Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities

Engineering

Dan Rogers is a Principal Investigator on a recent grant on energy storage for grids: https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/ NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/ W02764X/1. He and his collaborators in Engineering Science have done a lot of work in the interesting field of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation technology (zapping the brain with large magnetic fields: see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_ magnetic_stimulation for an intro). They have built a new type of TMS machine in their laboratory that is now being used in human neuroscience trials. They have also filed two patents in the field and are actively working with industry to commercialise their ideas. Dan has a new DPhil student joining his group (https:// eng.ox.ac.uk/power-electronicsgroup/) in October, funded by a local Oxford tech company (YASA motors: https://www.yasa.com/; as an aside, YASA were spun out of the Department of Engineering Science and have been a real success story).

Professor Steve Roberts continues to work at the interface of theory and application of large-scale machine learning. Over the last year he has focused on healthcare applications (particularly for Covid detection and analysis), ecology (further extending work looking at the detection and analysis of malarial mosquitoes), finance (with continued emphasis on risk averse trading models and better quantification of uncertainty in real systems) and physical systems (using deep learning methods to discover underlying dynamics from complex systems). Over the past year Steve has stepped down as director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance and taken up his role as Associate Head of Department (Research).

Professor Richard Stone’s final two DPhil students have completed this year. One is now working for NASA and the other is now employed as a postdoc in the Department by Felix Leach (one of his former research students). Various projects will continue after Richard’s retirement, and he is expecting to maintain some involvement with both the Stirling engine work and the EPSRC/ Jaguar Land Rover/Siemens prosperity partnership. Richard is also reviewing projects for the ERC and this will mean a week in Brussels in October.

Professor Noa Zilberman’s group is exploring ways to build scalable, sustainable and resilient digital infrastructure. Their research this year ranged from mechanisms for developing trustworthy AI systems (published in Science Magazine), to making the Internet carbon-intelligent (a collaboration with Intel, Yale and others). Noa’s team developed a new low-cost platform called P4Pi (pronounced ‘puppy’) for teaching how the Internet works and making computing more accessible. P4Pi is already used for undergraduate teaching at Oxford, and if funding is secured will also be used for outreach activities at schools. This year, Noa was chosen to join the DCMS College of Experts and the UKRI NERC Digital Research and Infrastructure strategy group, in addition to her membership of the UKRI EPSRC e-Infrastructure Strategic Advisory Team. She was also elected to the Open Networking Foundation P4 Technical Steering Team and co-chaired the USENIX 2022 Annual Technical Conference.

History

Pippa Byrne has been working on manuscripts about health and heresy in southern Italy and Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She has enjoyed mapping the hot springs of the medieval gulf of Naples (sadly a research trip is out of the question as most of these sites are now underwater). She is pleased to have managed to attend her first in-person conferences and outreach sessions since 2019.

Natalia Nowakowska was on sabbatical and Lady Carlisle leave in the academic year 2021-22, working on two books in progress: a study of the Renaissance concept of dynasty, and a new history of the Jagiellonian dynasty (1377-1596). In February 2022, Natalia gave the annual Ilchester Lecture for the Modern Languages Faculty at Oxford. Following the invasion of Ukraine, she gave media interviews on the region’s long-term history, and spoke on an International Relations panel at Cambridge University on Ukraine and her Neighbours.

Benjamin Thompson’s role as Associate Head of the Humanities Division was at last able to diversify from Covid fire-fighting, in particular to focus on the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, which will be built next to Somerville on the Radcliffe site. With seven Humanities faculties, a suite of performance-spaces including a concert hall, and other facilities and institutes besides, it opens up significant opportunities both for interdisciplinary collaboration and for connecting academic research to artistic performance. He turned his academic attention to visitations of monasteries, perhaps rather too close to his dayjob of regulating teaching in the ten Humanities faculties.

