Section 2: Reports on the Year

As I sit down to write my fifth contribution to the annual Hall Magazine, I reflect on the highs and lows of the past year with many more of the former thankfully. The first ‘high’ is the lack of lockdowns. Hallelujah! We have just completed a full academic year where I didn’t have to send yet another e-mail trying to explain to our wonderful, patient and yet weary student body that powers beyond us meant that they had to go home once again to work from their bedrooms with tutorials via Zoom. What has this lack of lockdown meant for this past year? Well, it would appear that everyone decided to make up for lost time – in formal dinners, partying, music, sport and even face-to-face tutorials and lectures. I only do a few lectures a year in biology – but the numbers turning up to lectures were more than I have ever seen in my past 23 years – and talking with colleagues it would appear they also found the same; we all missed face-to-face interactions – and to the student body this meant even attending early morning lectures to make up for lost time. As for the partying – all I can say is that we now have two porters on duty every evening. But please don’t get me wrong – this past year has been very good humoured and, quite honestly, it has been a total delight to see the College full of vibrant students and alive again. As I hope you will glean from the pages of this magazine, the Hall is thriving in so many ways; academically, in music, fine art, writing, drama, sport of all kinds, and many other diverse activities. Long may it last. Another good reflection from the past year is the launch of our HALLmarks Campaign to raise funding for all the aspirations that we set out in our 2019 Strategic Plan – from fully-funded bursaries, to ensuring accommodation for all undergraduates and first year graduates. This strategy and campaign represent our roadmap to longterm financial resilience and will enable us to retain and build further this incredible place not only for current students but for many generations to come. The total goal is £50 million – which in our present financial climate might appear eyewateringly high and certainly something to which we need to be sensitive. But this amount is to be raised over ten years – so £5 million a year – and by not doing anything, we push the College and our students into potential longer term financial difficulties.

Sometimes I hear alumni say that they had a perfectly acceptable (and sometimes wonderful) time living out in their second years – usually with a motherly-type landlady – so why the push for developing more in-college accommodation? Is this a luxury we can’t afford? As I point out in reply, times have definitely moved on. Not least, in Oxford we now have 17,000 Oxford Brookes students all applying for the same small stock of poor-quality housing in the rental market. It also costs around £2000 year more to live out than live in (due to the need to take on a twelve-month license) so immediately this lack of in-college accommodation disadvantages the less well-off students.

All the colleges of Oxford University have recognised this challenge. Many have raised money to build new residential blocks in recent years, and we are one of only two colleges of the University which does not now, or will shortly, house all its undergraduates. This in turn affects our ability to make the best possible offer to prospective applicants, especially those from less wealthy backgrounds. I also fear the motherly-type landladies have long since retired… Designing high quality, environmentally sustainable accommodation in Norham Gardens (the Norham St Edmund project) has therefore taken a large amount of our time over the past year. Many from across the Hall community have worked with the architects to ensure that we have a design that is not only environmentally sustainable but affordable and fit-forpurpose. For example, our student body has been closely involved in the design and layout of the rooms and social spaces. As well as an exemplar in environmental sustainability, it is critical that this new development is a space for our community to use and a wonderful environment in which to live and work. Plans have now been submitted to the Oxford City Council Planning Department, and by next summer I hope we will be in a position to start this incredibly important project; one which will finally enable us to accommodate all undergraduates and first year graduates in College accommodation. This will represent an important next step in the history of the Hall. In terms of our staff and Fellows – we have certainly had some turnover in the past year (though not quite as much as our government, it has to be said). We have said goodbye to a number of long-standing College staff and Fellows including our Chef John McGeever, our Domestic Bursar Charlotte Sweeney, and a number of notable other College staff and Fellows of whom you will read in the pages of this Magazine. It is always sad to see people go – and to me this often reflects a ‘low’ point because it is the people that make the Hall what it is – but it also reminds me that we are merely custodians, pushing this nearly 780-year-old Hall into the next millennia, and that turnover is part of this process. The antiquity of the College was really brought home to me recently when I learnt a new historic fact, one of which you may all already be aware: our Library, the former parish church of St Peter-inthe-East has existed on this site since the late tenth century. St Peter’s is said to be named after the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (c.1085). I still find it incredible to think that some of the Hall’s buildings which are still in use every day for studying, and accommodation, have been used for this purpose for more than 800 years. A key reason for this longevity is because of the many generations of past students, Fellows, and staff that have provided financial support over the years since its early foundations. And this is a legacy that we now have a responsibility to maintain – to allow the Hall to flourish into the future.

Floreat Aula! Professor Katherine J. Willis CBE, Baroness Willis of Summertown, Principal As the Magazine was going to press I received the extremely sad news of the death of our former Principal Justin Gosling. Justin was a brilliant, dedicated, and sensitive leader of this College. Even after retiring, he continued to serve the College in many different ways from teaching to supporting alumni events and his former students. He brought extraordinary scholarship, wisdom, and enthusiasm to everything that he was involved with. Geoffrey Bourne-Taylor has kindly written a tribute on page 191 and we will celebrate Justin’s life and achievements more fully in the next issue.

In addition to her teaching as College Lecturer in Physics at Teddy Hall, during this past year Dr Jo Ashbourn has continued as the Director of the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics, which aims to not just focus on chronicling the history of the discipline as a retrospective exercise, but to also critically engage with the philosophy and methodologies which inform how current research in Physics is undertaken.

The Centre has continued to go from strength to strength with its online events, which now regularly convene up to 1000 attendees from across the world. Online events have included a lecture on ‘Brilliant Blunders – Mistakes by Great Physicists That Changed Our Understanding of the Universe’ by Dr Mario Livio and a discussion panel on ‘Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Across a Century’ which featured the pioneers in this field from around the globe. The Centre held its first in-person event since the pandemic in Trinity term 2022, a oneday conference on ‘The Nature of Light’. The conference dinner was held amongst the dinosaurs in the University Museum of Natural History! Details of these events with videos of all the talks plus forthcoming events for 20222023 can be seen at www.stx.ox.ac.uk/ the-happ-centre During the past academic year, Emeritus Fellow Alistair Borthwick worked part-time at the University of Plymouth, collaborating with fellow Aularians Deborah Greaves (1992, Engineering Science) and Alison Raby (2002, DPhil Engineering Science). Alistair chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy Ireland (MaREI) and acted as an External Assessor of Civil Engineering Excellence for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He recently became a Member of the External Advisory Board to the President of University College Cork, Ireland. He gave invited lectures on extreme coastal wave events and on landslide-induced barrier lakes at St Andrews and Bath Universities.

Alistair gave a keynote presentation on the sustainability of global golden inland waterways at a Congress on Rivers and Wetlands held in Colombia, a country with several rivers troubled by invasive hippos that originally escaped from Pablo Escobar’s abandoned ranch in 1993.

Alistair’s co-authored paper titled ‘Global trends in water and sediment variations of large rivers’ won the Science Bulletin 2021 Best Paper Award. In late January, Alistair almost succumbed to bacterial meningitis, shrinking from hippo to human proportions while in hospital. He is now making a very good recovery.

One of our Honorary Fellows, Professor Keith Bowen has been awarded the degree of PhD from the Royal College of Music for his thesis The Bass Clarinet in Bassoon Form: its History, Repertoire and Acoustics. Keith has been working on this project, involving detailed studies of historical instruments in many European museums, and computer modelling of their acoustical resonances, for about ten years. He has also continued with his scientific activities and is now Chief Scientist of Adaptix Ltd., an innovative young company on the Oxford University Science Park at Begbroke. Adaptix is producing advanced, portable X-ray tomosynthesis systems for human and veterinary diagnostics, and non-destructive evaluation equipment for aircraft and other components.

An update from Professor Adrian Briggs, now Emeritus Fellow, but still busy: “Retirement is a funny thing: there are times when it feels as though one has retired from one’s salary but not from the work. By way of confirmation that I had done the right thing, I volunteered to help out with a set of land law tutorials in Michaelmas term. However, being tutored by a former person with no room in College, and with the malevolent, shape-shifting virus as, er, virulent as ever, meant that the students had to endure classes in the bum-numbing discomfort of the Hearne Room: scarved, mittened and masked, with the windows and door wide open to the purifying November cold. Brave faces were, no doubt, put on, but even the dense warp and weft of the Land Registration Act 2002 fell short of serving as a comfort blanket. Never again. On the writing front, the grim tearing out and patching up of Private International Law in English Court ground painfully on throughout the year. One should probably be grateful to have something to serve as a distraction while those occupying government office go about making our lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short: maybe that’s what a Brexit opportunity looks like. I really must tell a Minister.”

The first chapter of A Conflict Of Laws Companion: Essays in Honour of Adrian Briggs which describes Adrian’s contributions to the study of Law in Oxford as well as the authors’ recollections of time spent with him can be read in full on the Oxford University Press Website: bit.ly/3UvuLNM

St Edmund Fellow Philip Broadley continues as Senior Independent Director on the boards of Legal & General and AstraZeneca. He is proud of the success of the partnership between Oxford University and AstraZeneca that has seen over three billion doses of the Vaxzevria vaccine supplied in the global response to the Covid pandemic. The vaccine is estimated to have saved at least six million lives during 2021 alone.

The Global Public Seminars in Comparative and International Education, convened by Maia Chankseliani, Fellow by Special Election in Comparative and International Education, are now popular among students, academics, practitioners of education from different parts of the world, including Teddy Hall alumni. This year Maia has obtained research funding from the US State Department

to form a research team to examine the links between student mobility and their home countries’ development. The project covers all six regions of the world: SubSaharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Middle East and Northern Africa, South and Central Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. The study offers macro-level modelling of the links between student flows and national development indicators since the 1960s. At the same time, the study provides a nuanced analysis of how international higher education has impacted on the formation of leaders around the world and how leaders explain the connections between their educational experiences and their societal contributions. Thus, this project aims to advance the empirical and conceptual understanding of the potential of international higher education for transforming societies. Maia’s new book What Happened to the Soviet University? is another space where she engages with the concept of transformation of societies. The book investigates how a major geopolitical change of the twentieth century — the dissolution of the Soviet Union — triggered and inspired the transformation of the Soviet university. Watch the Global Public Seminars in Comparative and International Education: www.education.ox.ac.uk/events/globalpublic-seminars-in-comparative-andinternational-education

Emeritus Fellow Gordon L Clark has published a number of papers over the past academic year including ‘Agency, sentiment, and risk and uncertainty: fears of job loss in eight European countries’ (ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography vol. 66, no. 1, 2022, pp.3-17) . This paper draws upon a research programme on precautionary behaviour with Zurich Insurance which used advanced statistical methods and bespoke surveys across eighteen countries designed to understand responses to risk and uncertainty notwithstanding differences in underlying employment conditions across the world. Professor Clark has also given a number of major presentations, including a keynote address to the Global Economic Geography Conference in Dublin (June 2022). There, his presentation was devoted to the role of finance in giving effect to global economic and political objectives. His advisory work continues, including chairing the IP Group’s ethics committee along with commitments to significant US FinTech start-ups. He is also a Universityappointed trustee on the Oxford Staff Pension Scheme.

