, and being at American summer camps, was very different from rural England. With the end of the war, Jenny resumed her schooling at the Sacred Heart Convent at Hove but was able to spend the summer of 1946 with her foster father George Schuster in Germany where he had been appointed by Franklin Roosevelt as Chief Administrator of Bavaria, in effect the Governor of the American Sector of Germany.

In 1950 Jenny was accepted at Somerville to read Zoology, but her progress was frustrated by the chemistry she struggled to pass, and by falling in love, then marrying, Richard Steed. Richard was training to be a pilot in the RAF, and following his demobilisation, became a racing driver. They spent the next few years touring the circuits of Britain and Europe where Richard raced, and during these adrenaline years of high casualties, Jenny gave birth to twins, Mark and Clare, in 1952, and to Hugh in 1954. Children increasingly kept Jenny at home on their Oxfordshire farm, where she had the support of dear friends, Peter and Genevieve Newman, tenants in the rambling farmhouse.

After the death of Richard, ironically in a traffic accident on an icy morning, and Peter’s divorce from his wife, Peter and Jenny married in 1974. Jenny moved to Baltimore in the United States where Peter was then Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. Peter’s children interlaced in age with Jenny’s. The next sixteen years saw Jenny working as a librarian at the Milton S. Eisenhower library of the university, and as a support to an academic head of department. In 1990 Peter retired with emeritus status, and they moved back to a converted barn in Dorset. There Jenny acted as personal assistant to Peter while he edited three New Palgrave dictionaries of economics, with Jenny acting as the communication hub for the academic and governmental contributors and the publishers.

After Peter was diagnosed with cancer in 2000, he and Jenny migrated to New Zealand to be close to their daughter and her family. Peter died there in December of that year but the kindness of Kiwis and the more relaxed approach to life there made the prospect of tearing up her new roots all the more daunting so she settled and took citizenship in 2005. She blossomed as an artist, print maker and as a prolific quilter.

Marie Sturridge, née Thomas (Modern Languages, 1950, and DPhil)

Born in London in 1931 to a Welsh-speaking family, Marie was always passionate about languages and reading. Her schooling (disrupted by a twoyear evacuation to North Wales during the Blitz) took place in both English and Welsh, and she studied French, German, and Latin in her teens.

As she later recalled, she applied to Oxford and Cambridge with “no confidence of success” because her grammar school did not normally put forward candidates, but she won a scholarship to Somerville, matriculating in 1950. After her undergraduate degree, she studied for a DPhil in Philology and Linguistics. Somerville was life changing, and she credited College for having prepared her, from the day of her interview, to stand up for herself and other women. The 1962 letter inviting her to defend her DPhil provides a glimpse of the barriers she faced outside its walls: “Dear Sir,” the letter reads, “I have much pleasure in informing you that the Board of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages has granted you leave to supplicate for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” “Sir” is crossed out with three typewritten x’s and “Madam” inserted in its place.

At Oxford, Marie met her future husband, David Surridge, a medical student who would later flourish as a psychiatrist; they married two years after going down. Having taught part-time at Oxford while starting her family, Marie emigrated to Canada in 1967 with David and their three daughters, Michela, Lisa, and Siân, where the couple flourished in their careers: she in academia and he in medicine.

A passionate teacher of French linguistics and translation, Marie began teaching part-time at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario and rose to assistant professor (1970-77), associate professor (1977-87), and professor (1987-97). Her research focussed on French linguistics, especially lexicology. She published a book, Le ou La?: The Gender of French Nouns (Multilingual Matters, 1995), along with numerous articles on lexical borrowing, homophony and homonymy, gender in French and Welsh, and women and language.

An academic leader at Queen’s at a time when few women assumed such roles, Marie served as the first woman head of her department (1983-93), was elected to Queen’s Senate, and became Vice President (1986-88) and then President (1988-90) of the Canadian Linguistic Association. At Queen’s, she formed part of a network of women who supported one another across departments and faculties, eventually collaborating to found the Queen’s Women’s Studies programme in the mid-1980s. She became professor emeritus in 1997. At the end of her life, looking back on the days when she was often the sole woman in a room of male academic colleagues, she credited Somerville for having given her an “excellent preparation” for courageous leadership.

MARIE STURRIDGE

Wendy Marks, née Frazer (Geography, 1951)

Wendy was born in 1932 into a ferociously intelligent family – her father Alec Frazer was a renowned physicist. Her childhood was in the war and she remembered playing in the grounds of the National Physical Laboratory listening out for the sounds of Doodlebugs. She was the youngest in her year at St Paul’s, just younger than Shirley Conran. Afterwards she followed her sister to Oxford, and she and her friends were known as the Golden Girls of Somerville. Wendy was sporty and swam and dived for Oxford. A friend told the family at her death, ‘She was a special friend, and I remember one day in summer when we drove out to The Trout in my old car and sat on the stone ledge under the wall with our feet dangling in the river, arguing as to who had the more beautiful feet (neither of us conceding to the other). That

somehow epitomises those Oxford days, probably the last truly carefree days of our lives’.

Wendy moved to London in the early 50s; work was hard to find, even with an Oxford degree, and instead of the usual routes, she took up modelling: tall, slim and elegant with her hair piled up. She met her husband, Vivian, and had two children, David and Caroline, who remember a childhood full of crossword puzzles, cards, games and books, collecting fossils on the beach and looking after an endless stream of rescue cats.

Her family describes Wendy as the proudest grandmother possible, and one of these grandchildren named her Nomni (‘We always said she was Omniscient, but he couldn’t say that, so she became Nomni and it suited her perfectly’). After the death of Vivian, she became a great presence in the lives of her oldest three grandchildren: babysitting, chauffeuring, and watching their school matches.

As she slowed down and became increasingly forgetful, she still finished Sudoku faster than anyone in the family, and her cat companions brought her comfort and joy. A fall meant that she never fully recovered self-sufficiency and needed full time care. She had a dignified and peaceful passing in hospital with her daughter by her side.

WENDY MARKS

Corinne Petford, née Chambers (Physics, 1951)

Corinne was born in June 1932 in Dulwich, moving soon after to Wimbledon. In 1939 she and brother David were evacuated from London and their parents were bombed out of their house and moved to Harrow, which remained their home until shortly before they died in 1993.

Corinne was clearly academic as a child, and she attended the local grammar school, Harrow County School for Girls. The acceptance of an older school friend to Oxford motivated her and she in turn received an Exhibition and state scholarship to Somerville, going up in 1951 to read Physics. With a real vocation to teach, in the term between being accepted to Oxford and going up, she taught maths at her own school.

As well as her studies, Corinne was a keen sportswoman and went up through the ranks of the Guides to become a Sea Ranger, leading to several life-long friendships, trips to Italy in charge of guides, and a love of sailing. She was very adventurous. At Oxford, she met her future husband, David Petford, and spent happy hours away from their studies either punting or sailing on the Thames by Port Meadow. When they were married in 1957, Corinne was teaching maths and physics at St Helen’s School in Northwood. They returned to Oxford and she taught maths and physics at Headington School until she retired in 1993. She was responsible for introducing computing as a resource for the girls at the school. David, who spent a lot of his time working with computers, helped her set up the first machines and lead the computing club. Corinne also served as the Deputy Head at Headington for many years and as Acting Head for one term.

Corinne had two breaks from Headington: firstly, to have their two daughters Amanda (in 1961) and Bryony (in 1962); and secondly to spend a year living in Zermatt, Switzerland (1970-71) as David was involved in experiments to study sunspots at an observatory at the top of the Gornergrat mountain.

Amongst the many extra-curricular activities that Corinne supported, the most notable is probably the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. She gave up many weekends to lead camping and walking trips as part of the scheme. Her love of travel, gained from her parents, inspired many trips abroad. Even after David developed Alzheimer’s, through which she cared for him until he finally had to go into a home, Corinne made a point of taking him on short trips abroad: a heroic effort on her part. She had a strong Christian faith.

Ann had a peripatetic youth, as her father was a tax collector and had to move frequently. During the war, her family lived in Summertown in Oxford. Their neighbours, who were to become lifelong friends, were lively, stimulating and politically motivated. Many had escaped persecution in Nazi Germany.

Ann came to Somerville in 1953 where she read PPE. She joined the Labour Club and was a political campaigner throughout her life. She worked for the Family Services Unit in Liverpool and Stepney and met her husband, Howard, writing a Fabian pamphlet about the need to reform National Assistance. She argued that the writers should gather input from small groups of users of different kinds (ex-prisoners, young families, longterm disabled) who would discuss their experiences of claiming benefit: what we would now call focus groups. She and Howard helped found the Comprehensive Schools Committee, pressing for an end to the 11-plus. Later, with three friends (Frances Stewart, Lynne McFarland and Rosalind Steele), Ann wrote a Fabian pamphlet called ‘WomanPower’ (1966) making the case for nursery and pre-school facilities, and flexible employment practices, to help women to join the workforce –new and exciting arguments at that time.

But her life’s work became teaching mathematics in London comprehensive schools. She was a convert to ‘New Maths’. She sought to make maths engaging and developed lots of equipment. One pupil would get inside her homemade cardboard ‘function machine’; other pupils passed in a number and would receive a transformed number out of the other end. She believed maths should be comprehensible and fun.

Asked to sum up Ann in one word, a friend chose ‘bouncy’. In almost any photograph of her she is beaming. As a mother of two (Andrew and Rachel, who followed Ann to Somerville), she was unquestionably the family lead. “Oh, don’t be such a pessimist!”, “Let’s do it!” she would say. She passed on her enthusiasm not only to Andrew and Rachel but to her grandchildren, Ben, Daniel, Rose and Will – to hitch hike, camp, light a fire and be resilient, just as she had been as a Girl Guide.

Ann was laid low by a subarachnoid haemorrhage in 2016 and, cheerful but much diminished, was looked after by Howard for the last 8 years of her life.

Rachel (PPE 1985) and Andrew Glennerster, Ann’s daughter and son

Ann Glennerster, née Craine (PPE, 1953)

CORINNE PETFORD

ANN GLENNERSTER

Janet Glover, née Hebb (Lit Hum, 1954)

In 2014 Janet finished writing her life story. A number of volumes chronicled her happy childhood and time growing up through and after WW2, her beloved school days and time at university, her early married life and young family, and finally, her later family life and retirement. We’re so grateful she did this because her life lives on for us through them, and also because, when her memory was failing, reading them with her, helped her and us remember what a truly full and wonderful life she had.

Janet was a scholar, with a drive to learn and achieve throughout her life. She loved her time at boarding school, worked hard and then went to Somerville to read Classics. She loved University life, playing cricket for the University Women’s team. After graduation, she settled on a career in teaching, pursuing this profession with passion for her whole working life and in retirement through coaching and leading U3A groups. Janet was an early feminist; she adored her family but felt she also wanted to have fulfilment and meaning through work and achievement for herself. This way she set a strong example to her daughters and grand-daughters.

