Ivan Gazidis: From Queen’s Lane to San Siro Stadium

Aularian Connect

Last August we launched Aularian Connect, the official networking platform for Aularians. The Hall worked with the St Edmund Hall Association and alumni volunteers to meet the demand from Aularians for a platform to connect all alumni and students.

The platform enables you to re-connect with old friends, offer careers advice and become a mentor, share photographs and news, find and advertise jobs and sign up to events and societies.

We now have over 1,214 registered users on the platform and 71% of users have offered to help their peers with careers advice and mentoring opportunities.

Join today at www.aularianconnect.com to connect with contemporaries, friends and fellow Aularians.

1,214 Aularians have registered for the platform since its launch in August.

1,214

71%

71% of users are willing to offer careers advice, become a mentor or provide an internship.

44

Aularians from 44 different countries are registered with Aularian Connect.

130

Aularians from over 130 different industries are ready to help you with your career.

“I am delighted we have launched Aularian Connect this year. With such a diverse and fascinating 10,000 strong group of alumni at our fingertips, the platform is a golden opportunity for current students and alumni to reach out to others for mentoring, career and other networking opportunities. As we all know, the currency of real networking is generosity, not greed!”

Olly Belcher (1999, Geography), President of the St Edmund Hall Association Join today at www.aularianconnect.com. If you would prefer to download the Aularian Connect app please visit the website for instructions: seh.ac/aularianconnect

St Edmund Hall: A College Like No Other

A College Like No Other is a beautifully illustrated book which stands as a portrait of St Edmund Hall and a lively celebration of its past and present.

The book produces a rich overview of Hall life – the intriguing history of a medieval hall and its transformation into a distinguished college within the University of Oxford. It records the stories of place, people, communities and events.

The book is edited by former Principal Professor Keith Gull and is a shared project where the writings of many Hall personalities come together to illustrate the diverse aspects of college life through all periods of the Hall’s existence. The books themes are the origins and evolution, twentieth-cenutry transitions, buildings, garden and art, Hall life, academic life and Aularian recollections.

This is the first such celebration of life at the Hall and a treasure for Aularians and friends. We are rightly proud of the Hall’s claim to a special, distinctive and distinguished place in Oxford.

If you would like to purchase a copy of the book please visit the website: seh.ac/book

Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano

Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano is a Early Career Research Fellow and the College Chaplain. Zack completed his BA in Biblical Studies at Evangel University, his MDiv in Theology at Harvard Divinity School, and his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Coming to Teddy Hall in the middle of a pandemic has been like entering a whirlwind. I arrived in Oxford at the same time as the students, and knew where I needed to be each day, but only just. Among my first goals was settling down to some proper research after five years mostly in journalism and church work.

My first degree was in biblical studies, and my study and writing since then has borne the imprint of those early years. A turn to medieval history was unexpected but not unrelated. While preparing for my first trip to Oxford in 2008 to take part in a summer course, I read the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. I was fascinated by its biblical ‘flavour’, evident at every level, from phrasing to larger narrative structures. I asked myself a question then: ‘Why would you narrate personal or national history in a biblical mode?’

I feel like I’ve been coming back around to that question ever since: first, by studying the history of biblical interpretation at Harvard, and then, by writing about medieval commentaries and sermon collections during my PhD at Cambridge and in various articles on ‘biblical reception’ afterwards. My first book was published by Brepols in late June 2021, after many pandemic-related delays: The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon: Religious and Cultural Reform in Carolingian Europe. It concerns the history of a collection of sermons compiled partly at Charlemagne’s court in the late eighth century. A monk and scholar, Paul the Deacon, was meant to collect ‘the best’ and ‘most useful’ texts written by ancient interpreters of Scripture. As a source of readings for daily prayer and as a model sermon collection, it exerted an enormous influence in the Middle Ages.

Published in 2021. Available to order here: bit.ly/3AisxqT

My current project comes back to Bede, particularly his understanding of wealth and poverty and his widely read commentary on the Gospel of Luke. Luke’s gospel is known for attention to the poor and disadvantaged, as well as for recording most of Jesus’ statements about riches. I have wanted to know how such texts were understood in an era when the Church was, collectively speaking, one of the largest landholders in Western Europe. How did such a community receive the teaching of Jesus in Luke 14.33: ‘Anyone of you who does not give up every possession cannot be my disciple’?