This year saw revivals of two of Honorary Fellow John Cox’s most celebrated opera productions. John’s 1975 production of The Rake’s Progress, with stage designs by David Hockney, was revived for the Glyndebourne Tour in the autumn of 2021 and Mozart’s Così fan tutte ran at Garsington Opera in June and July 2022.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, Honorary Fellow, had a busy year. Poem, Story and Scape, an exhibition from his literary archive in the Brotherton Collection with support materials and illustrations, was displayed in the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at Leeds

University during spring and summer 2022.

His two publications during the past year have been Arthur, the Always King (US and foreign editions will follow next year) and a poetry chapbook of brief monologues about warfare, leadership and love, voiced by the young Harald Hardrada, Harald in Byzantium. They were both illustrated by the renowned political cartoonist and children’s book illustrator, Chris Riddell.

Kevin was commissioned to write a poem (An Alms-Basket) for the 75th anniversary of the Almshouse Association, and his and Cecilia McDowall’s cantata, The Girl from Aleppo, has been performed in Europe and the USA, while in their first post-pandemic concert, Vox Anima London brought together youth choirs from London and Texas in a spectacular performance at the Cadogan Hall. Kevin also served as Guest Director for the Yorkshire Festival of Story, and helped to assemble a full and vibrant online programme for adults and children.

Leslie Ann Goldberg, Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Computer Science, finished her first academic year as the University’s Head of Computer Science: “This year we hired faculty jointly with Exeter, Green Templeton, Kellogg, St Anne’s, and Trinity. We are going to be hiring many Tutorial Fellows in the coming years, and I hope that soon we will be taking undergraduates in Computer Science at Teddy Hall. Meanwhile, I have just returned from the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming in Paris and I am looking forward to spending the summer focusing more on research (and having a holiday!).”

Writing continued apace for the Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano, Career Development and Research Fellow in Early Medieval History and College Chaplain. He has finished half of a new book on Bede’s Commentary on the Gospel of Luke and has begun submitting book proposals to various presses. Amid other projects, Zack has been invited to publish a popular-level book on the Church and slavery. He gave papers this academic year at conferences in London, Oxford, and Leeds, and was delighted to learn that his book on The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon, published last summer, has been shortlisted for the book prize of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Zack was named one of the University’s ‘Select Preachers’ for celebration of the Latin Holy Communion required termly by statute. He also became a convenor of the Student Ministry Forum, an interfaith group of chaplaincies. More broadly, Zack joined Oxford’s diocesan synod over the past year and the advisory board for Convivium, an effort at connecting local communities with heritage and sustainability. He has been a regular guest preacher in various churches, particularly outside term time. For St Giles and St Margaret’s, he delivered ten sermons over the course of Holy Week and Easter with the theme ‘“Surely, he has borne our griefs” — Christ and the pattern of salvation.’ Details on Chapel life may be found in the Chaplain’s Report on pp. 40-41.

Professor Keith Gull, Honorary Fellow, continued his research with ex-members of his laboratory to understand antigenic variation in the African trypanosome with the discovery of the master regulatory protein controlling the expression of the single active antigen gene. This was published in Nature Microbiology. Keith continued as a trustee of the Leverhulme Trust and also visited Ghana to teach and chair the Advisory Board of the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens in Accra. Keith visited Prague as a member of the International Advisory Panel of Charles University in addition to acting as a member of the small group advising the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin on promotion of Senior Faculty. He intensified his research into piscatorial opportunities around 660 North.

In July, the Oxford Chinese Economy Programme (OXCEP) – organised by St Edmund Fellow Frank Hwang – successfully concluded its fifth annual two-week Academic Medicine Course, for a group of 26 senior medical academics, clinicians, and researchers from Taiwan. It will continue to train Taiwanese medics in 2023 and 2024. The Course was offered to senior medics from mainland China during the period of 2016-2019 and will resume such training in 2023 for five consecutive years. Japanese and Korean medics are expected to join the Course in 2024 and 2025 respectively. The intensive two-week summer course is designed for busy senior medics to update their muchneeded knowledge on the latest general advances and breakthroughs in medicine and related biomedical sciences.

The Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event was an interval of regional marine deoxygenation caused by a high-temperature climatic episode that occurred during the Early Jurassic Period (c. 183 million years ago). This palaeoceanographic phenomenon was associated with numerous collateral effects including enhanced continental weathering, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, a so-called carbonate crisis, lacustrine anoxia–dysoxia, and a second-order mass extinction. First recognized and documented in the 1980s by Professor Hugh Jenkyns, Emeritus Fellow, on the basis of the coeval worldwide distribution of organic-rich sediments (black shales), a collection of papers on the re-christened ‘Jenkyns Event’ has

recently (2021) been published by the Geological Society of London as a Special Publication. This event is an object lesson on what happens to planet Earth in terms of environmental deterioration when subjected to extreme global warming More about the volume Carbon Cycle and Ecosystem Response to the Jenkyns Event in the Early Toarcian (Jurassic): www.geolsoc.org.uk/ SP514

100 Days, a collection of essays from the pandemic written by Honorary Fellow Gabriel Josipovici, was published by Carcanet at the end of 2021.

Emeritus Fellow Professor John Knight lives quietly in Witney, tending his garden, painting in oils, and pursuing his research hobby – some of it on the economics of happiness and some on the economy of China. Last year he enjoyed an email correspondence with several former pupils, and would be equally welcoming this year. Contact John Knight: john.knight@seh. ox.ac.uk From the unstoppable Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies and Professorial Fellow: “Events at St Edmund Hall for me marked a staged return to teaching and researching in-person. Singing together started in Michaelmas, Hilary brought international researchers for a workshop with the world-premiere of a setting of the ninth-century Murbach Hymns by James Whitbourn, sung in Latin and Old High German in the Crypt (youtu.be/ p4zImJl8ppY ). And finally, Trinity was marked by the biggest bonanza of the medieval calendar: The Medieval Mystery Cycle, with 89 actors and a dog performing eleven plays in five languages, attended by some 350 spectators live and the same number following the livestream. It was a truly all-encompassing experience, starting at noon in front of the Chapel and ending five hours later behind St Peter-inthe-East. In-between: multiple versions of Lazarus raising from the churchyard and John the Baptist beheaded live on stage, punctuated by trumpet calls and laughter. Mark the date for the next iteration on Saturday, 22 April 2023! More about the Mystery Cycle on the Hall Website: www.seh.ox.ac.uk/mysterycycle and in the Year Gone by on p.75.

April also saw the book launch of the first volume of letters from the convent of Lüne at the Abbey of Lüne itself, presenting the insights of the last six years of research

in the Nuns’ Network project. It was gratifying doing it in the knowledge that our research group received funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation to continue the work for another three years, so I hope to be back with updates on the progress of the next volume in 2023!”

This year Dr Alexandra Lloyd, Fellow by Special Election in German, has continued her research on the anti-Nazi resistance group ‘The White Rose’ (die Weiße Rose).

In February 2022 her book Defying Hitler – The White Rose Pamphlets appeared with Bodleian Library Publishing. She has given talks at the Oxford Literary Festival and the Chalke Valley History Festival and appeared on History Hit’s Warfare podcast. The White Rose Project has continued its work under Alex’s direction, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the White Rose circle’s first resistance pamphlets, written and circulated in June 1942.

This year’s highlights include a display and publication of undergraduates’ creative responses to the resistance pamphlets, and an interdisciplinary graduate conference on the theme of ‘Rethinking Resistance’.

At the beginning of the year, Alex became the new convenor of the TORCH Comics Network, hosting a series of talks by international comics scholars, and practical workshops on ‘Thinking with Comics’.

As always, Alex is grateful to the many students she has taught (and from whom she has learnt in return) for their hard work, insightful questions, and tireless enthusiasm for German literature, film, and translation.

Paul Matthews, Professor of Neurology and Fellow by Special Election, continues as Head of the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London. He was delighted to see that his department scored overall highest in the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 exercise – a significant step up from the earlier 2014 result! He remains busy with research concerning early glial mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease and as Director of one of the seven Centres in the national UK Dementia Research Institute. He also has enjoyed working on secondment with the UKRI Medical Research Council as Chair of the Neurosciences and Mental Health Board working always to increase funding opportunities for researchers and trainees. For some years, his work has had an international element; Paul is a Visiting Professor in the LKC Medical School of Nanyang Technological University, at which a number of Hall students have been able to pursue summer research placements over the years. This summer he is hosting one of the Biomedical Science students in his lab – and looks forward to more in the future!

Honorary Fellow Michael Nazir-Ali was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church on 29 September

2021, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood for the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street on 30 October 2021 by His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster.

In April 2022 Pope Francis conferred on Dr Nazir-Ali the title of Prelate of Honour to His Holiness and he is now entitled to be addressed as ‘Monsignor.’ On his appointment, Monsignor Nazir-Ali said: “It is very generous of the Holy Father to confer this honour on me which I hardly deserve. Please pray that I will be worthy of it”.

Dimitrios Tsomocos, Professor of Financial Economics and Fellow by Special Election has given presentations at several conferences this year, including the Delphi Economic Forum on ‘New Realities’, the European Economic Association-Econometric Society European Meeting in Milan and the Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

He has also spoken at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and at events in Warsaw, Prague, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Warsaw.

Dimitrios has published three articles this year: ‘Default and Determinacy under Quantitative Easing’ with N. Romanidis in the journal Economic Theory; ‘An Assessment of the European’s Bank Bailout Policies since the Global Financial Crisis and the Proposal for Reforms: a Comparison with the US Experience’ with A. Hryckiewicz and Natalia Kryg in Future Europe; and ‘A Computable General Equilibrium Model as a Banking Sector Regulatory Tool in South Africa’ in the South African Journal of Economics with C.Beyers, A. De Freitas, K. A. EsselMensah and R. Seymore.

Dr Linda Yueh, Fellow by Special Election in Economics, was honoured to be invited to deliver a keynote address at the United Nations on 5 July 2022. Her speech, ‘Building back better and advancing the SDGs’, was delivered at the 2022 Session of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development at their headquarters in New York City, United States. The HLPF is the apex UN platform reviewing progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since those were adopted by all nations in 2015.

Robert Whittaker, Tutor in Geography and VicePrincipal, reports that he has appreciated being able to resume in person teaching this year and to see College life return to full swing. He took part in the Biodiversity, Conservation and Management MSc field course to Tenerife in March, which ran for the first time in three years, and has recently returned from participation in an island biogeography and macroecology postgraduate summer school held in Terceira Island, Azores.

Robert’s plans for the summer focus on completing the revision of his book on island biogeography, which has been ongoing since well before the onset of the pandemic. He was recently awarded the accolade of Distinguished Fellow of the International Biogeography Society, of which he is a founder member and past President.

Dr Rhys Llewellyn Thomas was elected an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall in October 2021.

He teaches Microeconomics related subjects to undergraduate students at the Hall.

Rhys graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Southampton in 2016. Subsequently, he received an ESRC DTC 1+3 Research Studentship where he studied for an MSc followed by a PhD, in Economics, also at the University of Southampton. Rhys’s research interest is in Health Economics. In particular, he uses econometric techniques to analyse healthrelated questions. More specifically, he is interested in applying econometric methods to answer public policy, inequality, and behavioural questions in health.