Faridah Zaman’s year has been full of teaching and admin, and of rediscovering the pleasures of in-person college life. She has had little chance to do much research but has a piece forthcoming in the journal Twentieth Century British History on the subject of British socialism and empire in the early twentieth century.

Law

The Academic year 2021-22 saw Professor Julie Dickson’s new book, Elucidating Law (https:// global.oup.com/academic/ product/elucidating-law9780198727767?cc=gb&lang=en&) published by Oxford University Press. She is delighted with this hard-won achievement and is now working on a short introductory book on the topic of content-independence in

law for Cambridge University Press. Professor Dickson also continued with her undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in Philosophy of Law and European Union Law. Together with her colleagues she would like to thank Dr Achas Burin, Early Career Lecturer in Law at Somerville, for all she has given the College and its law students over the past four years, and to wish her well in her new permanent post at Oxford Brookes University. With continuing alumni support for which the law school in College is extraordinarily grateful, Somerville hopes to appoint to a new Early Career post in Law in due course.

Professor Stephen Weatherill, one year on from taking early retirement in part as a result of the sheer exhaustion caused by trying to engage with the shapeshifting dishonesty and ignorance of Brexit and its cheerleaders, has not had reason to regret his choice. Rather the reverse. He continues to supervise his existing DPhil students – a source of great joy and pride – and he continues to follow the shaping of EU law, but he also has more time for watching sport and walking. He retains an interest in the implications of the Protocol attached to the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement which addresses the unique circumstances arising on the island of Ireland, addressed in part while the UK was a member of the EU by the acceptance of common rules on trade regulation by the UK, Ireland and the rest of the EU but jeopardised by Brexit’s commitment to the UK choosing its own divergent path. He wrote ‘Interpreting the Protocol’, pp. 69-79, Chapter 6, in C. McCrudden (ed), The Law and Practice of the Ireland-Northern Ireland Protocol (Cambridge: CUP, 2022). The Protocol’s solution is to place a regulatory and customs border down the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but not only have the architects of this solution – most notably Boris Johnson – refused to admit this was what they agreed, they have even gone so far as openly to deny it. Meanwhile Conservative MPs fall over themselves to squeal about how terrible the Protocol is and how it must be dismantled – even though every single one of them voted for it in Parliament and it exists only in consequence of their support for it. This slack-jawed flight from reality could be funny – if it were not so seriously damaging to the UK’s international reputation. Professor Weatherill watches in dismay and despair as the government pumps out paperwork which is peppered with falsehoods about what Brexit is and what Brexit can be – see for example ‘Hunting the Benefits of Brexit’, Blogpost on EU Law Analysis, 8 February 2022 (https://eulawanalysis. blogspot.com/2022/02/huntingbenefits-of-brexit.html). He also writes on the development of the UK’s internal market now that the UK has quit the EU’s internal market, which in particular concerns the need to reconcile the desire for unimpeded trade within the UK with the scope for divergent market regulation, in areas previously regulated in common by the EU, by the devolved administrations in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. ‘Comparative Internal Market Law: the UK and the EU’ (Yearbook of European Law 40 (2021), pp. 431474) seeks to show how and why the UK has selected a market model which is slightly different from that found in the EU, and in particular one that is less tolerant of diversity and local autonomy.