Janet met her husband Murray at university (when he walked into her friend’s room on all fours pretending to be a bear). They had four children and were together for over 60 years until Murray’s death two years ago.

Janet had a huge sense of adventure and loved to travel, taking many trips abroad through school, with friends, with Murray, with her family and on her own. She pushed herself and us to go and see the world. A committed Christian and active church volunteer, in her 60s and 70s she achieved a theology degree. A reflective and critical thinker, she sometimes questioned her beliefs, but she kept her faith until the end: a strong guiding force in her life.

The last few years of Janet’s life were particularly hard because she lost the ability to do all of the things that she loved to do. Having visits from her family and friends were a huge source of comfort to her and the truly amazing and wonderful staff at the care home she lived at treated her with patience and kindness, leading to a dignified death in a place filled with warmth and affection.

More than anything in her life, these journals tell us about Janet’s love for and pride in the family she and Murray created, her children and her grandchildren. We all have wonderful memories of her as a mother and grandmother, of her care, acts of kindness, tolerance, acceptance, and thoughtfulness. Of her humour, cuddles, making jumpers and dresses, cakes and puddings, telling stories, reading books, watching assemblies and shows, giving gifts, sharing holidays, stimulating conversations, going on marches, coming to our rescue, minding babies and children, listening and…. of course, of her gentle, warm, unconditional and unwavering love for us all.

I think above all she would like to be remembered for this.

Katie Glover, Janet’s daughter

JANET GLOVER

Jane Khin Zaw, Sister Jane of Mary (PPE, 1956)

Born in Rangoon, now Myanmar, in December 1936, Jane was the middle of three sisters. Her father was a Burmese Buddhist, her mother half-English, half-Burmese with a spirituality drawn from both Christianity and Buddhism. Jane remembers her singing Christian hymns around the house, then she and the children would join their father for silent meditation. The children were left free to choose their own religion as they came of age. In 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma and the family fled and settled in Delhi. After the war, they moved to England and settled in Wimbledon, where the girls attended grammar school. Jane came to regard herself as an agnostic, yet experiencing a deep yearning for an enduring Truth.

Patricia Allison, née Johnston (History, 1958)

When Jane began to read Chemistry at Somerville, Dame Janet Vaughan proved prescient when she asked, “Are you sure you won’t want to change your subject later?” At the end of only one term, Jane asked to change to PPE, choosing to specialise in Moral Philosophy, with Philippa Foot as her tutor. She met prominent thinkers and writers, of all faiths and none, and was strongly influenced by Sheila Cassidy (Physiological Sciences, 1958). Cassidy introduced her to the Catholic Chaplain, with whom she began to discuss matters of faith. Jane was greatly influenced by the simple faith and piety of intellectuals, such as Elizabeth Anscombe, among whom she moved.

After finding herself in the Cathedral of Chartres, gazing at the Blue Madonna in a stained-glass window, Jane was quietly received into the Catholic Church. Her faith grew and with it a sense of vocation to consecrate herself in the contemplative life. Though her Buddhist father was delighted that she should choose a life of contemplation, her mother was appalled at her leaving behind the promising career ahead of her. As the years passed, though, she realised that her daughter had made the right decision.

Jane entered the Carmel of Upholland in Lancashire and was very happy there for 33 years, making her First Profession in 1964 and spending fifteen years as Subprioress. Chosen to go as a community delegate to a meeting of the Association of British Carmels, she visited Golders Green in London. She felt a strong attraction to the idea of joining them, strengthened by the knowledge that she would be able to see more of her mother who was old and frail. Transferring in the 1990s, she continued her religious life there, helping in the community as much as her health allowed.

Sister Jane’s final years were spent at Dysart Carmel, already established as an infirmary, and though her health was not very good, she took her share in community tasks. Her strong character made outward changes less daunting somehow, and she seemed irrepressible. As she grew very weak and then bedridden due to heart failure, her family members were pleased to spend final time with her.

Patricia was born in Aberdeen. Reading History at Somerville, she was JCR President in her final year and acquired a lifelong admiration for William Gladstone from the indomitable Agatha Ramm. After marrying young, she had three daughters before joining the staff of St George’s School in Edinburgh as a History teacher. She really enjoyed the company of teenagers and spent many happy years convincing her charges of the debt they owed to the suffragettes! When her husband, Ian, took early retirement from his GP practice, she swapped teaching for an advocacy role at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, where she applied her fierce intelligence and empathy to defending the rights of clients without her educational advantages. She was a skilled and knowledgeable gardener and some of her happiest times were spent working with Ian in their large garden in Ninemileburn at the foot of the Pentland Hills. She died on February 27th 2025 and leaves behind three children and seven grandchildren.

Sally McEnalley (English, 1981), Patricia’s daughter

Judith Rattenbury (Physics, 1958)

Judith Rattenbury, who died aged 84, was a pioneering computer programmer and data analyst for the social sciences. She was also a cellist, chamber musician and dedicated campaigner, from joining the Aldermaston marches in the 1950s to more recent activism over the climate crisis.

Born in Grantchester, the youngest of three, Judith went to a Cambridgeshire high school and became fascinated by computers, spending a gap year working with the X-ray crystallography group at Cambridge. There she carried out data entry by punching cards, using the EDSAC computer in the Cavendish laboratory.

n 1958 she came to Somerville to study engineering, but changed to physics. After graduating in 1961 she started work in London as a programmer of the LEO III computer for the catering firm J Lyons & Co. Noticing that each mathematical operation in the punch cards could be programmed to a different musical note, Judith enabled the computer to “sing” as it worked. She designed computer systems for the BBC’s audience research department (1963-67) then moved to the survey research centre at the University of Michigan as Head of Computing. From there she taught the Osiris data processing package, on which she wrote two books, to institutions all over the world.

JANE KHIN ZAW

PATRICIA ALLISON

JUDITH RATTENBURY

Returning home in 1975, Judith worked at Durham University and then as director of data processing at the UN World Fertility Survey (1978-84). After moving to Cambridge, she became an international consultant, including development of Unesco’s IDAMS software. She also co-founded SJ Music, a publisher of unusual chamber music, in 1987 with Sue Otty.

Her commitment to social causes began at university, when she was arrested on an Aldermaston march. On early retirement in the mid-90s Judith volunteered for the Campaign Against Arms Trade for 20 years, before declaring her IT skills obsolete. Concerned about climate change, she restricted her travels to places accessible by public transport, and became actively involved with Transition (a movement of communityled groups working for a low-carbon, socially just future), Extinction Rebellion – getting arrested once more – and groups supporting refugees.

At the age of 80 Judith left Cambridge for a retirement community in York, making new friends and championing the cause of a car-free city. She had an extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends from all periods of her life.

Judith believed a solution commonly overlooked by most was to reduce and live more simply. But she said that after a life of trying, and in her eyes failing, to make the world a better place, she eventually realised that the only thing an individual could do was to be kind – something else she humbly excelled at.

Based on the obituary in The Guardian, by Alison Atkinson, Judith’s niece

Jennifer Wiggins (Mathematics, 1958)

Jennifer Wiggins (Walkden, 1958) entered Somerville from Northampton Girls’ High School to read Maths. We first met in April 1959 and were married in the University Church in September 1962. In the 1960s she worked successfully as a systems engineer developing navigation equipment for military aircraft, and control systems for an oil refinery. She managed to work almost full-time through the births of our children in 1963 and 1967.

while in the 1980s she was Chair of her local Riding Club, taking part in show-jumping and eventing competitions. We moved to Somerset when we retired, and she continued riding, eventually buying her own horse (kept at a riding stable) as a present to herself on her 80th birthday.

She was always an enthusiastic traveller from our days as undergraduates, and we took our children skiing and camping all over Europe. We went to Scotland for the May half term week every year for more than forty years, during which she climbed 165 of the 284 Munros. Further afield she climbed Mt Blanc, Ararat, Kilimanjaro and Stok Kangri in Ladakh, as well as mountaineering in North and South America and trekking in Tibet to the Eastern base camp for Mt Everest.

Until her cancer diagnosis in 2023 she enjoyed perfect health. Our daughter Victoria, a member of the first group of women admitted to Oriel, died in 2015. She is survived by me, our son Nicholas, and five grandchildren.

John Wiggins (Oriel 1956)

Marieke Clark (History, 1959)

Born in Bishop’s Stortford to a Dutch mother and British father, Marieke’s mother died shortly after her birth and she was raised by her father and two stepmothers. She cherished her Dutch family, making contact with them after WW2. Her father was a Quaker and a conscientious objector. In 1959, Marieke came up to read History at Somerville, gaining a Diploma in Education as well as a degree.

In 1969 the family accompanied me to Cambridge, Mass. where I held a fellowship for two years. On our return the Division of GEC for which she worked had relocated, so she accepted the offer from the Inner London Education Authority to train as a maths teacher, teaching initially in Islington, and then from 1974-93 at Queen Elizabeth’s Girls School in Barnet.

She came with me to Luxembourg in 1993 where I held an EU appointment for nine years, continuing to teach part-time at the European School. In Luxembourg she had time to pursue her interests in painting and horses, working in water colours, and riding out in the forest adjoining Luxembourg City.

Horses were important throughout her life: as a teenager she looked after her own pony and competed at show jumping,

Initially working for OXFAM, Marieke met and married Suresh Awasthi in India and together they wrote We are the Original People, the story of a development project in an Adivasi village. He spent some time with her in the UK, but did not wish to leave India and they divorced in 1982. Marieke taught in Matabeleland, now part of Zimbabwe, where she was taken to visit the grave of a senior Queen (Lozikeyi), who led her people while colonial powers occupied the country and was the intellect behind one of the most effective anti-colonial revolts. Marieke researched her in Oxford and London, as well as archives in Harare and Bulawayo, and in 2010 published a biography, entitled Lozikeyi Diodlo, Queen of the Ndebele: A Very Dangerous and Intriguing Woman

Returning to the UK to a post with OXFAM again, she worked tirelessly for them for 35 years, including 19 as the charity’s Educational Materials editor. She visited Zimbabwe to assess projects for EU funding and kept strong connections there for the rest of her life through active membership of the British Zimbabwe Society and the Quaker educational charity ‘Friends of Hlekweni’.

In the UK Marieke was a donor and member of the Oxford Poverty Action Trust, providing grants to local charities who work with homeless people, and she was a loyal member of the Labour Party. Later known throughout North Oxford as “the

JENNIFER WIGGINS

MARIEKE CLARK

lady on the tricycle”, she remained a Quaker throughout her life, serving both as an Elder and as a Clerk for Correspondence. Marieke felt very fortunate to have a large flat in North Oxford in a rent-controlled tenancy and had lodgers to supplement her income; latterly a young Turkish woman, Mehpare Atay, who lived with her rent-free in return for companionship and assistance. Marieke’s generosity to friends was legendary; they were always welcome to visit, especially if bearing gifts of samosas or biscuits, and her birthday parties were especially popular. She will also be remembered for her deep love of cats.