In October 2021 Filippo de Vivo joined the Hall as Professor of Early Modern History and Tutorial Fellow in History. Filippo studied at the University of Milan, took his BA and PhD in Cambridge, and a Master’s degree at École des hautes études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before moving to Oxford he taught for eighteen years at Birkbeck, University of London.

Filippo is an historian of Renaissance and early modern Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean. He has written on power and communication in Venice (academic. oup.com/book/6202), ranging from rhetoric and speeches in government councils to pamphlets, rumours and graffiti scribbled on walls. He has also written on the comparative history of archives across late-medieval and early modern Italy (bit.ly/3ff2ECr) – he studies archives not just as repositories of information but as tools of governance and information management. In Italy and across Europe in this period, states tried to cope with the shared problem of information overload, and so reformed archives and devised new techniques for retrieval and organisation. Filippo also studies the cultural and social history of urban spaces and practices, from pharmacies to squares and the history of walking (www.journals. uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/685830). He has just published an article in Past and Present, co-written with Maartje van Gelder (Amsterdam), on popular protest and archival suppression in sixteenthcentury Venice (see his recent post on the Hall website: www.seh.ox.ac.uk/blog/ papering-over-protest-in-sixteenthcentury-venice). He is currently working hard to complete an edition of Thomas Hobbes’ translation of a large collection of newsletters written in Venice and spanning the first phase of the Thirty Years’ War for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Hobbes.

Also in October, Professor Solène Rowan was elected Tutorial Fellow in Law at St Edmund Hall.

Solène is a Professor of Law specialising in contract, tort, commercial and comparative law. She is the author of the award-winning monograph, Remedies

for Breach of Contract: a Comparative Analysis of the Protection of Performance (OUP, 2012), which won the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (First Prize) and the Inner Temple New Author’s Book Prize for Outstanding Authorship (Runner-Up), and is based on a PhD thesis that was awarded the Yorke Prize (for theses of distinction) by the University of Cambridge. She read Law as an undergraduate at King’s College London and Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and undertook LLM and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Solène held a Futures Scheme Funding Award (for world-leading high-performing mid-career researchers to enhance their research) at The Australian National University (ANU) from 2019-2021. She was also an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2012-2018) and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Law at Queens’ College, Cambridge (2008-2012). She has held visiting lectureships at the Universities of Oxford, Paris II (PanthéonAssas) and Osaka Gakuin, and was a Jean Monnet Fellow at Keio University, Tokyo. Solène is a non-practising solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, having trained at Herbert Smith in London and Shanghai. Her work has recently been cited by the Scottish Law Commission, the Court of Appeal of Singapore, and the Court of Appeal of Ireland.

Dr Orlando Lazar was elected Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall in October. Orlando is a political theorist researching domination and the workplace, with a particular interest in new and emerging forms of work. His DPhil was in Political Theory at Oxford, and his BA and MPhil were in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. At St Edmund Hall, Orlando teaches the Finals papers Theory of Politics, Marx & Marxism, and Feminist Theory, as well as the theory components of the Prelims paper Introduction to Theory & Practice of Politics. His research focuses on domination, republicanism, and work, and his doctoral thesis concerned contemporary republican approaches to the workplace. His ongoing research takes this project forward, looking at structural accounts of domination, and at distinctively modern forms of precarious work. Most recent republican writing on work (including his own doctoral work) tends to imagine a traditional employment contract – a set number of hours worked, overseen by a manager, in return for a regular wage. Orlando proposes to reorient this approach towards an analysis of emerging forms of work – platform and gig economy work, automation, algorithmic management and surveillance, and remote and flexible working. These new labour practices risk handing significant and unfamiliar forms of power to employers, and challenge many of the traditional ways that republicans have approached the workplace. From a normative analysis of distinctively modern forms of employment, and the new forms of domination they can involve, he is also interested in a practical set of questions: how should we re-organise work and the workplace to best promote freedom and non-domination?

Dr Claire Nichols joined the Department of Earth Sciences as the Associate Professor of the Geology of Planetary Processes in July 2020. She subsequently joined Teddy Hall as a Tutorial Fellow in Earth Sciences in October 2021.

Before moving to Oxford, Claire was a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied both Earth and the Moon’s ancient magnetic fields. Highlights included collaboration with Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt to uncover the shape of the ancient lunar magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago, and two field seasons to a remote part of southwest Greenland to study Earth’s magnetic field strength at a similar time period. Claire completed all her studies at ‘the other place’, with an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences from Newnham College, Cambridge (2010-2014) and a PhD from Jesus College, Cambridge (2014-2017). Her PhD on ‘Tiny Space Magnets’ with Professor Richard Harrison investigated the magnetic properties of iron and stony-iron meteorites in order to understand the internal dynamics of asteroids and other small planetary bodies. Claire’s research has since become a little more down to Earth, with a focus on banded iron formations, a type of ancient iron-rich marine sedimentary deposit which has the potential to record variations in the strength and direction of Earth’s magnetic field between 1.5 and 4 billion years ago. Claire hopes to use these magnetic field records to understand how Earth’s magnetic field has influenced the composition and preservation of Earth’s atmosphere over time. This will help us to understand whether magnetic fields are an essential criterion when considering which planets may be habitable, both in our own solar system and elsewhere in the Universe.

Dr Callum Munday became a Fellow by Special Election in Geography at St Edmund Hall in October 2021.

Callum is a climate scientist specialising in African climate and climate change. He is currently working on a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)- funded project in southern Africa and is a Visiting Scientist at the UK Met Office.

He completed his DPhil (2014-2019) at St Edmund Hall and was a college lecturer at Keble and Teddy Hall from 2017-2021, teaching broadly across the Physical Geography course. Alongside college teaching, he has lectured on African climate in the School of Geography. Callum is interested in the mechanisms leading to droughts and floods in Africa, and their alteration under climate change. His research combines modelling with observational field campaigns for data sparse regions in Africa. The aim underlying much of his research is to improve our confidence in future projections of climate change in Africa – the continent likely to endure the some of the worst effects of rapidly rising global temperatures.

James Howarth became Librarian at St Edmund Hall in May 2018 and was elected Fellow by Special Election in November 2021.

James came to St Edmund Hall from Balliol College where he was Assistant

Librarian from December 2015. Previously he has worked at the International Institute of Strategic Studies and at Lambeth Palace Library in London, as well as the Taylorian Library in Oxford. He holds MAs in Library and Information Studies from UCL and Medieval Studies from the University of York, and as an undergraduate he read English at Exeter College, Oxford. As Librarian, James strives to make the Library the intellectual hub of Hall life and a welcoming place to study. He is responsible for maintaining and developing the Library’s collections and particularly welcomes book requests (on almost any topic) from students. He is also responsible for the Hall’s historic and special collections that live in the seventeenth-century Old Library and is keen to promote their use in research, study and outreach.

Also in November, Dr Frank Hwang was elected a St Edmund Fellow.

Frank is the Chairman of the Oxford Chinese Economy Programme (OXCEP) at St Edmund Hall. St Edmund Hall has been working in partnership with OXCEP since May 2013, with the aim of promoting the study of the Chinese economy at the College. Dr Hwang believes in academic collaboration between the Global East and West, as well as lifelong learning experience for all. After his early days as a medic and on subsequent diplomatic tours of duty in Hong Kong and at UNESCO in Paris, he helped spearhead several China development projects at the Hall, including the training of senior academics, clinicians, researchers and professionals in various fields of study from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Chinese communities elsewhere around the world.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr Hwang embarked on a mission to help secure vaccine equity for people in AsiaPacific countries. He is committed to building a better world post pandemic, through better education, innovation, transformation and collaboration across the globe.

Andrew Vivian, Fellow by Special Election, is the new Director of Development at St Edmund Hall and responsible for fundraising and alumni relations.

Andrew joined the Hall in March 2022 and was previously the Associate Director of Development for Student Support at the University of Oxford, raising funds for a range of University priorities. Andrew’s experience prior to this has been in educational programme management for a number of organisations, including the British Council and Education Development Trust, supporting young people in the UK and internationally to gain access into Higher Education and employment.

Katie Charles was a Visiting Fellow in English for the duration of Trinity term 2022.

Katie teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures in English at Washington College; her areas of special interest include the early novel, the long history of form, and media studies. Her book project, Inside Stories: Interpolated Tales and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, explores how

early novels develop fictions of orality as a tool for both representing and unsettling social differences. She is also interested in the ways that modernist writers read the eighteenth century and remediate it as creative content. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction;

After very nearly four years with the College, I am heading off to pastures new in preparation for my retirement next year. It has been a pleasure to act as Domestic Bursar for the Hall and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time getting to know the team, the Fellowship and the estate. The team, as ever, has worked extremely hard this year in providing an excellent service to the College.

Projects

49–56 High Street (Besse Building) was re-opened following refurbishment in October 2021. The students have been delighted with the much improved and more sustainable building. The new Ecosync heating system, improved insulation, double glazing and heat recovery from wastewater system are delivering a 28% saving in heating costs. We have submitted the full planning application for our new builds at Norham Gardens. This project will deliver an additional 72 student bedrooms, five of which will be fully accessible. The three new buildings will be Passivhauscertified and the work on 17 Norham Gardens original villa will be a low energy refurbishment. We will be working with the University Parks team to create a wildlife corridor between our residences and the

The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; and the Dickens Studies Annual; and is forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly. SCR obituaries can be in found in Section 10.

Parks and sharing our biodiversity scheme so that the space in the parks can be enhanced along our boundary. We have had a Decarbonisation Plan written for the College to help us reach our goal of net zero energy. We will be using this plan to inform all works carried out at College. The first material project to benefit from the plan is the Front Quad refurbishment which is still in its infancy. Along with improving insulation, and adding double glazing, we have submitted a pre-application for re-wiring the Front Quad.

The Forum Garden outside the Wolfson Hall underwent a major renovation in 2021 and is flourishing well. The new lighting scheme for the area is very sympathetic to the surroundings. We are awaiting pre-application advice for the building of approximately 30 student bedrooms at the Tamesis Guest House site on the Iffley Road.

Events

When most of us breathe a sigh of relief that term is finally over and the feeding and housing of our considerable student body is over, the conference, catering accommodation, housekeeping, IT and maintenance staff all gear up for conference season. This is the first season post-Covid and while it might not be quite as busy as usual, the challenge of running all the conferences on reduced staff is a testament to the dedication of our staff to the College. This activity brings in vital additional funding to maintain the College and the Hall is grateful for all the hard work that goes into this activity.

Our People

During the course of the year, a number of long serving staff have left us: • Cliff Dandridge (32 years) • Nada Milkovic (27 years) • Joan Kavanagh (18 years) • Filemon Da Costa Ribeiro (15 years) • Lynne Morley-Johnson (11 years) • John McGeever (11 years) • Sally Brooks (10 years) Shorter serving staff who have left include: • Elion Angelo • Luke Bradshaw • Sarah Bridge • David Cavalier • Casey Charlesworth • Timothy Delport • Stephen Fenemore • Clea Da Cruz Flausino • John Morrison • Kate Payne • Cleris Piovezzam • Sophie Quantrell • Andrew Ramos • Shannon Russell • Gareth Simpson • Anna Tyler The College is grateful for their contribution.