Linguistics

Dr Louise Mycock reports: ‘This year, Somerville’s Linguistics community has continued to forge ahead in the face of the continuing challenges presented by the pandemic. In-person teaching has returned and it has been wonderful for us to meet with each other again or for the first time. Our time together feels even more precious after having to spend so long communicating via our respective screens. With respect to admissions and access activities, as well as taking part in the College’s Open Days, I provided a session at the recent Linguistics course that is part of the UNIQ summer school (https:// www.uniq.ox.ac.uk/linguistics). It was wonderful to welcome young people from across the UK to Oxford and to give individuals with huge potential and enthusiasm the chance to learn more about my subject and what it would be like to study here. My research time this year has been devoted to writing a book comparing and analysing the structure of questions in a variety of unrelated languages, focusing in particular on English, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Malay. I will spend the summer completing the manuscript, as well as continuing my research on the history of the pronoun tag construction (“It’s good, that”) based on data extracted from a corpus which spans from the 13th century to the early 20th century. I have also attended further remote meetings of the research network of which I am a member (Syntax Beyond the Canon: Cutting-edge Studies of Non-Canonical Syntax in English). Our first in-person meeting for over two years will be held in Germany in September. Sadly, our network meeting in Spring 2022, which was scheduled to be held at Somerville, had to be postponed because of the uncertainty surrounding international travel in the early part of 2022. Instead, we will be meeting at Somerville in Spring 2023. This year sees the retirement of Professor Aditi Lahiri CBE FBA MAE, Professor of Linguistics and Fellow of Somerville College. It has been an honour to work alongside her in the Faculty and at Somerville, though this is certainly not goodbye: Professor Lahiri will continue her research work at Oxford after becoming the first Oxford academic to be awarded a third ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. I was a member of the electoral board to appoint Professor Lahiri’s successor, who will be joining Somerville as a Professorial Fellow next year.’

Mathematics

Dan Ciubotaru was on sabbatical from the Maths Institute for half the academic year, postponed from the year before due to Covid. This allowed him to accept two invited visiting professorships (one month each), at Sorbonne-Université de Paris and at Université de Lorraine. These visits led to new collaborations, some unplanned: in Paris, it happened that two American professors in his research area (from Columbia and MIT) were on sabbatical at the same time, and they have started new projects together that he is very happy about and hopes will lead to serious advances. In a different direction, with his DPhil student (Okada) and a postdoctoral fellow (MasonBrown), he wrote two papers in abstract harmonic analysis and Lie theory that generated substantial interest, and they are now working on a sequel. He reported on his research in seminars at Jussieu Paris, Metz, and Michigan-JHU (online), MIT (online), and at a satellite conference for the vICM (online). Okada graduated this summer and secured an excellent three-year postdoc in Singapore at

NUS. Dan had a second DPhil student finishing in June, Xin Zhao, with a nice thesis in algebraic representation theory. In other happy news, our Somerville JRF in Mathematics, Beth Romano, received a permanent lectureship at King’s College London, starting in May. Beth contributed extensively to College Maths teaching and outreach and Dan is really delighted that her research career benefited as well.

Renaud Lambiotte reports: ‘20212022 was great in many ways. We could regain some form of normality, brainstorm on our whiteboards (which is truly essential for mathematicians) and, believe it or not, I finally met in person my second-year PhD students. But it was also nice to discover some of the fruits of the crisis, in particular the publication of my second book in December 2021, Modularity and Dynamics on Complex Networks, finishing with the sentences ‘Most of this book has been written during the Covid-19 pandemics, at a time when lockdowns and school closures transformed our personal and professional life. We are thus particularly indebted to Bram, Charlie, Thyl, and Charlie for the hours they gave us with relative, intermittent silence in these unusual times.’ With the reopening of the College, and the creative interactions that it encourages, I was more than happy to discover that my colleague James Kirkpatrick had found this book lying in the Senior Common Room and wanted to discuss the network structure of Philosophy. Hurray for random encounters.’

Medicine

Naveed Akbar undertook a fourmonth lab visit to Harvard Medical School where he worked with medical engineers to design a new device to determine the diagnostic potential of extracellular vesicles, which are released into the blood following injury to the heart (Akbar et al. 2022 Cardiovascular Research). This new device may identify patients who need additional therapy following a heart attack to help the heart heal and prevent heart failure.