Marieke’s was a life lived ethically, uniquely and very much in accordance with her Quaker family values.

Denise Street, née Fraser (Biochemistry, 1961)

Born in Belfast in November 1943 and educated at Methodist College, Belfast, Denise was the first person from that school to gain entry to Oxford University. When she arrived at Somerville for interview it was the first time she had been to England. Initially she read Chemistry but changed to Biochemistry after her first year. A keen badminton player, she gained four Blues and was Captain of the team, and represented Ireland at under 21 level. Towards the end of her second year she met Terry, also an Oxford undergraduate, and they became engaged on her 21st birthday.

After graduating, with Terry teaching at Portsmouth Grammar School, Denise took up a post as Research Assistant in the Department of Pharmacology at Portsmouth College of Technology (later Portsmouth University), a job which enabled her to undertake medical research for a PhD. On the award of this, she was promoted to Research Fellow. The couple were married in April 1966, and during her time at Portsmouth she continued playing badminton, representing Hampshire in the first division of the county championship.

Their first child, Karen, was born in July 1969, a month before the family moved to Kenilworth. Denise did not take external employment for the next 13 years as she cared full time for her family, which grew with the births of Kevin, Neil and Jacqui. Between and after pregnancies she continued to play badminton, now representing Warwickshire in the county championship.

In 1982, with the children all at school, she took a PGCE in Maths at Warwick University and taught maths part time at a number of comprehensive schools around Coventry. Soon she began to teach Chemistry at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, where Terry was then teaching. She started there in January with a full time-table including both an upper sixth and a Year 11 set. After a very intense period of late-night working (she had not done any chemistry since her first year at Somerville 24 years previously!) all her pupils were very successful in their external exams. She remained at the school for 19 years, becoming successively Head of House and then Head of Years

8 and 9. She also continued playing club badminton and started badminton at the school, coaching it for all her time there.

Retiring together in 2003, Denise and Terry moved to Crewkerne in Somerset and spent the next 20 years travelling the world (even to North Korea), and helping to care for their increasing band of grandchildren which grew to number ten. Denise also continued playing badminton with the U3A.

Diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of stomach cancer, after a short time, she died surrounded by her family in St. Margaret’s Hospice, Taunton - just two weeks short of her 58th wedding anniversary. She was still playing badminton three months before her death. She considered her role in life as wife, mother and grandmother to be the greatest and most fulfilling job that anyone could ever undertake.

Diana Senior (English, 1962)

Diana was born on in December 1943 in New Delhi, India, where her father was working as a mining engineer and, during the war, in the army. Her parents stayed, off and on, in India, until around 1970, finally moving back to England, to Kent, to be grandparents. Diana was schooled initially by her mother and then in boarding schools in East Africa where the family moved during and after partition, where she had to refrain from her love of reading because of strict rules to rest flat on her back in the afternoon (which probably led to her amazing posture) and then in Folkestone, Kent, where finally someone noticed that she was actually very bright and encouraged her to apply to Oxford, for which she won a scholarship to Somerville to read English.

At Oxford Diana was academically brilliant and famously beautiful. She made lifelong friendships there, and met her future life partner Heathcote Williams. Afterwards she lived in New York, working for Penguin books, and then as a model in San Francisco.

Returning to London she embarked on a PhD on Angels at the Warburg Institute – impressive as only a handful of people were selected to take the course with Eric Gombrich. Co-parenting a daughter, China, with Williams wasn’t always easy. Diana trained as a teacher and then moved for a year to the Welsh borders, a time she often said was one of her happiest.

After this Williams wanted to be back in the city and they moved to a one room flat in Ladbroke Grove, the beginning of a massively important creative connection for them both with that area of London. Diana was involved with the squatting movement and other social causes, fly-postering and then working with Mike Braybrook at Printshop W11, the printing press being a crucial part of community activism at that point. Through this work, Diana got to know about everything going on in the area and became particularly interested in the wide range of immigrant communities that had made the area their home. She had her second daughter, Lily, and she started working for the North Kensington Community History Project.

DENISE STREET

DIANA SENIOR

Moving to Oxford, Diana was able to transfer these community skills to her new role working with Adult Learners who had missed out on education for various reasons. She became particularly embedded with the Redbridge Traveller Community and was awarded an Inspirational Woman Award by the Mayor of Oxford. She adored reading and wanted everyone else to love it too.

Nature and marking the seasons was hugely important to her and she was delighted with her Oxford garden and chickens and her cat friends Matilda and Persie. After she became ill she continued to make new friends, and her humour and unique take on life influenced and delighted her new companions and carers.

Kim Taplin, née Stampfer (English, 1962)

My mother, Kim Taplin, who has died aged 80, was a writer and poet. Her work celebrated the natural world in ways that link the personal and political. The English Path, first published in 1979, explores footpaths in literature, showing how they connect us with each other and with nature. Her second book of cultural analysis, Tongues in Trees (1989), asserts that “human health, physical, psychological and spiritual, is wedded to that of the earth”.

In 1990 Kim published her first full-length collection of poems, By the Harbour Wall, in which details of the changing seasons, from plum blossom to flocks of winter redwings, are as vital as a natural history of Britain’s nuclear sites. She was always

prophetically clear about the urgent environmental crisis. But her work is essentially optimistic, exhorting us to “bring in better times”.

Born in Colchester, Essex, to Norman Stampfer, an actuary, and Jean (nee Smiles), a housewife, she was originally called Pamela, but soon became known as Kim. She went to Wycombe Abbey school in Buckinghamshire, studied English at Somerville, and married Oliver Taplin in 1964. They separated in 1988 and later divorced. She lived for 50 years in rural Oxfordshire, where her old stone cottage was filled with wild flowers and a smell of fresh baking.

Over the years Kim worked in a travelling theatre company, a library and an organic farm. She was a teacher, registrar, parish clerk and workshop-leader before becoming a full-time writer in the 1980s. She also protested at Greenham Common, held peace vigils, marched for the planet and campaigned for rights of way.

As well as writing several collections of poems and numerous essays and reviews, Kim published travelogues. One of these, Three Women in a Boat (1993), is an engaging account of rowing up the Thames from Oxford to Cricklade. In it, Kim evokes the restorative powers of the river with its “common, extraordinary beauty” and meditates, among the meadowsweet and moorhens, on art, nature, sexism and sadness.

Her last years were spent in Dorset, still writing, reading, walking and birdwatching. She tackled the Guardian crossword every day, even on the morning of the day she died. Her final poem, ‘On My Watch’, describes, among other things, the garden birds outside her window.

She is survived by her partner since 1992, fellow poet Jeremy Hilton, the two children from her marriage, Nat and me, and by two grandchildren.

Based on the obituary in The Guardian, by Phoebe Taplin, Kim’s daughter

KIM TAPLIN

Janet Watts (English, 1963)

Judith Goldfinch, née Oldham (Maths, 1964)

Born in Oadby, near Leicester, Janet was the second child of two headteachers, Joyce (née Odell) and Frederick Watts. At Guthlaxton grammar school, she won a scholarship to Somerville to read English, and, before coming up to College, she worked in a library. She graduated in 1964 with a rare congratulatory first, after College years which were to lead to lifelong friendships. One of her peer group remembers her as ‘hugely empathetic, a patient and perceptive listener’, and another notes that ‘she had a piercing gaze as she talked and you always felt she was totally focused on you’. They comment on her ‘beauty, sharp intellect and brilliant acting’, with memories of her part in the Experimental Theatre Club’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party or as a wonderful Olivia to Michael York’s Orlando in the Playhouse’s Twelfth Night. Describing her Somerville friends as ‘sisters’, Janet continued to welcome them to her homes in London and, later, Swanage, as she found private family time outside her career as an exceptional journalist.

After stints on the Times Educational Supplement and the Evening Standard she moved to a more satisfying job as a feature-writer on the Guardian and the Observer, interviewing literary and theatrical figures. Using that perceptive listening noticed by her fellow undergraduates, Janet produced insightful interviews of such subjects as Orson Welles, Iris Murdoch, Anaïs Nin and Dirk Bogarde. From seeing behind Alan Bennett’s ‘drooping tweed jacket’ to the less cosy man behind, to engaging Marianne Faithfull in ‘a cool interview’, Miriam Gross, then the literary editor of the Observer, characterises Janet as ‘exceptionally honest, unbiased, generous and perceptive in everything she wrote’. Writing her obituary in the Guardian, her friend Valerie Grove remembers how ‘she stood out among the Old Etonians in her demure Liberty print frocks with collars, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’, but this was as well as her ‘first-class intellect’.

Outside her professional life, Janet had a son, Edward, now a documentary film-maker and raised him as a single parent. After 26 years of deadlines, in 2003, Janet decided to change her life, leaving journalism and London behind, and moving to a pretty house high above the bay at Swanage in Dorset. From College days onwards, friends had seen her complexity, and behind her outward appearance recognised that she could be ‘in a dark place’. Here she learnt to play the piano again, worked on her garden, wrote poetry, and met her Somerville sisters. In 2016, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and moved to a specialist care home.

As Lesley Brown comments of her contemporary, ‘Janet definitively did leave her mark, with the remarkable corpus of published interviews and other writings, but above all as a dear friend to so many’.

Born in Ipswich, Judy attended the then Ipswich High School, whence she gained an exhibition to Somerville, matriculating in 1964 to read Mathematics, in which she duly graduated with first class honours. Throughout those three years she was an active member of the University Scout & Guide Club, and in her first year was also heavily involved with the Women’s Rowing Club, taking part that year in the competitions with Cambridge.

On graduation, she accompanied her husband-to-be to Glasgow, where she took up a Science Research Council scholarship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde, a period which was quickly followed by appointment as lecturer and the award of her PhD.

For the ten years from 1975 she was close to a full-time mother to her two sons, whilst also doing tutorial work for the Open University. One evening one of her students said he wanted to talk to her but refused to enter class, saying he would talk to her afterwards. Some student! He explained that he was Head of the Mathematics Department at Napier College, where the OU classes were held; that he’d been watching her teaching; and that he had a lectureship he would like her to accept.

Judy worked at Napier, successively College, Polytechnic and University, for the rest of her working life. She became a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, dividing her professional time between statistics in business and education and, something which had come to fascinate her, unravelling mathematical skills for those frightened by the subject. She also served for some years as Secretary of the Scottish Mathematical Council, her interest being the general promotion of mathematics in Scottish schools, especially through the development of a national competition. But Judy never forgot Somerville, becoming a member of the Cedar Circle.

In retirement, she worked as a volunteer at the Falkirk Food Bank. After Judy’s funeral, one of them commented, “She was just one of us, working on the cereals; we always did wonder why she was so good with her sums and looking after the money for us.” For Judy had never mentioned to them Oxford, or her PhD, or her degrees in maths – she was “just one of us.”