The research has come together fairly well, even as library access has been a challenge and archival travel impossible. I contributed a chapter on Bede to an edited collection, The Intellectual World of Christian Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press), and in a different vein I have a chapter on the theology of sustainability coming out soon in a collection on the church and environmentalism. A couple other articles may find their way to publication soon, after some conference papers and a lecture on the moral legacy of church property and on Bede’s work as a textual critic.

As Chaplain, I had other hopes for this year. I was keen to maintain contact with students, staff, fellows, alumni, and other friends of the College. Choral Evensong was a Sunday staple, broadcast on Zoom even in lockdown(s), with our wonderful choir and Director of Music adapting to an ever-shifting set of Covid rules for choirs. And there was much else: confirmation prep, reading groups, midweek services, weekly walks, and special events like Ghost Stories, Carols in the Quad, or a St Peter’s Day celebration with the University Church. It has been an incredible and challenging year. As a researcher and Chaplain, I feel my work has just begun.

The magic of colour

Dr Joseph Prentice is a Cooksey Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow at the Hall. Joseph’s research is in the realm of materials modelling – using theoretical tools to model and predict the properties of materials. In particular, Joseph is interested in optical, thermal, and vibrational properties of systems.

To the casual observer, colour is one of the most obvious properties of a material. What is perhaps not so well-known is that there are some materials, particularly molecules, that almost magically change colour in response to their environment. pH indicators are one familiar example, but there are many others. Some molecules exhibit ‘solvatochromism’, where dissolving the molecule in different solvents gives different colours. In extreme examples, one molecule can produce almost the entire rainbow!

There are also molecular crystals that exhibit ‘colour polymorphism’, where the same molecule, packed together in different ways, produces completely different colours. A wellknown example is commonly called ‘ROY’ – a molecule, not a person! – which gets its nickname from the fact it can be Red, Orange or Yellow, depending on how it is crystallised.

Knowing that such materials exist, the question is then: can we find more? This is not a purely academic question, as a material which changes colour controllably could have many applications, for example in sensors, or even tunable lasers. There are many molecules that could potentially exhibit colour-changing properties, so this will be a tough search. Synthesising candidate molecules in real life is the ultimate goal, but doing this is likely to be a complicated and expensive process. It would be a huge help if we were able to narrow down the field ahead of time by predicting the colour of molecular materials accurately and relatively quickly.

As you might expect, this is quite a tricky problem. It requires solving the most important equation of quantum mechanics – the Schrödinger equation – for all the electrons in the material simultaneously. This would be completely impossible to do by hand! However, if we make some carefully chosen approximations, and enlist the help of (super-)computers to crunch the numbers, we can reduce the problem to a manageable size. What approximations we make will determine how accurate our answer is, and also how long it will take a computer to run the calculation. Typically, if you want your calculation to be more accurate, it will take longer – sometimes much longer.

So, can we now predict the colour of a material accurately? There’s one further complication – it’s not enough to include one or two molecules in our calculations, as interactions between distant molecules will have an important effect on our answer. Including more molecules means including more electrons, making the calculation much longer and more expensive. If we want a calculation that is not unfeasibly long, we can either include these interactions, or use a highly accurate method – not both.

My collaborators and I have been working on a method that can solve this quandary. The essential idea is to use a cheap method to do a calculation including many molecules, and then use both the cheap method and an expensive method to do a calculation including only one or two molecules. If we compare the two sets of results for the smaller calculation, we can make a good guess at how wrong the cheaper method is, at least for the quantities we are interested in. We can then use this knowledge to correct the results from the larger calculation. This allows us to include both the long-range interactions and the higher accuracy of the expensive method, without requiring extremely expensive calculations. Our results have shown that this method works very well in a variety of materials, including ROY. With this method, we hope that predicting the colour of materials accurately will become much easier than it was before, allowing many more magical colourchange materials to be discovered.

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BYR_color_wheel.svg

This article also features in Accurate and Efficient Computation of Optical Absorption Spectra of Molecular Crystals: The Case of the Polymorphs of ROY”, J.C.A. Prentice & A.A. Mostofi, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 17, 5214 (2021).