We welcome a number of new staff:

• Mohammad Ali • Jane Armstrong • Heather Barr • Stephen Breakspear • Emily Bruce • Nigel Buckle • Laura Butler • Diogo Campos • Emma Carter • Francisco Castro • Toby Cherrill • Daniele Cotton • Carol Drake • Tom Gallagher • Zaulino Guterres • Erica Hanlon • Simon Hogarth • Sitarani Rai Jabegu • Pierre Lucien • Eve McMullen • Steven Mills • Jose Hernandez Morales • Alena Nemeckova • Sunny Pagani

• Susana Berrocal Pereo • Fabio Simoes • Fiona Smith • Michele Stroudley • Aitor Vera Gonzalez • Andrew Vivian • Eleanor West • Bart Wieczorkiewicz • Laura Zampini We hope they will all find the College a happy, exciting and inclusive environment in which to work.

A special mention has to go to Dan Field this year. Dan joined the College as an apprentice chef ten years ago. On John McGeever’s retirement as Head Chef, Dan became Senior Sous Chef having worked as Chef de Partie after his apprenticeship. We recruited a new Executive Head Chef, but, sadly, it did not work out and Dan stepped into the breach and has been acting Executive Head Chef since Easter. This has been a huge amount of work for Dan, who has not let standards slip despite being short of three full chefs. At the time of writing, we had managed to appoint two Sous Chefs and one Senior Chef de Partie, all with starting dates over the summer and a new Executive Head Chef, Sam White, will join us at the end of October.

Congratulations go to Sue McCarthy on her promotion to Conference and Catering Manager, Melody Njoki who was promoted to College Registrar and Tom Sprent who was promoted to Campaign Operations Manager. Congratulations also to Dylan Rampton who has successfully completed his apprenticeship and has been promoted to Chef de Partie. A final set of congratulations to Joanna Bell on the birth of her son, Eric, and to Alex Grant on the birth of his daughter, Eliza.

I would like to thank all our staff for their hard work and dedication without whom the College would not be such a happy and supportive place to work for both staff and students.

Dr Charlotte Sweeney, Domestic Bursar

The finances of the Hall for the 20212022 financial year continue to be impacted by the Covid pandemic, but not to the same extent as in the previous financial year. The timing of the Magazine’s publication means that the 2021-2022 accounts are still three months away from being completed, however, I anticipate that they will show a small deficit on normal operations.

The new 2021-2022 academic year commenced with the return of the students to the Hall, including visiting students, with all Covid restrictions lifted. The conference season in summer 2021 was non-existent, but happily the conferences in summer 2022 finally returned and it was lovely to see delegates in the Hall and enjoying the facilities. Looking ahead, as the financial impact of the Covid pandemic starts to reduce, the College now must deal with the challenges that are arising from the cost-of-living crisis, which is putting pressure on wages, food costs and particularly energy prices. Cost control will be key over the coming months.

Each year the Hall makes an application to the University’s College Contributions Committee (CCC), which distributes income grants to the less wealthy colleges, financed by wealthier colleges. This year, we made another successful bid, being awarded £113,000: £15,000 to be matched by the College for the purchase and implementation of an RFID library book self-issue system, as the current system is well beyond its useful life, and £98,000 for assistance with a maintenance rewiring project. This award brings our total income from CCC over the past ten years to £2.4m. The Hall’s endowment funds increased to £74.9m at 31 July 2021, from £62.8m at 31 July 2020. The final valuation of the endowment funds at 31 July 2022 are not yet finalised, but this has been a difficult and volatile year and initial indications suggest a final valuation of around £72m after taking into account the transfer to income of £2.4m under the Hall’s agreed spend rule. The 2021-2022 accounts will be published towards the end of the calendar year, when a more detailed analysis will be shown. The Investment Sub-Committee has, again, been particularly active and I am grateful to the members of the Committee, especially the external members, for their support. Rathbone Greenbank continue to manage 40% of the Hall’s investment portfolio, with the balance being held within the Oxford Endowment Fund (OEF). The Hall’s investment policy can be found on the College website (www.seh. ox.ac.uk/policies-accounts-and-legaldocuments), with the key aim to manage and invest the entire portfolio in holdings that meet strict environmental, social and governance criteria. I am pleased to report that, notwithstanding the volatility in the financial markets, the loan facility remains above the initial £20m investment and the

surplus was used to support the Besse refurbishment. The refurbishment was completed in time for student arrivals in Michaelmas term 2021, with fabulous newly refurbished rooms, most of which are ensuite, that can also be used for conferences.

The College launched its £50m HALLmarks Campaign in Hilary term, which is focused on raising funds to meet the aims prioritised within the College’s ten-year strategy. This includes the aim to fully endow our Tutorial Fellowships, increase our endowment for student support and to raise funds for the new student accommodation at Norham Gardens, built to Passivhaus standards. Housing all our undergraduate students remains a priority, and the project at 17 Norham Gardens is now underway. Funding for this project will be from a combination of College Funds and donor support. Support from our alumni in the form of gifts and legacies are extremely important to the success of this project.

Finally, my thanks go to Stephanie Hanks, our College Accountant, who continues to improve the financial processes and procedures within the Finance Department and across the College. We have welcomed two new staff members during the year, Toby Cherrill and Diogo Campos, who have settled in very well.

Eleanor Burnett, Finance Bursar and Fellow

Unlocking the Library

September 2021 found the Librarians with hopeful hearts, restoring the Library to its pre-Covid state: tape was removed from desks – bringing the reading spaces back to our full complement of 93 seats, masks were made non-compulsory and (perhaps slightly to the dismay of housekeeping) we no longer asked students to clean their desks before and after use. And, despite a rather traumatic brief period of mask wearing in January, things have returned to normal; we are as busy as ever it was, with nearly 150 readers using the Library on an average day in term time. We have kept several of the new services adopted during the pandemic. These include click and collect (where students can request a book via the online catalogue and have it delivered to their

pigeon hole); postal deliveries of books; and keeping the Library open every day except Christmas Day, even when the rest of the Hall is closed.

We’ve also continued our ‘Blind Date with a Book’ scheme – readers (including Fellows and staff as well as students) can contact us and request either a fiction or a non-fiction book from the collection, along with a brief outline of their tastes, and we supply them with a book for recreational reading. This year we ran several themed offerings including Black History Month, Valentine’s Day/LGBTQ+ History Month and Christmas.

Activities in the Old Library

The lifting of Covid restrictions has also meant that we have been able to resume our programme of opening up the Old Library and its treasures to a wider audience. We marked this at the opening of the year by staging an exhibition of works relating to St Peter-in-the-East for the Oxford Open Doors event. This was a belated celebration of the 50th anniversary of the church’s conversion into the College Library. We welcomed more than 1400 visitors on a very busy Sunday. Further exhibitions and openings followed throughout the year. Notably, to mark the launch of the HALLmarks fundraising campaign an exhibition of Books and Silver donated by Aularians between the 1680s and 1710s was put on in the Old Dining Hall during the Campaign launch event in May. We’ve also led six school outreach sessions across the year, using the Old Library’s collections to bring a ‘hands-on’ experience to visiting schools on subjects including Shakespeare and the history of maps. As ever, we are hugely grateful to everyone who has donated their own works as well as other books to the Hall Libraries.

We received two very substantial donations this year. The first is the collection of John Hayes, partner of Honorary Fellow John Cox (1955, English). It comprises some 3000 books with particular strengths in art history and theory, medieval studies (history, literature, philosophy and theology), critical theory (especially Derrida) and philosophy. It also includes a very large number of exhibition catalogues and similar works. Our working collections in all of these subjects will be immensely strengthened by this generous bequest. Around 50 volumes will be added to the Old Library collection, including signed and annotated works by Angela Carter and a number of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury works of art history. The Librarians are currently assessing and documenting the collection, and we are grateful to John Cox for his continued engagement with the Librarian in this substantive, if wondrous, task.

Second, on his retirement as Tutorial Fellow in History in September 2021, Nicholas Davidson offered the Library and the History Faculty Library a donation of around 1000 volumes from his working collection. The Library has added 380 of these to the shelves, the History Faculty Library accepted 48, and 223 were taken by other Bodleian and College Libraries. Other donations to the Old Library were made by Dr Bill Cogar (1976, DPhil Modern History), who donated two seventeenth-century works on the Civil War, and by David Aukin (1961, English) who has donated a 1940-1959 run (incomplete) of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine – this will be the largest collection of the title in Oxford outside of the Bodleian.

We have received several items of Aularian interest, including, from Jeffrey Hackney (Emeritus Fellow), a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which formerly belonged to the Hall’s former Dean Graham Midgley when he was a schoolboy. Dr Midgely subsequently gave the book to the Hackney children. Jeffrey also gave us a copy of Poets in their Lives by Robert Emden (the ABE’s brother) which was given to him by the author. Richard Gretton (1973, Geography and quondam President of the JCR) has presented material related to the restoration of St Edmund’s Chapel in Dover as well as a copy of The British Isles, a photograph book including on page 199 a picture of the front quad – including the young Richard Gretton sitting on the well. The Library has also received welcome gifts to the working collection from Jim Denning (1958, Modern Languages), Elaine Evers (Principal’s EA), Ian Scargill (Emeritus Fellow), Robert Whitaker (Vice Principal), and David Cruz Walma (2019, DPhil Biomedical Sciences) amongst many others.

Library Staff

In October, Emma Carter joined as the new Assistant Librarian. She has extensive library experience having previously worked at the Garrick Club, the Flyfishers’ Club, the Bodleian and the British Library. Emma holds an MA in Library and Information Studies from UCL and was a Graduate Trainee at Trinity College, Cambridge. Across the year, she has made amazing contributions to the Library including bringing a superb eye and flair to our exhibitions, and the establishment of a much-needed conservation programme in the Old Library. Our Graduate Library Trainee this year was Heather Barr. She recently completed the MSt in Medieval English Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and worked as an invigilator in their College Library. She previously worked for a specialist education agency in London. Amongst many other projects, Heather has been very active in working on the ‘greening’ of our Library. We are delighted to say that she will be staying with us for the next two years while she completes an MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL. James Howarth, Librarian Karma Nabulsi, Library Fellow

Over the year the Library was the beneficiary of many gifts for the Aularian Collection, which are listed below:

AKANBI, Gold Maria (2021, MFA Fine Art) Poem 7 Gold Maria Akanbi, 2021

Cascade of 100 Sins Gold Maria Akanbi, 2022

ARMITAGE, Christopher Mead (Honorary Fellow) Unlocking my Word Hoard Grateful Stops Foundation, 2021

AUKIN, David (1961, English) Issues of Horizon Magazine 1940-1959

BRATBY, Richard (1991, History) Forward: 100 Years of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Elliot & Thompson, 2019

CHANKSELIANI, Maia (Fellow by Special Election in Comparative and International Education) What Happened to the Soviet University? OUP, 2022

CHARTERS, Steve (1979, History) Charters, Steve et al. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture Routledge, 2022

Charters, Steve, Gallo Jérôme (eds.) Économie et management du vin Pearson, 2014

Charters, Steve, Michaux, Valéry (eds.) Stratégies de territoires vitivinicoles: Clusters, governance et marque territorial EMS, 2014

Charters, Steve (ed.) The Business of Champagne Routledge, 2012 Charters, Steve, Thach, Liz (eds.) Best Practices in Global Wine Tourism: 15 Case Studies from Around the World Miranda Press, 1987

CLIPSON, Paul (1975, Human Sciences) Wake Up, We Humans! Reading the Writing on the Wall We Humans Press, 2021

COGAR, Bill (1976, DPhil Modern History) [Donor] Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Esq; Lieutenant General of the Horse, Commander in Chief of the forces in Ireland, one of the Council of State, and a Member of the Parliament which began on November 3, 1640 [Vevay] Switzerland, [i.e. London]: Printed at Vivay in the canton of Bern. [i.e. John Darby of Bartholomew Close, London] MDCXCVIII.

The Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges [London]: Printed [by Simon Dover and Thomas Creeke], anno Dom. 1660.

CROSSLEY-HOLLAND, Kevin (Honorary Fellow) Collaborations with Artists Walker Books, 2022

With Riddell, Chris (illustrator) Harald in Byzantium Arc Publications, 2022

Arthur the Always King Walker Books, 2021

DIEPPE, Tim (1989, Mathematics) Scriven, John, Dieppe, Tim Beyond the Odds: Providence in Britain’s Wars of the 20th Century Wilberforce Publications, 2021

GOMEZ, David (1987, History) Gomez, David et al. The Regulation of Healthcare Professionals: Law, Principle and Process (2nd edition) Sweet & Maxwell, 2019

Gomez, David, Glynn QC, Joanna The Regulation of Healthcare Professionals: Law, Principle and Process Sweet & Maxwell, 2012

Fitness to Practise: Health Care Regulatory Law, Principle and Process Sweet & Maxwell, 2005

GORDON, Keith (1988, Mathematics) Residence: The Definition in Practice (4th edition) Claritax, 2021

Discovery Assessments: How to Challenge Them (3rd edition) Claritax, 2021

GRETTON, Richard (1973, Geography) [Donor] St Edmund’s Chapel Dover: Reconsecration by his Grace the Archbishop 27th May 1968

Tanner, Terence Edmund Saint Edmund’s Chapel Dover and its Restoration Catholic Records Press, 1968

Commemoration of the 700th Anniversary of the Dedication of the Chapel of St. Edmund by St. Richard of Chichester… Monday 30th of March, 1953…

The British Isles Colour Library Books, 1987 HACKNEY, Jeffrey (Emeritus Fellow) [Donor] Palgrave, Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (Copy formerly belonging to Graham Midgely) OUP, 1930

Emden, Cecil S Poets in their letters (Given by the author) OUP, 1959

HAWKINS, John (1970, Physics) The Royal Family and Freemasonry: The Prestonian Lecture for 2022 Henry Ling, 2022

The Corporation Estate Norbitton M. Litt. Dissertation, 2020

Hawkins, John, Sleigh Godding J.W. Westminster and Keystone Lodge No. 10 1722-2021: The History of a London Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons Westminster and Keystone Lodge of Ancient Accepted and Free Masons No. 10. 2021

HIBBINS MBE, Joy (1981, Modern Languages) The Suicide Prevention Pocket Guidebook Welbeck Balance, 2021

HURN, Stan (1983, DPhil Economics) Hurn, Stan et al. Financial Econometric Modelling OUP, 2021

Hurn, Stan, Baum, Christopher F. Environmental Econometrics Using Stata Stata Press, 2021

KISSICK, Lucy (2016, Environmental Research (NERC, DTP) Plutoshine Gollancz, 2022

KNIGHT, John (Emeritus Fellow) Knight, John, Gunatilaka, Ramani ‘Income Inequality and Happiness: Which Inequalities Matter in China’

in China Economic Review Vol 72 Elsevier, 2022

Knight, John, Ma, Bianjing, Gunatilaka, Ramani ‘The Puzzle of Falling Happiness despite Rising Income in Rural China: Eleven Hypotheses’ in Economic Development and Cultural Change Vol 70/3 University of Chicago Press, 2022

Knight, John, Shi, Li, Haiyuan, Wan ‘Why has China’s Inequality of Household Wealth Risen Rapidly in the Twenty-First Century?’ in Review of Income and Wealth Vol 68/1 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, 2022

LLOYD, Alexandra Defying Hitler: The White Rose Pamphlets Bodleian Publishing, 2022

Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture Legenda, 2020

OGURA, Michiko (Former Research Fellow) Christian and Related Terms Used in Interlinear Glosses in the Old English Period Peter Lang, 2022

The publishers in memory of HOEY, Augustine (1935, History) Pinchin, Anthony, Jolly, Graeme Trembling on the Edge of Eternity: Father Augustine Hoey, a Biographical Memoir St Michael’s Press, 2015

PITT, James (1964, Psychology and Philosophy) Pitt, James, Webster, Ken Education Unbound: How to Create Educational Opportunity in Abundance TerraPress, 2021 POSTLES, Dave Fogg (1967, History) Some Medieval Taxation Returns: Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, 1327 and 1341-2 Dave Fogg Postles, 2020

RICHARDSON CB, Michael (1965, Classics & Theology) Henderson, Richard, Richardson, Michael Beside the Lotus Lake: A Tibetan Adventure in India Alba Publishing, 2021

Ridler, Colin, son of RIDLER, Vivian (Emeritus Fellow) [Donor] Ridler, Vivian Diary of a Master Printer Perpetua Press, 2022

SHAFRAN, Roz (1988, Experimental Psychology), SAUNDERS, Ursula (1988, English), Welham, Alice How to Cope When your Child Can’t: Comfort Help & Hope for Parents Robinson, 2022

TROTMAN, John (1975, English) Cuttings: Prose and Poems Moat Sole Publishing, 2022

TYTLER, Graeme (1954, Modern Languages) ‘The Presentation of Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights’ in Bronte Studies Vol 47/1 Routledge, 2022

‘Violence in Wuthering Heights’ in Bronte Studies Vol 46/3 Routledge, 2021

‘Comedy in Wuthering Heights’ in Bronte Studies Vol 46/1 Routledge, 2021

‘The Workings of Memory in Wuthering Heights’ in Bronte Studies Vol 37/1 Routledge, 2012

WARNER, Guy (1960, Mathematics) A Voyage Down the Years Mereo, 2020

WHITE, Stephen (1961, Jurisprudence) What Queen Victoria Saw: Roderick Maclean and the Trial of Lunatics Act, 1883 Barry Rose Law Publishers, 2021

The Churchyards of the Church in Wales: A Legal History The Welsh Legal History Society, 2018

White, Stephen, Jupp, Peter, Davies, Douglas, Grainger, Hilary, Raeburn, Gordon Cremation in Modern Scotland: History, Architecture and the Law Birlinn, 2017

WIJAYADASA, K.H.J (1971, Dip Economics) Insights into Buddhism in Practice P&P Associates, 2022

WINKLER, Emily (Fellow by Special Election) Winkler, Emily, Lewis, C.P. (eds.) Rewriting history in the central Middle Ages, 900-1300 Brepols, 2022 Young, John (1958, PPE) [Donor] Stanley, Henry M. In Darkest Africa (2 volumes) Sampson, Lowe, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1890

Prescott, Willam H. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella Swan Sonnenschein and Co, 1904

History of the Conquest of Mexico Swan Sonnenschein and Co, 1906

History of the Conquest of Mexico Swan Sonnenschein and Co, 1907

There were also many gifts of texts for the working collection from Fellows, alumni, student members and others. This year particular mention must be made of the donations received from: Elaine Evers (Principal’s EA), Jim Denning (1958, Modern Languages), Stephen Barlow (Lecturer in Statistics) and Kalli Dockerill (2019, History and Politics). Gifts were also received from: the Catmur family, Kristiana Dahl, Martin Ridal and Jake Arthur amongst many others. Thanks to everyone who has remembered the Library. We are grateful for the continued support we receive in this way.

Last year, we noted the difficulty of maintaining Chapel life in the middle of a pandemic, when we could hardly meet in person. We had different problems this year, like managing a full round of events while sickness and absences abounded. We had to cancel the planned night of Ghost Stories in December, due to the Omicron wave. Even I was absent at times, due to flu on one Sunday, Covid on two others, and Storm Eunice on the day we’d planned a special Evensong for Freshers’ parents. But, mostly, this year’s delights and challenges were different. Throughout the year, we had so many people attending Chapel services that seats were scarce or had to be added, or we quickly ran out of post-service refreshments. Chapel registers reveal that attendance hasn’t been this consistently high for nearly 40 years, when Graham Midgley was in post. This is true of Sunday’s Choral Evensong and twice-termly services of Compline in the Crypt, but especially so for the big services of the year: St Edmund Day, the Carol service, and Leavers’ Evensong. We have resorted to ticketing the big events, and hope to add an additional Carol service. The Choir’s excellence is no small part of this. A particularly remarkable occasion came on 27 February, three days after the invasion of Ukraine. We had originally planned an ‘ordinary’ Choral Evensong, with a guest speaker discussing the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The beginning of the service was delayed as more and more people came, and we kept adding chairs. Once things started, the Choir sang the Clucas responses, Stanford in G, and Arvo Pärt’s Littlemore Tractus. Our guest, Canon Prof Anderson Jeremiah, beautifully related the parable to the unfolding War in Ukraine. Intercessions were offered, and the service closed with ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ — there was a mixture of emotions, and what felt like true prayer. ‘Drop thy still dews of quietness / Till all our strivings cease’. Ordinary routines were maintained, like preparations for baptism or confirmation or marriage. We continued with the renewed pattern of daily prayer in Chapel, both with Evening Prayer at a set time and with the building open throughout the day. I feel it has lent a greater sense of space to Front Quad, as well as renewed use and appreciation of the Chapel for its stillness, welcome, and calm. I have been grateful to be joined daily in prayer by Sam Cherry, our Chapel Clerk, who has been a steadfast companion. Chapel collections this year raised several hundred pounds for the Oxford Winter Night Shelter and the Ukraine fund of the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Trinity term seemed packed with celebratory events, some of which may be detailed elsewhere. On May Morning, Prof Henrike Lähnemann and I climbed the tower of St Peter-in-the-East with students Edward Taylor and Fred Tyrell to form a brass quartet, accompanied

by Samuel Patterson and others on percussion. Aularians and friends turned out to listen and dance (and enjoy coffee and donuts after). We had a special service for Corpus Christi this term as well, beginning in the Crypt with early music sung by an incredible new consort in Oxford, Antiquum Documentum. We ended with a procession to the Chapel – silently to avoid disturbing exams – before finishing with Benediction hymns and prayers. On the practical side, we received the Quinquennial Report of our surveyor Mark Hammond, which revealed many needed repairs to the interior and exterior of the Chapel and Old Library. Specialist surveying must come first, including for the historic joinery and our beautiful stained glass. Some long-term planning is needed, too, for the proper maintenance of the roof. In the meantime, one initial investigation took place this summer: I was fairly sure the carpet on the east end of Chapel covered several memorials to past Principals (and at least one Principal’s wife). We confirmed that it does, and will make plans to remove the carpet and restore the stone. We have also removed an aging Communion table and covering, with the hope of commissioning a new altar, along with choir fronts. Watch this space.