Sadly, in her late seventies Judy developed dementia, with her last eighteen months spent in a care home - where one of the senior nurses recognised her former lecturer. However, her kindness and supportive character still shone through, and she will always be remembered for her quiet smiles, her kindness, her understated brilliance, and her love of the hills of Scotland that became her adopted home.

Paul Goldfinch, Judy’s husband

JANET WATTS

Sophy Hoare, née Haslam

(Modern Languages, 1965)

Sophy was born in 1947 in Hammersmith, London. For the first ten years of her life, she lived beside the Thames with her father, an art teacher and designer for film and TV, her mother, a part-time physiotherapist, and her siblings Gemma and Dominic.

Winning a scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Acton, her favourite subjects were Art and English. During these early years Sophy wrote many stories and poems and was an avid reader. When she was ten her parents divorced, her mother remarried, and Sophy moved with her mother and stepfather to West Sussex. Her school there was run on progressive lines and Sophy specialised early in languages – French, Spanish and Latin – excelled in her A-levels, and went to read French and Spanish at Somerville.

Jane Hunt, née Williams (Jurisprudence, 1966)

A sister, mother and grandmother, Jane was many things to many people. And of course, she was a wife: firstly, to Nick, her daughter Sophie’s dad, and friend to him once they divorced; and then to Michael from 1984 – a long and lasting partnership. They would have been married 40 years a month after she died.

Jane had great ambition, driving her from school in Ludlow to study law at Somerville. Friends comment how happy and confident she was there, presiding over mugs of hot chocolate in her room late at night, or playing Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1. She used to read to a blind law student, joined OXMENT supporting those with mental health needs, and she always gave her time freely when people needed it.

After graduating with a first-class degree, Sophy married a fellow Oxford student. She first catalogued foreign and antiquarian books at the Bodleian Library, then worked for Europa Publications when they moved to London. She worked at the Council of Industrial Design as a researcher and scriptwriter for thematic exhibitions, which she greatly enjoyed. By this time her first marriage had ended, and after a few months she met her second husband, Syd Hoare, at a judo class in South Kensington. They married and had four children –Sasha, Jocelyn, Zoe and Max.

Sophy went to her first yoga class in 1970, and after six years started teaching and subsequently writing books about yoga. In the 1970s and 80s, Sophy campaigned on behalf of the Birth Centre London, meeting lifelong friends and running an influential yoga teacher training course. Meeting Vanda Scaravelli in London in 1991, she studied with her in Italy and became a well-known and widely respected Scaravelli yoga teacher, invited to give workshops around Britain and abroad.

Sophy became more interested in creative writing in her late fifties and sixties. As she wrote, ‘Most of the choices of work I have made in my life have been in response to other people’s suggestions and invitations. These have proved interesting and successful and have led to undreamed-of meetings and travel. But when I write poems, I feel that I am coming back to myself.’

She felt most alive in nature, loved gardening, walking, and outdoor swimming. Her final partner, Peter Chadwick, introduced Sophy to the Shropshire Hills and she grew to love it there, eventually buying a house in Bishop’s Castle where he cared for her in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, before dying himself of cancer.

When Sophy became ill with dementia in her mid-sixties, she was teaching, travelling, writing and looking ahead to a permanent move to Shropshire. Her four children supported her throughout her illness and, along with her six grandchildren, miss her greatly.

Sasha Neal, Sophy’s daughter

From Oxford she went to law school and a training contract at Hempsons in London, one of the top medical negligence firms of the day. She went on to become a lawyer specialising in family law, and eventually trained in mediation, becoming a pioneer at using mediation as an approach for a less adversarial divorce. She was the chair of the Surrey solicitors’ family law association.

On retirement Jane’s ambitions changed, taking a new direction towards supporting children in education. Moving back to Ludlow, she volunteered at the local primary school, and then qualified as a teaching assistant, looking after two boys who needed significant support. She had always been keen to care and support people, and before going to university, in a gap year, she volunteered at a specialist German school for children with additional needs.

In retirement Jane’s quest to learn new things didn’t stop, and she was a very active member of the Ludlow U3A art history group. She was always ambitious for others too, encouraging Sophie to study, Michael to continue with his professional tax qualifications, and many younger family members or children of friends to seek out qualifications and a career path that suited them.

Quietly unstoppable, as a single mum in the late 70s, she negotiated working hours around school hours and was always there to pick Sophie up from school. She loved living in London with all the access to cultural and musical events, and her hospitality to family and friends was well known.

Jane’s family speculated that maybe her love of travel came from the fact she was born abroad in India and had travelled widely with her family, living in Europe and Africa by the time she was eight. Over her life Jane travelled whenever she could and she and Michael journeyed to interesting and fabulous places: from the top of Europe down to the southernmost tip of south America.

SOPHY HOARE

JANE HUNT

Linda Crawford, née Robertshaw (Physics, 1967)

Born on 25th January 1949, in Wednesbury in the West Midlands, Linda was the youngest of four children and her childhood was coloured by the illness of both her parents. She would often stay with her grandmother, away from her siblings who were just old enough to be left to fend for themselves.

Her love of the water saw her swimming every morning before school, excelling in the butterfly. She became Head Girl at her secondary school, and took her A levels a year early, winning an exhibition to study Physics at Somerville. Before starting at Oxford, she spent a year working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell. It was there that 17-yearold Linda announced to her sisters that she had met her future husband, Barry.

Barry moved to Durham to start work but he would hitchhike down to Oxford. A special arrangement with ‘Stan the Porter’ provided college access through the back door and they spent almost every other weekend together for three years. Linda graduated with a First, plus a Blue for representing the university in swimming.

After graduation Linda had several jobs and started a family. She took a teaching diploma, took up diving and became a diving instructor. She loved the ocean and took part in dives around the UK and in the Red Sea. She taught Mathematics at Penglais School in Aberystwyth for 15 years. In retirement she and Barry travelled widely, including summers in a house they built in British Columbia.

She was loved and is missed by Barry and her children Gail and James and by her grandchildren and her many friends.

Lidia Sciama (Anthropology, 1970)

Lidia was an associate of St Antony’s College and Wolfson College and an active member of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was a founder member of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women (CCRW) at Queen Elizabeth House which be-came the International Gender Studies Institute at Lady Margaret Hall. She ran the CCRW for a time and organised many seminars over the years there with colleagues. She previously studied English literature in Venice, Jerusalem and the USA, and Anthropology in Cambridge and Oxford, where she completed her DPhil in Mediterranean studies.

Carolyn White (Dip in Social Administration, 1970)

Carolyn was the older daughter of Rosalie and Stanley White, and was born in December 1943. Her fifth birthday present, almost to the day, was a younger sister, Pat. Growing up in Yorkshire, she was a pupil at Harrogate Grammar School and was highly academic, winning subject and form prizes, and representing her school in Hockey. She gained an open scholarship to Newham and read History. The college was a very special place for her and she often returned to Cambridge for reunions. The whole family was very proud of her double first in History, and she had a life-long love of the subject.

After graduation, Carolyn first worked for a short while at the British Council. But then she decided to return to university, this time coming to Somerville for a diploma in Social Work. She became a social worker, initially for the Borough of Islington, and she remained in London for her whole career. She loved to visit, and to volunteer in, museums and galleries there, sustaining her passion for history. She also made many friends in the capital, and with them made cultural excursions, such as regular visits to another friend in Edinburgh and her enjoyment of the Festival.

Family and friends noted her eclectic taste when shopping, and how she dressed uniquely and impeccably, buying from craft fairs, charity shops and designers, and wearing original pieces of jewellery.

On her retirement she returned to Yorkshire, and at that stage her mother’s health deteriorated; Rosalie was to be in a care home until she died at 97. A woman her family refer to as kind, generous, talented and unique, she made the most of local society and culture in this northern setting. Living in Ripon, she joined the Civic Society and played Mahjong. She learnt German through the U3A and travelled to Germany.

Her thesis on lacemakers in Burano became the book A Venetian Island: Environment, History and Change in Burano (latest edition 2005) and she contributed towards, and edited many other books and journals, including Beads and Beadmakers with Joanne Eicher (1998) and Humour, Comedy and Laughter (2018). She also enjoyed supervising students. From the University of Oxford School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography website

In May 2024 she became ill and was taken into Harrogate General Hospital, moving then to The Moors in Ripon. She died on 8 March 2025 in Harrogate.

Rose (Rosie) de Falbe (Modern Languages, 1974)

During the nearly 40 years that I have worked in a London bookshop, it has been a regular occurrence that a man (usually a man) of a certain age, on learning my name, has said, ‘Do you have a sister called Rose? I knew her at Oxford… She was so… so…’ So what? Beautiful, yes, but something else was expressed in the dreamy look that would accompany this beginning.

Rose de Falbe died on 13th December, 2024. Born in 1955, the eldest of six, she read French and Italian at Somerville from 1974. She spent some months before teaching at St Paul’s School in Darjeeling; she then visited Kathmandu alone, where she became ill and was helped home by Amedeo Guillet in

LIDIA SCIAMA

ROSE DE FALBE

Delhi. After graduating, she took a job in Japan, teaching English language at Nagoya University. From there, she travelled twice to Bangladesh and to Hong Kong where it appears she began doing charity work among Chinese refugees, falling ‘under the influence of the missionary, Jackie Pullinger’ (her words). Finding herself on the verge of collapse, she abruptly returned to England.

For some years she worked in London for the Japanese Chamber of Commerce but in due course she retrained in botany and horticulture. She lived in a small flat in Balham, from where she worked as a gardener, operating under the name ‘Weed, Feed, Seed’. She became deeply knowledgeable about plants and environmental matters, and was passionately involved with several local community projects over the decades. With an environmental understanding ahead of many others’ at that time, her gardening was sometimes at odds with clients’ imaginings – ‘She would plant weeds!’

Rose never lost the guileless humour that drew people to her at Oxford. She was always drawn to the humble - in plants, as well as in people: her Christian faith was deeply rooted. She was intensely private and could be both ferocious and obstinate. Diagnosed coeliac, she resisted the ‘fuss’ about nutrition this provoked, with the result that she presented as anorexic throughout her adult life. The tight reasoning that she could deploy in a letter to the Council was not always apparent in relation to herself.

In her last few years, Rose spent several long periods in hospital, heroically looked after by the NHS. Her family were repeatedly advised that she could not survive more than a day or two, but then she recovered sufficiently to be discharged for another season of radiant smiles, charm, kindness, bravery, or - laggards beware! - reproof. At her funeral, which was attended by about 200 people, many of whom were unaware of one another’s existence and surprised to find so much company, the vicar reported in his address that, some months previously, he was surprised during the Creed by a voice from the congregation interrupting: “it’s not ‘We believe in one God,’ it’s ‘I believe!’”