Professor Elena Seiradake’s research team has focused on a new discovery, revealing that two proteins found on brain cells during embryonal development (GPC3 and Unc5) work together to help cells navigate to their correct destinations within the brain. The team showed how they form a beautiful sandwich-like shape (‘complex’) as they come together in a formation that includes four of each protein and found that this complex is essential for proper brain development, but it also gets ‘hijacked’ by cancer cells. For example, it is repurposed by neuroblastoma tumour cells as they spread. The discovery of how these proteins work together has paved the way for a better understanding of brain development, which is generally poorly understood, and could lead to new cancer treatments. The work was submitted for publication in the journal Cell (this is the best journal in Elena’s field), and is now undergoing the process of peer review and revision.

Professor Raj Thakker has been awarded the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) Avioli Founder’s Lecture Award 2021. He has served as President for the Society for Endocrinology (UK) (2019-2022) and Chairman for the ASBMR meeting (2022); he has also been appointed Editor-in Chief for 2023-27 for the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (JBMR; journal of the ASBMR, USA). He has spoken at seven conferences in Europe and the US, edited three journals, and published numerous peerreviewed articles and reviews; he has also acted as Section Editor for the ‘Parathyroid Gland Calcitropic Hormones and Bone Metabolism’ and ‘Multi System Endocrine Disorders’ sections of DeGroot’s Endocrinology 8th Edition.

Modern Languages

Simon Kemp reports: ‘It’s been quite a different year for French in Somerville. In important ways we’ve been getting back to normal, with a year of inperson teaching in classes, seminars and tutorials without enforced recourse to teaching through a screen. The teaching itself has had some new faces, though. Dr Sarah Jones, a specialist in nineteenth-century French literature and the topic of health and medicine (including epidemics) has been in charge of French teaching for the year during my three terms of research leave. And the College’s language teaching too has had to adapt to a post-Brexit world in which our arrangements for speaking and listening practice through an invited lectrice from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon were no longer viable. With the aid of a very generous, and very timely, donation, we have been able to create a new full-time post of Lecturer in French Language, combining the roles of the lectrice with those of the language instructor. A trial-run single year posting, held by the excellent Christophe Barnabé, was very successful, so we will be making the post a permanent arrangement, offering mentoring and career development in research and teaching to the holder as a springboard for early-career academics in French language, literature and culture. While at least technically on leave, I have been keeping a close eye on all this through the year, while also continuing as Outreach Director for the Modern Languages Faculty and taking on the role of Senior Examiner for the Final Honours School in French for the year. I have nevertheless managed some research around the edges, and am well underway with a monograph project called Reading the Mind, a sequel of sorts to the book Writing the Mind that I published a few years ago. The new book is going to explore ideas on the mind from faith, philosophy, psychoanalysis and science to see what they can offer to literary analysis, and how the same story can look radically different when viewed from these different perspectives. It has a little way to go still, but I’m very much enjoying having the time to get back to writing books.’

Francesca Southerden has spent the year working on several research projects. Her monograph, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language, is forthcoming with Legenda in October 2022, and she is currently writing two articles, which offer readings respectively of a contemporary work by Caroline Bergvall entitled ‘Via’: 48 Dante Variations, and the figure of Narcissus in Petrarch’s lyric poetry. She is also completing an essay, co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati (Paris-Sorbonne; ICI Berlin, Senior Research Fellow, Somerville), on Zanzotto and Dante. She has recently been exploring eco-critical approaches to literature and is looking forward to developing this interest further in the coming months. In April,

she travelled to Fiesole to take part in a workshop on Dante and Performance organised and hosted by Georgetown University. She continues to be an active member of SMRG (the Somerville Medieval Research Group), who recently celebrated the publication of Openness in Medieval Europe, edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (ICI Berlin Press). Francesca has enjoyed teaching students in person again this year, including tutorials on poetry outside in the quad during Trinity term. She was also pleased to meet prospective Modern Languages applicants at the recent Open Day.