We can close with the prospect of something more immediate. Due to the generosity of a donor, we have commissioned a work of art to add to the beauty of services in Chapel. It’s ‘wearable’ rather than fixed or hung. Our present Chapel vestments are old, and many are now unusable. With some input from the Chaplain, Watts & Co. are designing a new cope in ‘Stag’ cloth of gold damask, bearing a version of St Edmund’s coat of arms on the back hood, with choughs worked in silk shading of black, gold, and red around a cross of gold. Plans are for a proper unveiling and dedication on St Edmund Day (16 November), alongside an exhibition of Chapel vestments and treasures. It’ll be worth dropping in.

Revd Dr Zack Guiliano, Career Development and Research Fellow and Chaplain

Music in St Edmund Hall 2021-2022

Music is part of the energy that drives forward the life of this academic community, and it brings depth to those moments of significance which punctuate its natural rhythm. The choral programme run by the Director of Music is an important part of the educational offering available to students at the Hall. Tuition in music reading skills, formation of choral sound, and concepts of performance practice are all given within the curriculum, and weekly Sunday Evensong provides the principal performance opportunity for its members. Some 26 of the Hall’s students faithfully perform to a high standard in Chapel each Sunday and have covered repertoire by many notable composers in the European and Western traditions. The Choir comprises students from a wide range of disciplines, and the award holders among them are fortunate to receive instruction from our two singing tutors – Jeremy Kenyon and Julie Cooper, a current member of The Sixteen – who offer expert, healthy vocal development to our undergraduates. In February 2022 the St Edmund Hall Choir joined the Choir of Magdalen College in our neighbours’ beautiful Chapel for a service in which the two choirs together sang music by Stanford and Brahms. The psalm chant that evening was by John Stainer – an undergraduate at St Edmund Hall and organist of Magdalen College.

In September 2022 the Choir finally resumed their summer residency in Pontigny. This had been rendered impossible during the pandemic, although in September 2021 they had instead enjoyed the rich acoustic and French associations of nearby Douai Abbey during a short residency there. Pontigny, where St Edmund died in 1240, and where his relics remain in a golden casket above the High Altar, is a place of deep association for the College and the chance to study and

reside there for a week – and marvel in one of the world’s finest acoustics – is an experience to be cherished. This academic year has seen the establishment of the Thursday dinner recital series, a platform for some of the outstanding talent within the student body (and occasionally SCR too) to be showcased to a student audience of around 150 people. These short ‘micro-concerts’ have proved a popular addition to college life. Performances have included music by Clara Schumann, played by violinist Gabriele Brasaite and music by the vocalist and composer Flora Hartz. Weihang Deng and I-Ting Chou played a beautiful work by Ren Gwang for violin and piano and Benjamin Thornley performed Roland Dyens’ arrangement of Round Midnight. Ekaterina Rahr-Bohr has performed this year as violinist, violist and singer whilst Elinor Buys and Earth Sciences Fellow Claire Nichols formed a flute duet which combined the talents of the Middle and Senior Common Rooms.

There have also been special dinnertime music events to mark Chinese New Year, Burns Night and the visit to the Hall of the Slovakian Ambassador, who was surprised and touched to hear the College Choir singing grace in his own language as he took his place at dinner. There was a short reflective event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day to which the Choir and Organ Scholars contributed. The two Organ Scholars, Michelle Ng and Alyssa Chan, have felt the benefit of new glazing in the organ room, which, together with efficient heating, have kept in line with the College’s sustainability strategy and may be expected to lengthen the life of our two-manual instrument by Wood of Huddersfield. Improvements to the space also included some newly made shelving for the music library, beautifully and playfully constructed by the college carpenter at the time, Elion Angjelo, with its coronet of organ pipes. The Organ Scholars are instructed by Benjamin Sheen, Sub-Organist of Christ Church Cathedral and make a significant contribution to the musical life of the College. The Music Society has organised a number of opera and ballet nights, taking advantage of the big screen available in the Doctorow Hall. The Music Room is very well used and provides a refuge for students and their friends who wish to make music together in any genre. It offers a place of informality which many students value as they seek to develop musical skills at a pace that fits with their academic work.

The St Edmund Consort, the SCR-based choir, has sung on a number of occasions throughout the year, often exploring repertoire derived from the academic interests of its members, especially those of Professor Henrike Lähnemann. The Hall has engaged the services of a number of professionals who bring good order and regular maintenance to the Hall’s musical instruments and equipment, from which the students benefit and for which we are all grateful. Dr James Whitbourn, Fellow by Special Election and Director of Music

It has been an exceptionally busy year in the Admissions Office, where we have seen a welcome return to in-person outreach. In total, 54 schools have visited the College this academic year. Combined with visits out to schools across the College’s link regions, we have worked with over 3500 students across 68 schools. This is the largest number of students that we have ever engaged with – a testament to our Access & Outreach Coordinator Eve McMullen’s hard work. We have continued the rollout of the Oxford NextGen programme in collaboration with Lincoln and Magdalen Colleges as part of the Oxford for East Midlands consortium. This sustainedcontact programme works with disadvantaged students across eight inner-city schools in the region. Early insights into the programme’s impact have been very positive, with feedback showing a marked increase in understanding of higher education amongst the programme participants. competitive an application as possible to a university like Oxford in the future. The rural stream aims to address the fact that, especially within the further reaches of our link regions, students have limited access to (and therefore awareness of) universities. By working with students both in-school and on a visit to Oxford, we hope to portray higher education as a viable next step for those who may have not considered it despite having the academic potential. Participants will not be arbitrarily selected from the brightest students in a school. Contextual data will be employed alongside measures of academic achievement to ensure that we work with the students who are most likely to benefit from the programme’s aspiration raising, guidance and support.

Eve and I have used the successes of the NextGen programme to devise an analogous programme for the Hall, Unlock Oxford, which will be launched later this year in target schools across our link regions. Split into two tailored streams, Unlock Oxford will work with students facing barriers to entering higher education within both rural and urban areas across our link regions. The urban stream revolves around two residential visits to St Edmund Hall: first in Year 10 and again in Year 12. Participants on the programme will gain first-hand experience of life at a top university, learn how to make informed A-level choices, and receive guidance on making as The third annual Teddy Rocks Maths essay competition, run by our Early Career Teaching and Outreach Fellow, Dr Tom Crawford, once again saw over 100 applications from students across the country and the world. Alongside this, Eve has devised and launched an additional competition to encourage super-curricular exploration amongst prospective

applicants. The Big Think Competition asked students to answer one of a range of big questions devised by tutors at the Hall. Answers were submitted in the form of a three-minute video on questions such as ‘Is translating creating?’ and ‘What can Earth’s past tell us about the future’. The entries proved hugely entertaining, with mock trials, time travel, giant mind maps and intricate whiteboard drawings being just some of the innovative approaches taken by entrants. Winning entrants will attend a Prize Winners’ Day at the College later this summer where they will be able to discuss their entry with tutors and other commended entrants.

In the 2021 admissions exercise, we saw the number of applications made directly to the College increase once again, despite a reduction on number of applications to the University overall. Furthermore, the proportion of our direct applications made by state-educated students saw a significant increase. 69% of UK offers made were to state-educated students, only one percentage point away from the Oxford University average. Conducting interviews remotely has continued to be successful, helping to alleviate barriers associated with travelling to Oxford for in-person interviews, and allowing interviews to take place in the arguably less intimidating circumstances of a student’s school or home, rather than a tutor’s office!

I look forward to the 2022-2023 academic year with much anticipation, as we put the Unlock Oxford programme into action. With a view to working with up to 1800 targeted students in schools and colleges across the region, I am confident that both the reach and the impact of our outreach work will be hugely increased going forwards. Luke Maw, Student Recruitment and Progression Manager

Raghul (Raggy) is a third year DPhil student in Engineering Science, working in the Hypersonics Group. This is his second year on the MCR Committee, after working as Welfare Officer during an academic year dominated by the pandemic. If the key theme of the past academic year and a half was social distancing, the aim of this year was socially reconnecting. Considering that some of the most senior members of the MCR were Freshers during the arrival of the pandemic, this felt like a considerable challenge at the start of the year.

Freshers’ Week

The incoming MCR Freshers made it no secret that they were keen to get out and about once more. Our annual Welcome BBQ at Norham Gardens was well attended by both new and old faces. The week reignited the MCR’s Oxford-wide reputation as a welcoming and socially vibrant collective. Many thanks to Philippa Warman and Ben White for helping out throughout the week.

We started out this year with a small MCR Committee and ran a fresh set of elections near the start of Michaelmas term; the incoming Freshers were so keen to get involved this year that they dominated the election nominations. The enthusiasm that the (all-Fresher) Steward, Welfare Officers and ancillary positions gave to their roles can only be described as impressive: learning on the job was the name of the game over Michaelmas and Hilary terms. The MCR can consider itself lucky that they will be continuing their roles for next year as well, and I’ve sincerely loved working with every one of them.

Looking Forward to Past Traditions

The MCR Committee worked incredibly hard to learn about all the pre-pandemic events and traditions. A series of successful exchange formals (including a trip to our Cambridge sister-college) throughout the year proved that the best formal at Oxford is still Teddy Hall. End of term dinners and inter-college bops were run by Antonin Charret, Giovanni Rolandino, Jasper Singh and Zubin Deyal. We bade farewell to Chef John McGeever at the MCR Christmas Dinner and thanked him for Teddy Hall’s reputation as having the best food in Oxford.

Welfare Officers Nancy Liang and Siddhant Dhingra injected their own takes on MCR welfare traditions. High teas, movie nights at Norham Gardens, and the immediately popular inter-college salsa classes are here to stay for next year as well.

Sally Blumenthal, as Treasurer, reconsolidated the MCR finances with the bank to ensure MCR ventures and funds could be run more sustainably over the long term. The Committee also saw their chance to make change for the better, writing two extensive papers to help improve College welfare provisions for mental health and harassment. Women’s Reps Ambra Speciale and Katerina Konstantinidou worked tirelessly to make this happen. Will Moppett overhauled the MCR’s academic grant to make funds much more accessible; the MCR has funded impressive academic ventures, from immersive language schools to international conferences. Will and David Priestland restarted the in-person MCR academic seminar, showcasing the MCR’s part in world-leading academic research at Oxford.

Sport

Sports Rep Muyi Yang took the initiative to help with the NSE gym maintenance and set the wheels rolling for new MCR self-defence classes. As usual, Teddy Hall had a strong year of sports, with especially strong performances at Rugby and Football Cuppers and great representation at Varsity. The Boat Club Committee was headed by MCR members and had an almost MCR-exclusive men’s boat during Torpids.

Trinity term

Trinity term was packed with summer croquet, poolside BBQs and trips outside of Oxford. The Committee as a whole had a fantastic time at the Teddy Hall Ball: the first in four years! A brainchild of Antonin Charret and Jasper Singh this year was Trinity Week: a social week with Teddy Hall’s first-ever joint MCR and JCR Leavers’ Ball, nights out, and the fanfareinitiated MCR Trinity Dinner. There was a great turnout for the MCR’s first Trinity photograph for three years.