Even in her final days, Rose defied predictions and lingered for long enough to enable a stream of nieces, nephews, siblings and friends to take leave of her blue eyes. She was much loved, and astonished all who knew her.

John de Falbe, Rose’s brother

Victoria Gibson (English, 1976)

My sister Vicky (as I knew her) died after a brief illness in December. She was a woman of great courage and vitality, qualities that remained undiminished after her terrible spinal injury ten years ago, which left her physically wheelchair-bound but still flying in her approach to life.

She had a deep love of art, music and literature and would always talk about the book she was reading or the latest exhibition she had seen, only rarely about the physical restrictions and pain she endured. Friends and family alike speak of her vivacity, she was, in the words of her daughter Emily: ‘The woman who whirled through life and swept people along with her: who gave her children a loving, magical, and imaginative childhood. She danced on tables and encouraged us to do the same. She adored snowy days and cliff top walks with the wind blowing hard enough to lean in to.’

Her capacity to find beauty in the everyday sustained her. She adored her garden, closely watching the seasons unfold, the colours change and the action of the house martins that nested in a huge colony on her house. She had a wicked sense of humour and loved to shock and entertain. Despite (or perhaps because of) the immense challenges involved, she undertook a trip of a lifetime holiday to Bhutan, a place she had always wanted to visit. Together with her family and wonderful carer Mimi, she had a fabulous time unhindered by the rough roads and vast flights of steps.

She wrote us birthday cards, her fingers weak from the injury, her writing like the manic peaks and troughs of an alarming graph – but very stylish. Last summer, she came up from her home in Devon to Shropshire, where I live, for a party. She was wearing a pink Stetson, with a white fur trim – typical of her sense of fun.

We miss her hugely.

Sarah Gibson (English, 1979), Vicky’s sister

VICTORIA GIBSON

Academic Report 2024-25

Examination Results

UNDERGRADUATE RESULTS

Ancient and Modern History

Class I 2

Class II.I 2

Biochemistry (MBiochem)

Class I 1

Class II.I 2

Biology (MBiol)

Class I 2

Class II.I 4

Chemistry (MChem)

Class I 2

Class II.I 3

Class II.II 3

Computer Science (BA)

Class II.II 1

Computer Science (MCompSci)

Distinction 1

Engineering Science (MEng)

Class II.I 3

Class II.II 2

English Language and Literature

Class I 3

Class II.I 6

Class III 2

Experimental Psychology (MSci Exp Psych)

Changed from a BA to UG Masters this year so 3rd years will go into year 4 and finish in 2026 (MSci Exp Psych)

2 will progress to the UG Masters programme.

History

Class I 5

Class II.I 5

History – Foundation Year

Merit 1

Jurisprudence

Class I 1

Class II.I 6

Literae Humaniores (Classics)

Class I 3

Class II.I 1

Class II.II 2

Mathematical and Theoretical Physics (MMathPhys)

Distinction 1

Mathematics (MMath)

Distinction 2

Merit 2

Mathematics (BA)

Class II.II 1

Mathematics and Computer Science (MMathCompSci)

Distinction 2

Mathematics and Statistics (MMaths and Stats)

Distinction 1

Pass 1

Mathematics and Statistics (BA)

Class III 1

Medicine - Preclinical

Class II.I 6

Medicine – Graduate Entry Pass 1

Modern Languages

Class I 4

Class II.I 5

Modern Languages (French) and Linguistics

Class II.I 1

Music

Class I 2

Class II.I 2

Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Class I 2

Class II.I 7

Class II.II 1

Philosophy, Politics and Economics – Foundation Year

Pass 1

Physics (BA)

Class II.I 1

Physics (MPhys)

Class II.II 1

Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics (BA)*

Class II.I 1

graduated from the original BA course. *PPL changed from a BA to UG Masters this year so 3rd years will go into year 4 and finish in 2026 (MSci PPL) 2 will progress to the UG Masters programme.

Results breakdown per grade:

Undergraduate Masters / GEM

Distinction 6

Merit 0

Pass 2

BAs

Class I 27

Class II.I 55

Class II.II 11

Class III 2

Astrophoria Foundation Year

Merit 1

Pass 1

POSTGRADUATE RESULTS

Bachelor of Civil Law

Distinction 1

Merit 1

Magister Juris (MJur)

Distinction 1

Medicine – Clinical

Distinction 1

Pass 5

MPhil Classical Archaeology

Distinction 1

MPhil Economic and Social History

Merit 1

MPhil Economics

Pass 1

MPhil Greek and/or Roman Languages and Literature

Merit 1

MPhil International Relations

Pass 1

MPhil Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

Merit 1

MPhil Music (Musicology)

Distinction 1

MPhil Politics: Comparative Government

Pass 2

MPhil Politics: Political Theory

Merit 2

MSc Archaeology

Distinction 1

MSc Advanced Computer Science

Merit 1

MSc African Studies

Pass 1

MSc Clinical Embryology

Pass 1

MSc Economic and Social History

Merit 1

Pass 1

MSc Energy Systems

Distinction 2

Merit 1

MSc Global Governance and Diplomacy

Merit 1

MSc Global Healthcare Leadership (Part Time)

Distinction 1

MSc History of Science, Medicine and Technology

Pass 1

MSc Mathematical and Computational Finance

Merit 2

MSc Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing

Pass 1

MSc Mathematical and Theoretical Physics

Distinction 1

Pass 1

MSc Mathematical Sciences

Distinction 2

Merit 1

Pass 1

MSc Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science

Pass 1

MSc Migration Studies

Merit 1

MSc Modern South Asian Studies

Merit 2

Pass 1

MSc Refugee and Forced Migration Studies

Merit 1

MSc Sustainability, Enterprise and The Environment

Pass 1

MSt Classical Archaeology

Pass 1

MSt Creative Writing

Distinction 2

Merit 2

Pass 1

MSt Diplomatic Studies

Pass 1

MSt English (1700-1830)

Merit 1

MSt English (1830-1914)

Merit 1

MSt English (1914 – Present)

Pass 1

MSt History - British and European History 1700-1850

Merit 1

MSt History – Early Modern History (1500-1700)

Merit 1

MSt History - Modern British History (1850-Present)

Merit 1

MSt History – Medieval History

Merit 1

MSt History of Art and Visual Culture

Merit 1

MSt Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

Pass 1

MSt Modern Languages

Distinction 1

Merit 1

MSt Music (Musicology)

Distinction 1

Merit 1

Results breakdown per grade:

Distinction 16

Merit 29

Pass 22

Scholarships and Exhibitions awarded to students for work of especial merit

Florence Hughes Scholarship

Anna Hull (Modern Languages)

June Barraclough Scholarship

Rozzie Weir (Modern Languages), Haroun Malik (European and Middle Eastern Languages), Leon Moorhouse (Modern Languages and Linguistics), Maryam Qureshi (European and Middle Eastern Languages)

Lord Nuffield Scholarship

Charlotte Gardhouse (Experimental Psychology), Cecilia Jay (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Sheikh Mohiddin (Experimental Psychology), Daniel Radford-Smith (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Lucy Wong (Experimental Psychology), Frances England (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Hannah Ruck (Medicine – Preclinical)

Madeleine Shaw Lefevre Scholarship

Tarka Abraham (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Anya Biletsky (Literae Humaniores), Oscar Brant (Literae Humaniores), Hanpeng Cai (Chemistry), Ben Carter (Computer Science), Nathan Chapplow (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Jude Collings (Chemistry),Zak Crane-Whatmore (Engineering Science), Sheng Dong (Computer Science), Louis Govani (Chemistry), Tasfia Karim (Chemistry), Yu Ming Lee (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Charlotte Lim (Chemistry), Matthew Lurie (Chemistry, Luca Marzin (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Helen Matthews (Ancient and Modern History), Juochukwu Orji (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Lucy Pollock (BA History), Harry Roberts (Biology), Layla Sklar (Biology), Reuben Smith (Chemistry), Harry Stewart Dilley (History), Beau Swallow

(Literae Humaniores), Tobi Taiwo (Chemistry), Diane Tang (Chemistry), Pippa Threlfall (Biology), Alice Thynne (Biology), Yusuf Usumez (Computer Science), Anna Wang (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Beth Wang (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Marcus Williamson (Biology), Yueshi Yang (History), Hengyi Zhang (Chemistry), Ellie Baird (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Oliver Eyre (Biology), Phoebe Harley (Biology), Anastasia Jones (Literae Humaniores), Tarini Kadambi (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Caitlin Morgan (Literae Humaniores), Callum Scott (Engineering Science), Ritchie Usherwood (Engineering Science)

Maria and Tina Bentivoglio Scholarship

Alan Gatehouse (History), Hannah Clarke (History), Henry Morris (Ancient and Modern History), Zoe North (History), Flora Prideaux (History)

Sir William Bousfield Scholarship

Alice Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), Daohan Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), Ben Chung (Mathematics), Miranda Conn (Mathematics and Computer Science), Joe Endacott (Physics), Dylan Heydon-Matterface (Mathematics and Computer Science), Reuben Hillyard (Mathematics), Maria Ilie-Niculescu (Psychology and Linguistics), Linkai Jin (Physics), Alfred Kelsey (Music), Francesca Lamberti (Music), Rinesa Lekiqi (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Boyi Li (History and English), Jinzhao Liang (Physics), Ziyuan Nie (Physics), Jack Potter (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Anaya Shah (Mathematics), Jonathan Stam (Mathematics), Matthew Tebbutt (Mathematics and Computer Science), Sonny Wilson (Jurisprudence), Tom Wright (Physics), Richard Zhang (Mathematics)

Exam Prizes to Undergraduates and Graduates

This list is accurate at the time of print and some awards may be made after this date. Awards with an * were not listed in the 2023-24 report, and are therefore included here.