Almut Suerbaum reports that between pandemic and the impact of the war on Ukraine, looking after the faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages has at times felt like more than a full-time job. It was wonderful therefore to be able to complete the latest volumes of the Somerville Medieval Research Group: the volume on ‘Temporality’, co-edited with Annie Sutherland, came out in Michaelmas term, and Manuele Gragnolati and Almut collaborated online to complete Openness in Medieval Europe in the spring. It was a particular delight therefore to celebrate the launch in person in June. In March, Almut was elected as a corresponding fellow of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen, in recognition of her research. Just published: Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Berlin 2022 (https://press. ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ ci-23), and Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, ed. Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland, Boydell & Brewer, 2021 (https://boydellandbrewer. com/9781843845775/medievaltemporalities/).

PPE

Politics Fellow Patricia Owens cocurated a public exhibition, Women’s International Thought (https://www. lse.ac.uk/library/events/exhibitions/ women’s-international-thought), that will run at the London School of Economics library through to 2 September 2022. It coincides with the publication of a new co-edited anthology, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge, 2022). James Ravi Kirkpatrick, who is the new Fixed-Term Fellow in Philosophy, has enjoyed the gradual return to normality, with most teaching returning to inperson. He has just seen his first set of students through from Prelims to Finals with stellar results, each of whom should be very proud of themselves and what they’ve achieved. In terms of research, he has most recently published an article on the meaning of indicative conditionals and epistemic introspection in Mind, as well as an article on the communication and retention of context-sensitive information in Philosophical Perspectives. He has continued his collaboration with Professor Joshua Knobe at Yale University; a paper summarising their work is under review. He is starting work on how polarisation within communities can lead to ruptures in how their members understand and communicate with one another, as well as on a new collaborative project with his Trinity College colleague, Dr Christopher Fowles, on narrative.

Psychology

Professor Charles Spence has published his long-awaited follow-up to Gastrophysics, called Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of your Senses for Happier Healthier Living. Unfortunately, it largely disappeared during the Covid pandemic, though he has been presenting at a few literary festivals (including one organised by Sam Knights (1990), the Shute Literary Festival). Professor Spence was also auctioned off to the highest bidder for a gastrophysics multisensory experiential dinner in College. The event was a great success and the Somerville kitchens managed to pull out all the stops in terms of delicious dinner to help illustrate the science. When not entertaining Somervillians over dinner, he continues to develop his multisensory garden in the cloud forest outside Bogota, Colombia. He is currently trying to grow some miracle fruit from seed, ready for his multisensory experiential dinners in c. 2027! He is also happy to report that a number of the Somerville psychology students have been doing phenomenally well over the last couple of years, and have been hoovering up a rather large proportion of university prizes for outstanding academic performance. Lesley Brown gave two named lectures in the summer of 2022, one in person at the British School of Athens (on Aristotle on Self-sufficiency) and one online to the International Plato Symposium held in Athens, Georgia. While staying at the British School of Athens she was able to read the newly-donated diary of Emily Penrose, who was there in 1887 while her father was the first Director, before Emily became a student at and later Principal of Somerville.

Senior Research Fellows

Stephanie Dalley finished two years of advising the National Museum in Oman on the cuneiform component (c. 2,100 BC) of their new galleries. She took part in a documentary and advised for Windfall Films, ‘Lost Cities of the Bible’, for Discovery Channel, broadcast in late 2021, and is now advising for a second film in the same series. She advised the Norwegian National Museum in Oslo on impounded antiquities from a private collection, and has written a paper identifying a supposed stela of Nebuchadnezzar II as a fake. Stephanie also completed three contributions for Festschrifts in honour of three colleagues, one in Changchun (China), one in Israel, and one in the UK. Her book The City of Babylon: A History, c.2000 BC - AD 116, was published in July 2021 by CUP. A lunchtime event for TORCH in Oxford is booked for Wednesday 12 October, with Paul Collins (Ashmolean) and Tom Holland (author).

Joanna Innes and her colleagues completed work on the third volume in their ‘Re-imagining Democracy’ series, Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean 1780-1870, and submitted the manuscript to OUP. They are now starting work on the fourth and final volume in the series, on central and northern Europe.