It was a pleasure to be included in the launch of the HALLmarks Campaign. The MCR was (and still is) heavily involved in discussions of the best ways to invest in graduate life at the Hall, particularly on fostering Norham Gardens as a social focal point of the MCR community. It’s difficult to put into words how incredibly grateful I am to the MCR Committee for getting stuck in so willingly, to the College staff and Fellows for helping to support our efforts post-pandemic, and to the rest of the MCR for supporting each other. The MCR itself rediscovered its own welcoming atmosphere. It is incredibly easy to walk into the dining hall or common room on any day of the week and bump into a group of friendly faces. This is something that is grown out of a love of the community and is treasured by many. Fellow MCR members are so incredibly supportive in challenging times: supporting fellow students affected by the war in Ukraine, raising money for very personal fundraisers, and turning out en-mass to support our sports teams. I’m confident that when I say many of my fellow MCR members are friends for life, I genuinely mean it.

Raghul Ravichandran (2019, DPhil Engineering Science)

October 2022. We’re back. Vaccinated, boosted, and hoping for the most normal year since Harry was a royal and the UK was in the EU. Bubbles? Popped. Rule of six? Overruled. And who would have thought that the sight of a packed Teddy Hall Library could look so good, with the tape finally removed from every other seat and social distancing now something, hopefully, more than two metres behind us. From sit-down clubs, to trying to make your 9am (in-person) lecture after a 3am bedtime. From YouTube home workouts, to sweating alongside your team at Football Cuppers. From watching virtual slides in bed, to running into the lecture theatre, coffee in hand, with two minutes to spare. I can’t say I’m envious of my predecessor, Julien Kress, who was faced with a lockdown-ridden year. Yet, he took it in his stride and made what he could of an unpredictable time, to say the least. But, as Michaelmas progressed, it seemed that, finally, things were looking up. Adjustment was difficult, of course, but perhaps not as difficult as you’d expect. Students’ ability to adapt never fails to astonish me, bouncing back from what was, for many of us, the hardest couple years of our lives, doing so with more grace than is

warranted and often even with a smile on their faces. Though, on reflection, is there really any other option? Aside from anything else, I’m embarrassed to say that it took me until this year to believe that my tutors existed from the shoulders down. It’ll be another couple of months, at least, for the novelty of face-to-face tutorials to wear off. Whilst the correct answer to our tutors’ question is no longer a sneaky google away, the genuine stimulation of being in-person with the rest of your group, attempting to tackle the next problem that is thrown at you, is irreplaceable. I can mark the exact moment that the absurdity of the new normalcy really kicked in, to 29 November 2021: Oxmas Dinner. And if you’ve been to a Teddy Hall Christmas Dinner, you’ll know that it is truly like no other. It was walking into the Wolfson, tackled with the unfamiliar, but welcome, decision of where to sit; the days of having to sit with your designated bubble, a (socially)-distant memory. It was filing all the Freshers into the perimeter of the room, shoulder to shoulder, for the speeches. It was standing on the tables, unstable with Christmas Spirit (and a little wine), belting out Christmas Carols, surrounded by the beauty that is the Hall. Hilary term was bittersweet, as we said goodbye to many of the Old Committee, but hello to a new one, with new social secretaries, Sophie Richardson and Emily Falconer, facing a very different entertainment scene than the previous year, focusing on inclusivity. Inclusivity in mind, we also had our first Diwali formal, as well as return of the Eid and Chinese New Year formals. And with Hilary being famously the bleakest of terms, the new Committee and I went tunnel-vision on welfare, introducing homemade brownies, fresh cinnamon buns and even a chocolate fountain to JCRT, because nothing puts a smile on students’ faces like free food.

As always, Teddy Hall showed nothing but enthusiasm in sport, entering the semifinals for Women’s and Men’s Football and Rugby, the finals for Hockey and Water Polo, and seizing impressive wins in Gymnastics, Mixed Touch Rugby and even Swimming, where, in true Teddy fashion, we entered more competitors than any other college, with over 35 ‘swimmers’ – a term used incredibly loosely, as some did not actually know how to swim. The halfway mark snuck up on many second years at Halfway Hall, the good food and good wine doing little to mask how quickly time was passing. And just like that, as always happens with Oxford terms, it was over before we knew it.

Which brings us here. Trinity term. We started the term with a bang. The 2022 Teddy Ball. With Alex Sarshar and myself as Ball Co-Presidents, as well as a stunning Committee, we organised the biggest Ball St Edmund Hall has ever had, with a guest list of 900 and spanning not just the Front Quad, but the entire College: a rodeo bull in the Graveyard and a ball pit in the Chough Room; silent discos and firebreathers; fairground stalls and exquisite food. It didn’t come without bumps or difficulties, but it was undoubtedly worth it. It was, to say the least, phenomenal. It goes without saying that the Ball would not have been possible without Robert Wilkins and Sue McCarthy, who helped us more than I could explain in the page space I have been given. I can only thank them for their time and efforts.

The Ball over, the distant idea of Finals and Prelims finally started materialising into reality. Trinity was a term full of days too beautiful to spend inside. That said, if this was the case, what better place to spend it than the Teddy Hall Library, occasional

JCRTs in the graveyard, fuelling revision sessions with ice cream and smoothies and our incredible new Welfare Officers, Verity Black and Jake Elliott, ensuring that ‘Fifth Week Blues’ were conquered with increased support access and even a welfare dog to make the exam prep as bearable as it could be. It’s worth noting that for me and my cohort, at least, these were the first in-person exams we had sat since our GCSEs in 2018. Yet you would never be able to tell, with the way that each student walked into the Exam Schools, donning their sub-fusc as if they didn’t know any different, going through the phases of carnation colour like it was second nature.

On lighter matters, our new Sports Officers, Teddy Thomson and Poppy Buckley, alongside our Social Secs, organised a fantastic Sports Day, where we watched Blues-Level Rugby players fail embarrassingly at the sack race, and Varsity Hockey Players topple and fall at Duck, Duck, Goose. Football Cuppers is one thing, but tug of war? – a completely different story. To severely understate 2022 – it’s been quite the year. It has been an honour to be the JCR President at the time when the college felt like it was waking up. The past year has taught us that the future is unpredictable, and certainty is a fool’s game. What is certain though? Whatever next year throws at us, the Hall will take head-on, as we always do. And as the ancient saying goes: “Teddy Teddy Teddy Hall Hall Hall” Brittany Perera (2020, Engineering Science)

Professor Luc Nguyen, Tutorial Fellow in Mathematics writes as Senior Treasurer of the Amalgamated Clubs: “Many of us will remember 2019-2020 when most clubs and societies activities were banned or had to exist entirely in cyberspace. As we exited lockdown restrictions, clubs and societies activities at St Edmund Hall slowly picked up its pace. By Hilary term, most activities have resumed as if no pandemic has taken place. Our community is as thriving as it has always been, if not stronger. As Senior Treasurer of the Amalgamated Clubs, it is my pleasure and privilege to facilitate the Hall’s commitment to help our students achieve their ambitions, be it in academics, sports or culture. We look forward to a new year with more successes and new initiatives. Floreat Aula”

Men’s Association Football

1st XI Captain: Sam Boulger Vice-Captain: Tomas Dwyer SEHAFC were looking to maintain the history of sporting triumph within the College by striving for success in Cuppers. Due to the team reaching the semi-final of the last Cuppers competition, we received a bye in the first round before drawing Wadham in the next stage. After an excellent performance in which we beat Wadham 4-0, we progressed into the quarter final where we defeated rivals Queen’s 1-0. The semi-final brought a memorable match which saw hundreds of Teddy Hall students pile into Balliol sports ground to watch an intense game of football. After leading by 2 goals at half time, we conceded 2 devastating late goals to take the game to extra time. An early extra time goal put SEHAFC ahead, only for another last-minute goal to take the game to penalties. Despite unmatched efforts from the team, we suffered a crushing loss, and therefore didn’t proceed to the final. The resilience of the team paid off when we beat our sister college and 5-time consecutive Cuppers winners, Fitzwilliam College, on penalties after a 5-5 draw in our annual game whilst on tour in Cambridge. It has been a huge privilege to be the 1st XI Captain of such a great club and an amazing group of individuals. This year, an enormous proportion of the Teddy Hall community has been involved in College Football, either by playing in one of our four teams, or by attending the games to show support. Players of all abilities are welcomed and strongly encouraged to play at Teddy Hall, with three 11-a-side men’s teams and one women’s team competing. The club is in very capable hands for the 2022-2023 season with 1st XI Captain Caspar Soyoye and Vice Jonathan Munro, who I’m certain will strive to Cuppers success. Sam Boulger (2020, Biomedical Sciences)

Captains: Gemma Smith-Bingham and Yasmin Ratcliffe Making a comeback from Covid, this season has shown some amazing balling from Teddy Hall. Making it to the Cuppers semi-finals was an achievement on its own and, despite our loss to Wolfson, the team really came together throughout the cup! Michaelmas saw plenty of league games, and it was easy to see players developing their skills in time for a Cuppers-heavy Hilary. We’re really proud of the girls’ display of Hall spirit, through health, sickness and essay crisis (famously). With plenty of socials and training alongside the matches we played, team spirit has finally recovered from the pandemic and we’re looking forward to seeing where next year takes us under our new Captains Lalou and Eve. Yasmin Ratcliffe (2020, Medicine) & Gemma Smith-Bingham (2020, English) Badminton Captain: Davidson Sabu After losing a couple of years of regular College Badminton due to the pandemic, the SEH badders were back to full strength this year as we entered men’s, women’s and mixed teams for the league competition. With several members of the Hall trying badminton out for the first time, there were some casual sessions arranged in a local leisure centre, in preparation for the league competitions which took place across Michaelmas and Hilary term. It was wonderful to see enthusiastic members of the Hall always showing up to get a team together, even when people had to drop out last minute. Members who had never played even gave it a go and enjoyed it, truly showing it is a sport anyone can try while at the College. The more serious Cuppers competition began at the end of Hilary, carrying through into Trinity term. The previous Cuppers tournament was mixed teams due to Covid regulations and we were going into this year as defending Cuppers champions. We only entered a men’s team this year, but hopefully next year we can also enter a women’s team. This year’s team consisted of myself, Naga, Will and John. The opening set of games were tough, and we just made it past the Jesus/Magdalen team on point difference. Then we beat New College comfortably to reach the semi-finals. It was a real battle in the semis and the boys should be very proud for the fight they put in, but sadly we lost to a very strong Wadham team. We will regroup and recoup for next year and I wish Co-Captains John Duale and Tehillah Campbell all the best for a successful upcoming year of badminton at the Hall.

Davidson Sabu (2018, Materials Science)

Cricket Captain: Robbie Hardwick The long awaited 2022 season for SEHCC begun with promise and sky-high aspirations. After plenty of winter training in the JCR and Buttery, we hit the ground running with a dominant performance against Lincoln. Freshers Caspar Soyoye and Atticus Evans-Lombe proved their worth with willow in hand, with Jake Elliot also bringing up his first half century for the Hall, before the seasoned pros Joe Minichiello and Lauren Irwin terrorised the Lincoln batters! Despite succumbing to an excellent hundred from a Lincoln ringer, the league season continued to flourish with wins against Keble, Queen’s and Oriel – not to forget a famous bowl-off triumph versus Somerville!