Alyson Bailes Prize

Lucy Pollock BA (History), Harry Stewart Dilley (History)

Archibald Jackson Prize

Mahek Bhatia (Criminology and Criminal Justice), Rachel Chae (Applied Digital Health)*, Grace Copeland (Creative Writing)*, Juan Cote Orozco (Sleep Medicine)*, Franciscus Crouse (Bachelor of Civil Law), Olamide Folorunso (Global Healthcare Leadership), Lucy Gibson (Creative Writing)*, Christian Hagemeier (Advanced Computer Science)*, Libby Harris (Archaeology)*, Kyle Kass (Energy Systems)*, Cassidy Kevorkian-Mielly (Mathematical Sciences), Vera Lim (Master of Public Policy)*, Pauline Marc Tudor (Energy Systems)*, Madelyn Mezzell (Classical Archaeology), Martin Moreno Delgado (Mathematical Sciences), Ashfiya Pirani (Applied Digital Health)*, Abigail Punt (Medicine – Clinical), Sanjay Rishi (Global Healthcare Leadership)*, Cerys StuartButtle (Sleep Medicine)*, Emma Tucci (Modern Languages), Clara Ffion Wenzel (Magister Juris), Sissi Yang (Statistical Science)*, Yuchen Zhang (Music)

Cerrie Hughes Prize

Brenda Skelding (English Language and Literature)

Sir William Bousfield Exhibition

Adam Ghosh MPhys Physics

College Prize

Vigaashan Asokan (Chemistry), Thomas Bainbridge (English Language and Literature), Hanpeng Cai (Chemistry), Tilly Cairney-Leeming (Computer Science), Ben Carter (Computer Science)*, Ben Carter (Computer Science), Nathan Chapplow (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Daohan Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), Ben Chung (Mathematics), Jude Collings (Chemistry), Zak Crane-Whatmore (Engineering Science), Petra Dijur (History), Sheng Dong (Computer Science), Sam Drew (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Joe Endacott (Physics), Hannah Flaherty (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Alie French (Engineering Science), Yang Gao (Mathematics and Computer Science), Charlotte Gardhouse (Experimental Psychology), Jack Garland (Mathematics and Statistics), Adam Ghosh (Physics), James Gooding (Modern Languages), Phoebe Harley (Biology), Alfred Harrison (Mathematics/Mathematics and Statistics), Maya Heuer-Evans (History), Isobel Jessop (Classics and Modern Languages), Ruizhuo Ji (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Linkai Jin (Physics), Tarini Kadambi (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Tasfia Karim (Chemistry), Jinzhao Liang (Physics), Wesley Lim (Jurisprudence), Charlotte Lim (Chemistry), Matthew Lurie (Chemistry), Sheikh Mohiddin (Experimental Psychology), Alphonsus Neo (Chemistry), Ziyuan Nie (Physics), Molly Ross (Biology), Mary Scorer (English Language and Literature), Callum Scott (Engineering Science), Anaya Shah (Mathematics), Jacca Smart-Knight (Engineering Science), Eden Smith (English Language and Literature), Reuben Smith (Chemistry), James Smyth (Chemistry), Nancy Sparrowhawk (Music), Jonathan Stam (Mathematics), Jess Sutton (Biology), Diane Tang (Chemistry), Pippa Threlfall (Biology), Miles Tickell (Music), Ritchie Usherwood (Engineering Science), Yusuf Usumez (Computer Science), Marlena Van Der Ploeg (Biology), Anna Wang (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Beth Wang (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Finch Ward (Modern Languages and Linguistics), Nel Wickins (Biology), Lucy Wong (Experimental Psychology), Tom Wright (Physics)

Margaret Kohl Prize

Anastasia Lysaght (Modern Languages)

Mary Somerville Prize

Tarka Abraham (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Bethan Belcher (English Language and Literature), Anya Biletsky (Literae Humaniores), Alice Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), Wuyang Chen (Mathematics and Computer Science), Holly Cobain (Modern Languages), Miranda Conn (Mathematics and Computer Science), Aneira Farrelly (History), Roo Foreman (Ancient and Modern History), Alan Gatehouse (History), Madelina Gordon (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Louis Govani (Chemistry), Reuben Hillyard (Mathematics), Anna Hull (Modern Languages), Emilie JungAndersson (Modern Languages), Eason Kamander (Computer Science), Eden Kilgour (Jurisprudence), Dan Kimberley (Music), Guan Lam (English Language and Literature), Amy Lovewell (Biology), Matthew Morecroft (Biology), Caitlin Morgan (Literae Humaniores), Enes Morina (History), Henry Morris (Ancient and Modern History), Franciszek Noga (English Language and Literature), Zoe North (History), Flora Prideaux (History), Alfie Roberts (History), Beau Swallow (Literae Humaniores), Erin Townsend (Music), Hannah Williams (Modern Languages), Wuwen Wong (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), John Wortley (Mathematics), Yuancheng Xu (Mathematical and Theoretical Physics), Hengyi Zhang (Chemistry), Richard Zhang (Mathematics)

Principal’s Prize

Elizabeth Bond (English Language and Literature)*, Sam Broadhurst (Engineering Science)*, Alice Chen (Mathematics and Statistics)*, Tom Drayton (Chemistry)*, Haley Flower (Modern Languages)*, Amaar Sardharwalla (Chemistry)*, George Seager (Literae Humaniores)*, Evan Slater (Biology)*, Martha Wells (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics)*, Mei Whattam (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History)*, George Whittle (Engineering Science)*, Richard Zhang (Mathematics)*

Sarah Smithson Prize

Holly Cobb (Modern Languages and Linguistics)

Alumni Awards

Alice Horsman Scholarship

Betty Barber 2018, Francesca Dakin 2021, Dani Heath 2018, Alex Maton 2015, Hannah Patient 2017, Anushka Shah 2019, Emily Shurmer 2021, Martha Wells 2021

Funding is available to support alumni with travel costs or a significant career change. Applications are accepted each term. More details are on the website (www.some.ox.ac.uk/funding-andopportunities) or from the Scholarships and Funding Officer (scholarships. funding.officer@some.ox.ac.uk).

Awards for Travel, Projects and Internments

Alan Hodge Travel Grant

Sam Berthon (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Corinne Clark (English), Petra Dijur (History), Odetta Edoja (History), Nicole Entin (History of Art and Visual Culture), Anna Espínola Lynn (History), Amy Griffiths (Literae Humaniores), Maya Heuer-Evans (History), Amara Ifeji (Nature, Society and Environmental Governance), Boyi Li (History and English), Evie Moss (Philosophy), Isadora Richards (English Language and Literature), Jamie See (History and Economics), Brenda Skelding (English Language and Literature), Adithya Variath (Global Governance and Diplomacy), Yueshi Yang (History)

Alcuin Award

Violet Aitchison (History), Petra Dijur (History), Odetta Edoja (History), Maya Heuer-Evans (History), Boyi Li (History and English), Ilina Logani (Economic and Social History), Jamie See (History and Economics), Margaret Williams (History)

Alice Horsman Grant for Finalists

Kanksshi Agarwal (Master of Public Policy), Bethan Belcher (English Language and Literature), Alice Bentley (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Anya Biletsky (Literae Humaniores), Niamh Campbell (Creative Writing), Jade Carlin (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Ashlyn Cheong (Jurisprudence), Holly Cobain (Modern Languages), Miriam Curtis (History), Shaniah Da Costa (Engineering Science), Wolfstan Doel (Chemistry), Rea Formica (English Language and Literature), Alan Gatehouse (History), Amy Lovewell (Biology), Matthew Morecroft (Biology), Henry Morris (Ancient and Modern History), Zoe North (History), Ben Short (History), Layla Sklar (Biology)

Alice Horsman Travel Grant

James Barnett (Politics), Giuseppe Di Pietra (Atomic and Laser Physics), Ashish Gaurav (Chemistry), Samuel Gavronski (Clinical Medicine), Callum Marsh (Mathematics), Ross McLeod (Pharmacology), Erik Rydow (Atomic and Laser Physics), Ikboljon Sobirov (Medical Sciences), Talia VasaturoKolodner (Neuroscience), Yiyi Wang (Engineering Science), Zhuxin Zhang (Organic Chemistry), Sana Zuberi (Clinical Neurosciences)

Ann Cobbe Travel Grant

Zak Crane-Whatmore (Engineering Science), Prasidhee Hathi (Engineering Science), Ben Paulwell (Engineering Science), Callum Scott (Engineering Science), Alex Sharp (Engineering Science)

Anne Clements Travel Grant

Tarek Alrefae (Statistics), Tina Bai (International Relations), Greta Latvenaite (International Relations), Ziyuan Nie (Physics), Rebecca Schleuss (Medieval and Modern Languages), Brendon Tankwa (Geography and the Environment), Gladson Vaghela (Global Health Science and Epidemiology), Muhammed Zeyn (Migration Studies)

Audrey Sunderland Travel Grant

Florence Cuckston-Fenn (English Language and Literature), Sarah Issever (Creative Writing)

Catherine Hughes Grant

Nicole Choi (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Yang Gao (Experimental Psychology), Naga Sathish Gidijala (Biodiversity, Conservation and Management), Maria Ilie-Niculescu (Psychology and Linguistics), Eliam Lau (Music), Amy Lovewell (Biology), Daniel Mackay (English Language and Literature), Duncan Marsden (Medicine – Clinical), Scarlet Pleasence (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Jess Sutton (Biology), Marlena Van Der Ploeg (Biology), Sumaya Wagad (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Nel Wickins (Biology), Grace Yu (Mathematics and Statistics), Muhammed Zeyn (Migration Studies)

Cooper Travel Grant

Yuge Liu (Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics), Mariam Mehrez (Physics), Harrison Nicholls (Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics)

Enid Starkie Travel Grant

Zoe Howell (Modern Languages)

Geiringer Travel Grant

Tala Al-Chikh Ahmad (European and Middle Eastern Languages), Rosie O’Connor (Experimental Psychology), Tom Pruchnow (Politics), Reyam Rammahi (English), Eryk Ratajczyk (Theoretical Physics), David Schramm (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Celine Zeng (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Yushan Zhu (Philosophy, Politics and Economics)

Hansell Travel Grant

Zaina Awan (Law), Ezgi Bakircioglu Duman (Clinical Neurosciences), Ezgi Bakircioglu Duman (Clinical Neurosciences), Greta Latvenaite (International Relations), Duncan Marsden (Medicine – Clinical), Joshua Miller (Sc Archaeology), Henry Morris (Ancient and Modern History), Andrea Pitrone (Mathematics), Abigail Punt (Medicine – Clinical), Bilal Qureshi (Medicine – Clinical), Raphaella Ridley (Medicine – Clinical), Adam Sharon (International Relations), Radostin Stoyanov (Engineering Science), Robin von Bonsdorff (Medicine – Clinical), Clara Ffion Wenzel (Magister Juris), Selina Whiteman-Gardner (History)

Helen Darbishire Travel Grant

Kanksshi Agarwal (Master of Public Policy), Sana Dar (Modern Languages), Ashima Gulati (Master of Public Policy), Scarlet Pleasence (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Catherine Stephenson (Biology), Jess Sutton (Biology), Marie Werner (Biology), Nel Wickins (Biology)

Hilda Lorimer Travel Grant

Carina Chan (Jurisprudence), Beth Waterfield (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry)

Maria and Tina Bentivoglio

Nicole Choi (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Prince Donald Forghab (Master of Public Policy), Eliam Lau (Music), Sifei Zhang (Atomic and Laser Physics)

Maria and Tina Bentivoglio Travel Grant

Kostadin Chuchulayn (Physics), Kaia Cochran (Physics), Ky Dicker (Chemistry), Joe Endacott (Physics), Kaitlyn Ingvarsdottir (Physics), Clara MacCallum (Medicine – Clinical), Daniel Mackay (English Language and Literature), Timea Snahnicanova (Clinical Embryology), Yijia Zhao (Physics)

Marya Antonina Czaplicka Travel Grant

Rebecca Hind (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Matilda Kennedy (Classics and Modern Languages), Grace Kind (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Yu Ming Lee (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Antonia Rogers (Classical Archaeology and Ancient History), Jesse Smale (Classics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

May Quinche-Berthoud Travel Grant

Juliette Caucheteux (Economics), Corinne Clark (English), Gaurang Ramakant Kane (Theoretical Physics), Tim Rafferty (Engineering Science)

Monica Britton Travel Grant

Oscar Brant (Literae Humaniores), Oliver Gillam (English Language and Literature), Flo Johnston (English and Modern Languages), Clara Price (Modern Languages), Maryam Qureshi (European and Middle Eastern Languages), Rebecca Schleuss (Medieval and Modern Languages), Rozzie Weir (Modern Languages)

Monica Fooks Travel Grant

Bethan Grimes (Experimental Psychology), Ruoqi Huang (Experimental Psychology), Xiaotong Wang (Psychiatry), Alice Zhang (Experimental Psychology)

Olive Sayce Travel Grant

Theodore Luketina (Modern Languages), Nina Unland (Modern Languages)

Rhabanus Maurus Award

Theodore Luketina (Modern Languages), Clara Price (Modern Languages), Zaynab Ravat (English and Modern Languages)

Rita Bradshaw Travel Grant

Naga Sathish Gidijala (Biodiversity, Conservation and Management), Rui Huang (Population Health), Tiger Li (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Xiaofei Li (Organic Chemistry), Eloise Peniston (English Language and Literature), Harry Roberts (Biology), Molly Ross (Biology)

Wilma Crowther Travel Grant

Clara Buccianti (Clinical Embryology), Kennedy Cholin (Clinical Embryology), Phoebe Harley (Biology), Amy Lovewell (Biology), Gauri Narendran (Medicine –Preclinical), Tariq Saeed (Biology), Sally Sansom (Population Health)

Other Awards

Chloe and Helen Morton Choral Scholarship

Ciara Morris (English Language and Literature)

Daphne Robinson Language Award

Erin Andrews (Literae Humaniores), Carina Chan (Jurisprudence), Chelsea Chen (Experimental Psychology), Kaia Cochran (Physics), Joe Endacott (Physics), Maria Ilie-Niculescu (Psychology and Linguistics), Kaitlyn Ingvarsdottir (Physics), Saafia Jinadu (History), Guan Lam (English Language and Literature), Phoebe Makin (Chemistry), Sophie O'Mahony (Medicine – Preclinical), Zac Parry (Physics), Mariana Pires (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Dominic Sloper (Medicine – Preclinical), Jesse Smale (Classics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies), Reuben Smith (Chemistry), Ritchie Usherwood (Engineering Science), Esme Waldman (Mathematics), Margaret Williams (History)

John M Cockcroft Choral Scholarship

François de Robert Hautequere (Music)

Margaret Irene Seymour Music Award

Zaira Christa Barakat (Music), Eliam Lau (Music), Miles Tickell (Music), Erin Townsend (Music)

Medical Fund Scholarship

Pippa Boering (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Sarafina Otis (Medicine –Clinical), Abigail Punt (Medicine –Clinical), Raphaella Ridley (Medicine – Clinical), Ellie Walker (Medicine –Clinical)

Olive Sayce Language Award

Tarek Alrefae (Statistics), Junjie Chen (Statistics), Sanjana Choudhary (Modern South Asian Studies), Ryan Dancy (Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science), Anubhab

Ghosal (Mathematics), Minshu Gupta (Medicine - Clinical), Amara Ifeji (Nature, Society and Environmental Governance), Aparajita Kaul (Bachelor of Civil Law), Chor Lai Lam (Clinical Neurosciences), Greta Latvenaite (International Relations), Chloe Phillips (Primary Health Care), Sally Sansom (Population Health), Alex Sharp (Engineering Science), Timea Snahnicanova (Clinical Embryology), Nicharee Srikijkasemwat (Engineering Science), Nina Unland (Modern Languages), Gladson Vaghela (Global Health Science and Epidemiology)

Pat Harris Spirit of Somerville Award

Ishani Mookherjee (Law), Reuben Smith (Chemistry)

Sports and Wellbeing Award

Alice Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), Miranda Conn (Mathematics and Computer Science), Stephanie Connell (Mathematics/Mathematics and Statistics), Sam Drew (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Betsy Elliott-Fricker (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Patrick Foley (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Alie French (Engineering Science), Yang Gao (Mathematics and Computer Science), Bethan Grimes (Experimental Psychology), Nathan Hart (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Amara Ifeji (Nature, Society and Environmental Governance), Ruizhuo Ji (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Theodore Luketina (Modern Languages), Tilly Moor (English Language and Literature), Martin Moreno Delgado (Mathematical Sciences), Thomas Morris (History), Ming Song Oh (Jurisprudence), Juochukwu Orji (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Marta Popyk (Master of Public Policy), Alex Quinton (Physics), Daniel Radford-Smith (Medicine - Graduate Entry), Sally Sansom (Population Health), Arundhati Saraswatula (History), Amy Shapiro (Mathematics/Mathematics and Statistics), Dominic Sloper (Medicine - Preclinical), Timea Snahnicanova (Clinical Embryology), Edward Speirs (Chemistry), Anna Wang (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Beth Waterfield (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Clara Ffion Wenzel (Magister Juris), Gina Wren (Primary Health Care), Zoya Yasmine (Law)

Undergraduate Students

Entering College

Ancient and Modern History

Amelia Harrison St Marys School, Ascot

Elle Jardine Sandbach High School and Sixth Form College

Isabelle Rothwell Dr Challoner's Grammar School

Biology

Lara Hauge Seaford Head School

Jess Sutton St Clement Danes School

Marlena Van Der Ploeg Harris Westminster Sixth Form

Marie Werner St Louis de Gonzague, France

Nel Wickins The King's School, Ottery St Mary

Myles Wilkinson Oswestry School

Chemistry

Vigaashan Asokan Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet

Fred Eatock Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Alphonsus Neo Raffles Junior College, Singapore

James Smyth King Edward VI School, Warwickshire

Edward Speirs St Thomas More School, Blaydon-On-Tyne

Martyna Wojcik Wyke Sixth Form College

Classical Archaeology and Ancient History

Rebecca Hind Bungay High School Science College

Grace Kind Royal Masonic School for Girls

Ellen Lane Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School

Computer Science

Tilly Cairney-Leeming Kingston Grammar School

Elissa Talaee City of London School for Girls

Engineering Science

Enya Broady Loreto Grammar School, Altrincham

Kai Ng Raffles Junior College, Singapore

Charlie Parker Eton College

Rohan Rana Solihull Sixth Form College

Rex Rocco-Devoy Balcarras School

Zheyu Zhang Yew Chung Education Foundation, Hong Kong

English and Modern Languages

Cara Williams Parkside Sixth

English Language and Literature

Amelie Addison St Mary's School, Cambridge

Thomas Bainbridge Tiffin School

Florence Cuckston-Fenn King Edward VI College, Stourbridge

Beth Gammaidoni Thomas Hardye School

Jack Groshong Alexandra Park School

Benjamin Laurin Godalming College

Sasha Newman Weald of Kent Grammar School

Rhys Ponsford Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Emily Sceeny Bexley Grammar School, Welling

Mary Scorer Exeter College, Hele Road Centre

Eden Smith The Charter School North Dulwich

Hannah Trowell Bexley Grammar School, Welling

Experimental Psychology

Chelsea Chen ULink College Guangzhou

George He British School of Guangzhou, China

Simon Klees International School of Dusseldorf

History

Petra Dijur Stuyvesant High School

Mikolaj Dziak City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College

Odetta Edoja The National C of E Academy

Tess Gardner Watford Grammar School for Girls

Liam Gibney King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford

Maya Heuer-Evans Colyton Grammar School

Holly Ingham Reigate College

Vicky Mokumo Ark Acton Academy

Stan Toyne Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Margaret Williams Watford Grammar School for Girls

History and Economics

Zeena Abdalla King Edward VI High School for Girls

History and Modern Languages

Lois Cameron-Young Otley Prince Henry's Grammar School Specialist Language College

Jurisprudence

Carina Chan Campion School, Hornchurch

Lily Hirst Bradford Grammar School

Abigail Lee The Alice Smith School, Kuala Lumpur

Wesley Lim Raffles Junior College, Singapore

Rosa Littlewood Withington Girls' School

Malina Mielczarek Goffs Academy

Chris Souillac King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford

Literae Humaniores

Erin Andrews Cowbridge Comprehensive School

Gabriel Oldknow City of London School

Oscar Sehgal Richard Hale School, Hertford

Eleanor Tester Sevenoaks School

Mathematics and Computer Science

Tom Griffiths Tiffin School

Siobhan McGuire Camborne Science and International Academy

Josh Parsons Clevedon School

Mathematics and Statistics

Stephanie Connell Harrogate Grammar School

Alfred Harrison Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Darius Mafi The Marlborough Science Academy (formerly Marlborough School)

Dylan Russell Newman College, Hove

Amy Shapiro University College School

Evie Taylor Peter Symonds College

Shayne Wood Barton Peveril College

Medical Sciences

Tiffany Bowyer-Howell King Edward VI College, Stourbridge

Tabi Butler St Mary's School, Cambridge

Anya Ferguson Crompton House

CofE School

Rachel George Stanwell School

Will Rogers Neston High School, South Wirral

Anirudh Shenoy The Chalfonts Independent Grammar School

Medicine - Graduate Entry

Caitlin Ashcroft UK The University of Oxford

Chiara Cox UK The University of Oxford

Patrick Foley The University of Cambridge

Modern Languages

Elizabeth Bailey Gordon's School

Eimear Fehily The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial RC School

Isobel Glen Holt School, Wokingham

James Gooding King Edward's School, Edgbaston

Anwen Jones Cowbridge

Comprehensive School

Sophie Stewart Anglo-European School

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Evelyn Pye Aylesbury High School

Sarita Shaw Mossbourne Community Academy

Finch Ward Bristol Cathedral Choir School

Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry

Michelle Chen Sacred Heart Catholic High School

Mariana Pires St Philomenas Catholic High School for Girls

Beth Waterfield Heckmondwike Grammar School Academy Trust

Music

Nancy Sparrowhawk Graveney School

Miles Tickell Royal Latin School

Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Sam Drew Abbey Grange Church of England Academy

Hannah Flaherty Wallington County Grammar School

George Ganney-White Coventry College

Annabelle Giles The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial RC School

Nathan Hart Coventry Blue Coat Church of England School & Music College

Sahl Yildiz Hashim Globe Academy

Ruizhuo Ji Raffles Junior College, Singapore

Sophia Li Shenzhen College of International Education

Tiger Li Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Meriel Mossman St Olave's and St Saviour's Grammar School

Grace Rogers Ysgol Gyfun Cwm Rhymni

Celine Zeng Loreto Mandeville Hall Toorak

Physics

Daiyan Bhuiyan Syed Beths Grammar School

Jun Lee Royal Russell School

Mariam Mehrez Cardiff Sixth Form College

Alex Quinton Sir John Deanes College

Caitlin Ryan Walthamstow Hall, Sevenoaks

Yijia Zhao Shenyang Zhiyuan Secondary School

Psychology and Linguistics

Ismail Rahman King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys

Sara Tillaih Kingsbury High School

Visiting Non-Matriculated Programme

Bara Fiedlerova Visiting NonMatriculated student (Masaryk University)

Graduate Students Entering College

Bachelor of Civil Law

Franciscus Crouse University of Pretoria, South Africa

Aparajita Kaul National Academy of Legal Studies and Research University, India

Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery

James Atkinson The University of Oxford

Minshu Gupta The University of Oxford

Jem Jiang The University of Oxford

Clara MacCallum The University of Oxford

Kaiser Obi The University of Oxford

Kirsten Parsons UK The University of Oxford

Rufaro Tom The University of Oxford

Lily Wei The University of Oxford

Bachelor of Philosophy

Joshua Loo The University of Oxford

Karolina Nixon Columbia University, US

DPhil Ancient History

Xinyi Zhou Fudan University, China

DPhil Biochemistry

Zachary Robinson University of Lethbridge, Canada

DPhil Biology

Pornchai Pukdee The University of Oxford

DPhil Chemistry

Ashish Gaurav Birla Institute of Technology, India

William He The University of Manchester

DPhil Clinical Medicine

Samuel Gavronski University of Illinois Chicago, US

Mohammad Haqmal Kabul Medical University, Afghanistan

Savannah Verhage University of Cape Town, South Africa

DPhil Clinical Neurosciences

Ezgi Bakircioglu Duman Istanbul Universitesi, Turkey

DPhil Engineering Science

Ploy Srikijkasemwat The University of Oxford

Yiyi Wang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Harry Woodfin GB University of the Arts London

DPhil English

Josh Abbey The University of Cambridge

Corinne Clark The University of Oxford

DPhil Experimental Psychology

Alice Zhang Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US

DPhil Geography and the Environment

Tanaya Nair St Xavier's College, India

DPhil International Relations

Baptiste Alloui-Cros Institut d Etudes Politiques de Paris, France

DPhil Law

Bhimraj Muthu The University of Oxford

Zoya Yasmine The University of Cambridge

DPhil Mathematics

Anubhab Ghosal The University of Oxford

Callum Marsh The University of Oxford

Andrea Pitrone Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, IT

DPhil Medieval and Modern Languages

Rebekah Goodchild The University of Oxford

Rebecca Schleuss The University of Oxford

DPhil Migration Studies

Muhammed Zeyn The University of Oxford

DPhil Philosophy

Evie Moss The University of St Andrews

DPhil Physics

Rafee Abedin The University of Cambridge

Sasha Boone The University of Oxford

DPhil Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics

Alan Zhuang University of Toronto, Canada

DPhil Politics

Thomas Hazell The University of Oxford

DPhil Primary Health Care

Zython Lachica The University of Oxford

Chloe Phillips The University of Warwick

DPhil Statistics

Junjie Chen University College London

Future Propulsion and Power (EPSRC CDT)

Adam Hu Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine

Magister Juris

Clara Ffion Wenzel Universitat Augsburg, Germany

Master of Public Policy

Kanksshi Agarwal Rajiv Gandhi, Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya, India

Prince Donald Forghab Faculte de Theologie Protestante de Yaounde, Cameroon

Ashima Gulati The University of Oxford

Andriy Hnidets Lviv State Agrarian University, Ukraine

Yetunde Mosunmola Nigerian Law School, Nigeria

Hansa Mukherjee The University of Oxford

Marta Popyk The University of KyivMohyla Academy, Ukraine

MPhil International Relations

Greta Latvenaite Vilnius University, Lithuania

Adam Sharon The University of Edinburgh

MPhil Law

Zaina Awan The University of Oxford

Nikhil Kothakota Symbiosis International University, India

MPhil Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

Aviva Liu The University of Lancaster

Ching-Syuan Shen National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Xiangyu Wang University of California, US

MPhil Music

Anna Samosudova Moscow Higher School of Economics, Russia

MPhil Politics

Agetiba Agetiba The University of Oxford

Friedrich Illies Universitat Bayreuth, Germany

MSc Advanced Computer Science

Ben Wilop Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany

MSc Archaeology

Joshua Miller The University of York

MSc Clinical Embryology

Clara Buccianti The University of Manchester

Kennedy Cholin University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Timea Snahnicanova The University of Edinburgh

MSc Criminology and Criminal Justice

Mahek Bhatia The University of Warwick

MSc Education

Wantoe Wantoe The University of Oxford

MSc Energy Systems

James Kirkwood The University of Exeter

MSc Global Governance and Diplomacy

Adithya Variath The University of Oxford

MSc Global Health Science and Epidemiology

Gladson Vaghela Not Listed

MSc Global Healthcare Leadership (PT)

Abisola Babalola The University of Leeds

Christina Lee University of British Columbia, Canada

MSc Mathematical and Computational Finance

Yanqi Chen South China University of Technology, China

MSc Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Comp

Dezheng Li The University of Leicester

Haibei Li The University of Oxford

MSc Mathematical Sciences

Anand Bhardwaj University College London

Cassidy Kevorkian-Mielly Ecole Polytechnique, France

Abdella Mohammed The University of Kent

Martin Moreno Delgado The University of Oxford

Maoduan Ran The University of Oxford

MSc Mathematics and Foundations of Comp Sci

Ryan Dancy University of Waterloo, Canada

MSc Modern South Asian Studies

Roy Anto Antoni University of Madras, India

Rukhsar Balkhi Bard College, US

Sanjana Choudhary The University of Oxford

MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Governance

Amara Ifeji The University of Oxford

MSc Refugee and Forced Migration Studies

Lina Altaan Al Hariri The University of Oxford

Tara Tamang The University of Oxford

MSc Sleep Medicine

Nicole Arra John Cabot University, US

Ian Beasley Aston University

David Book Medical College of Wisconsin, US

Asif Chatoo King's College London

Jo Ingleby The University of Leeds

Aidan Neligan University of London

Nicki O'Connor Not Listed

Rajaram Pattar Not Listed

Marcus Sim National University of Singapore, Singapore

Adam Woods Grant MacEwan College, Canada

MSc Sleep Medicine (PGDip conversion)

Kariem Elhadd The University of Oxford

Adam Pearson The University of Oxford

MSc Social Anthropology

Christin Alhalabi Not Listed

MSc Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment

Ali Zein Alabdin Ahmad Not Listed

MSc Water Science, Policy and Management

Tabina Manzoor The University of Oxford

MSt Creative Writing

Lily-Ann Cunningham University of Dublin Trinity College, Republic of Ireland

MSt English

Suzie Harding The University of Sussex

Paige Walker De Anza College, US

Saskia Wraith University College London

MSt History

Arundhati Saraswatula The University of Cambridge

Ben Short University of Sydney, Australia

Mia Thomas The University of Oxford

MSt History of Art and Visual Culture

Nicole Entin The University of St Andrews

MSt in Modern Languages

Emma Tucci The University of Oxford

Nina Unland Rheinische FriedrichWilhelms-Universitat Bonn, Germany

MSt Music

Amelia Welland The University of Cambridge

Yuchen Zhang University of Toronto, Canada

Distinguished Friends of Somerville

Elizabeth Bingham (Loxley, 1957)

Kay Brock (Stewart Sandeman, 1972)

Ginny Covell (Hardman Lea, 1973)

Charlotte Morgan (1969)

Karen Richardson (1972)

Sue Robson (Bodger, 1966)

Virginia Ross (1966)

Susan Scholefield (1973)

Eleanor Sturdy (Burton, 1984)

Judith Unwin (1973)

Mai Yamani (1979)

Somerville Development Board Members

Co-Chair

Sybella Stanley (1979)

Co-Chair

Ayla Busch (1989)

Basma Alireza (1991)

Judith Buttigieg (1988)

Sophie Forsyth (Wallis, 1989)

Lynn Haight (Schofield, 1966)

Niels Kröner (1996)

Vicky Maltby (Elton, 1974)

Nicola Ralston (Thomas, 1974)

Judith Unwin (1973)

Somerville Campaign Board Members

Omar Davis (1997)

Emma Haight (1999)

Dan Mobley (1994)

Sundeep Sandhu (1994)

Honorary Development Board Members

Tom Bolt

Doreen Boyce (Vaughan, 1953)

Paddy Crossley (Earnshaw, 1956)

Clara Freeman (Jones, 1971)

Sam Gyimah (1995)

Margaret Kenyon (Parry, 1959)

Nadine Majaro (1975)

Harriet Maunsell (1962)

Hilary Newiss (1974)

Roger Pilgrim

Sian Thomas Marshall (Thomas, 1989)

For full details see the college website at www.some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/the-development-board

Legacies

Gifts in wills are a vital source of support for Somerville. Here, we name all those whose legacies have been received by the College in 2024/25, as we record our deep gratitude for the gifts made to generations of future Somervillians. We would particularly like to take the opportunity to honour two individuals whose recent legacies have made a significant and indelible difference.

Dr John T. Hughes (husband of late Catherine Hughes, who was Somerville Principal in 1989-1996)

Legacy Benefactors in 2024/25

Shirley M. Beck (Clayton) (1950, Physics)

Christian A. K. Carritt (1946, Physiological Sciences)

Bridget A. Davies (1950, Physiological Sciences)

Gillian L. C. Falconer (1944, Modern History)

J. Trevor Hughes (Magdalen College, 1963, DPhil Clinical Medicine)

Elizabeth K. McLean (Hunter) (1950, Physiological Sciences)

Gillian L. C. Falconer (1944), pictured here on her matriculation day

Sheila M. Porter (1951, Literae Humaniores)

Cynthea Rhodes (Woffenden) (1956, Modern Languages)

Rachel S. Sykes (1946, English Language and Literature)

Hazel C. Thomas (1973, Modern History)

Phyllis M. Treitel (Cook) (1948, Philosophy, Politics and Economics)

Diana M. Welding (Panting) (1949, Modern Languages)

Margaret S. Willis (1940, Modern Languages)

Dates for the Diary

08 Jane Austen and Somerville: Prof. Kathryn Sutherland (1972) and others discuss College’s relationship with Austen, 250 years after her birth

15 Kathryn Ecclestone and Rebecca Williams discuss Ecclestone’s recent book Testament of Lost Youth

DECEMBER

08 Professor Anna Beer on her Oxford detective story, Death of an Englishman 08 Alumni Carol Concert in the College

08 Alumni Carol Concert at Temple Church, London 13 Reunion Dinner for 1995/2005/2015 Matric Years