Despite qualifying for the league finals, it was decided that Cuppers was the focus, as masterful displays against St John’s and Kellogg had placed us in the quarter final with a genuine chance of glory. Unfortunately, a star-studded side unexpectedly underperformed against Merton/Mansfield.

Special mentions must go to Freshers Kunal Barman and Alex Swallow for their peerless offspin and testing opening bowling respectively, limiting the opposition to just 140 on a decent pitch. Alex Post, our anchor at no. 4 who batted all season with extreme responsibility, controlled our run chase to within striking distance of a Cuppers semi-final. With seventeen needed off the last over, Musa Ali swept us to needing just three off two balls but wasn’t quite able to drag the Hall over the line.

Cuppers glory wasn’t to be, but it was fantastic to see so many involved in cricket this year, many of whom had never played before. Much of this is down to Saul Manasse, Hilarians Captain, who reported the following from the Second XI: “It was a classically Hilarians season for the Hilarians this year, with Teddy Hall’s esteemed Second XI narrowly missing out on the second round of Cuppers following an agonising loss to Christ Church. Highlights for Oxford’s only reserve side include a single wicket all season and a rejected appeal for a clear LBW, both courtesy of Sanjeev Malholtra, as well as First XI Captain Robbie Hardwick arriving purely to bowl the twentieth over and allowing the opposition to add 28 runs in just those six balls! Missed chances were the talk of the season, with at least four drops off the bowling of each of our two angry Scotsmen; I’m confident the team will rue these in the face of such marginal 120+ run defeats and return fighting in 2023!”

Robbie Hardwick (2020, Medicine)

Gymnastics Captain: James Odwell This year was another successful one for the Teddy Hall Gymnastics Club. After a year off due to Covid, Gymnastics Cuppers returned and SEHGC were ready to defend their 2019 title.

After seeing the success of the previous team, there was plenty of Hall talent hungry for Cuppers glory, and so a team of eight made its way to Abingdon Gymnastics Club, alongside a handful of enthusiastic supporters. Much of the talent of the team was concentrated in the Men’s Beginners, inspired by Teddy’s domination of the category back in 2019. But with fierce competition from rival colleges, this year even neater routines and more graceful (Teddy) bear rolls were needed. Thankfully the team were up to the challenge, putting in some heroic performances to secure plentiful points towards the title. A special mention goes to Robbie Hardwick whose performances on the floor and vault

apparatuses secured him a silver medal amongst a challenging field. The only other entry was James Odwell (me) in the Men’s Advanced Category. Two clean routines on the Floor and Vault were enough to earn the gold medal but more importantly, it meant more points for Teddy Hall. At the close of the competition, we all waited nervously for the results to be added up by the judges. But there was never any doubt, Teddy Hall were champions of Oxford Gymnastics again. James Odwell (2018, Engineering Science)

Hockey

Captain: Harriet Eyles SEHHC has had a hugely successful season. After the disrupted 2020-2021 season, it was great to have some league games to hone our skills and grow as a team in Michaelmas term before Cuppers was in full swing. The huge intake of talent this season, across all years, meant it took no time to blow off the cobwebs and allowed SEHHC to continue to grow from strength to strength. In usual (keen) Teddy fashion, we managed to field teams for Men’s, Women’s, and Mixed Cuppers. Myself and my Vice-Captain, Harry Mehta, were incredibly lucky to find teams that gave their all for the Hall, despite the pouring rain / biting cold / burning sun that we faced each week.

On and off the field, dedication to the game, the team and the port has been fantastic on all parts. Sunday morning games ensured sore heads and churning stomachs post Saturday night but not once did our merry band fail to turn up and show that Aularians are made of sterner stuff than most. The slap-up Sunday suppers in those gentle evenings helped replenish our spent strength and look forwards to the week ahead.

Our scorching Mixed Cupper run started with an emphatic 4-0 victory over Corpus/ Oriel, allowing us to find our feet and grow in confidence. We then breezed past John’s/Anne’s to put us in the semi-finals against a highly experienced Queen’s/ Benet’s side. The team left everything on the pitch and secured an impressive 2-1 victory. On to the final. Boosted by the huge Teddy support from the side-lines and strengthened by the expertise we had gained over the year, the team rose to the challenge and put on a thrilling performance. Unfortunately, it was not quite enough on the day, and we finished with a very respectable second place. This has only made us more determined to come out on top next year, a feat of which I’m sure our new Captain, Leo Brake, is more than capable. I wish him the best of luck and I’m excited to see what the 2022-2023 season has in store.

Captains: Beth Scott and Esme Macmillan

This year has been both really successful and promising for the netball team! Although off to a rocky start in Michaelmas due to being unable to secure training space, it all turned around in Hilary. During this term we really came together as a team, placing third in our league! You could see the team grow stronger with every game and this was due to the hard work and consistent participation from everyone in the team.

In Trinity, we took part in the Cuppers Tournament which was an amazing day for everyone involved. It was the best I had seen us play together and I was super proud of the team. We were in a tough group with some amazing teams from other colleges. It was so close that it came down to goal difference and we ended up just missing out on qualification by two goals. Even so, this gives me great promise and hope for next year. Throughout Hilary and until the Cuppers tournament in Trinity we also had regular training sessions at Magdalen College School which were always fun, and the court space was incredibly useful for practising drills and set plays. We were also extremely lucky to have another college training at the same time which allowed us to put these drills into practice with some friendly matches at the end of each session. The team really developed and improved from these sessions, and it was amazing to see what we practised come together in our games. We will definitely miss the Finalists leaving this year who have been such an integral part of the team, both playing wise and in making it such an amazing group of people of which to be a part, but we are looking forward to welcoming all new faces that will hopefully join us next year! Training sessions and matches will continue to be regular and hopefully our team can go from strength to strength! Beth Scott (2020, Jurisprudence)

President: India Brough Vice President: Raghul Ravichandran Men’s Captain: William Loosley Men’s Vice Captains: Adam Pattenden, Thomas Harray Women’s Captain: Jenyth Harper Evans Women’s Vice Captain: Madeline Prottey Captain of Coxes: Toby Whitehead Treasurer: Julien Kress Secretary: Emily Falconer IT Officer: Aleksei Malyshev Men’s Social Sec: Adam Pattenden Women’s Social Sec: Marie-Claire Jalaguier Water Safety Advisor: Sophie Richardson This year was the first full year of racing for SEHBC, after two years of disrupted rowing from both the weather and then from Covid. At the start of Michaelmas term, we moved our M1 and W1 boats over to Abingdon Rowing Club, where we train in Michaelmas and Hilary terms. This involved rowing through the locks down to Abingdon and was great fun for everybody! In October, the club put our efforts into recruiting Freshers to learn how to row. This included having learn-to-row sessions and a Fresher’s BBQ to get to know everybody. We had a successful recruitment period and trained up our novices to compete in the Christ Church novice regatta. We entered two women’s crews and one men’s crew into the regatta. Our women’s B crew won their first race and were knocked out in the second round, and our women’s A crew had a tough first race and were just beaten by a boat length! Our men’s crew had a fantastic first race against St Benet’s which they won by a boat length and then went on to win their second race against St Hilda’s! They just missed out on winning their third race.

Our senior rowers had the opportunity in Michaelmas to enter the Isis Winter League (IWL) races. Our Men’s First Eight (M1) finished highest of all men’s crews in IWL A with a time of 4:27.0 and finished third in IWL B with a time of 4:42.5! Our Women’s First Eight (W1) finished with a time of 5:39.0 in IWL A, and our W1 entered a 4+ into IWL B, finishing second of the women’s 4+ boats with a time of 6:37.0!

As Hilary term started, we started training in crews to prepare for Torpids. W1 and M1 trained primarily in Abingdon, moving the boats back to Oxford two weeks before Torpids. The rest of our crews trained in Oxford all term, and eventually we entered six crews into Torpids: two women’s crews, three men’s crews, and a mixed beer boat.

Our mixed beer boat, M4, started the week holding the coveted position of foot of the river. They bumped up and then back down during the week and finished back at the foot of the river! Our M3 had a tough week, starting their racing surrounded by very fast second eight boats from other colleges, meaning that they were bumped every day of the competition and won spoons. W2 had a strong start to the week, bumping up and then back down again, and then back up! They held onto the position they started in, standing them in good stead for next year. M2 were very high up in the charts for a second boat, meaning they were chased by some very good M1 crews. They fell seven places this Torpids and gained spoons, but showed fantastic sportsmanship and excellent rowing. Our W1 raced in Women’s Division 2. They had a fantastic week and bumped up +5, meaning they won blades for a second year running! This is the fourth time W1 have ever won blades in Torpids, and they have now risen eleven places over two years, back to the position they finished in 2018. M1 started at fifth on the river but were chased by some incredibly fast crews. They finished the week at 8th on the river in Men’s Division 1, having bumped down -3. Torpids results: M1 -3 W1 +5 BLADES M2 -7 W2 0 M3 -9 M4 0

Over the Easter vacation, rowing did not slow down. To remain competitive for Summer VIII, we continued training and entering external races. In March, our women entered the Women’s Head of the River Race, and our men entered the Head of the River Race. These are head races that take place on the Tideway in London and are excellent opportunities for rowers and coxes to experience different conditions from the Isis in Oxford. Both crews handled the conditions well and finished with modest times of 24:48.2 for our women and 21:07.1 for our men.

This year we had two rowers racing in the OUWLRC blue boat: Katie Wellstead and Hazel Wake.

At the start of April, we held a training camp for all crews on the Isis in Oxford. All of the rowers and coxes who took part improved immensely, and the crews came together really nicely ahead of a busy Trinity term of race preparation. Each evening of the training camp consisted of some sort of social activity, such as

mini golf or dinner, and allowed for lots of friendships to blossom! Before term started, W1 entered a 4+ into Oxford City Bumps. Our women’s crew rowed fantastically at the top of Division 2 in their first race and bumped Jesus College in their second race, moving into Division 1. They then bumped Bristol University in the next race and held their position for the final two races, finishing +2 overall.

At the start of Trinity term, we held a women’s alumni dinner to celebrate over 40 years of women’s side rowing at SEHBC and the naming of our W1 boat after Aularian Helen Taylor (2004, Chemistry). We worked with the Friends of SEHBC to invite the women’s side alumni to the event, and thanks to the work of Sue McCarthy and the Servery, we were able to hold the event in Wolfson Hall! The event had women’s captains throughout SEHBC’s history giving speeches about their time at the Hall and allowed for the women’s side to have a space to exchange stories and to make new friendships - it was a great success! Leading up to Summer VIIIs, Alex Grant and the rest of the maintenance team helped us continue to refurbish the boathouse by removing the bar in our upper boathouse to make room for a new weights section that we are hoping to install next year! SEHBC entered six crews into Summer VIIIs this year: three men’s crews and three women’s crews. Unfortunately, a very competitive qualification race meant that our M3 did not qualify. Women’s Division 1 was the last race of each day for the first time ever in Summer VIIIs!

W3 had a fun week of racing and were bumped three times. W2 had a hectic week full of klaxons and penalty bumps but held their nerve throughout and won well-deserved blades! M2 were very high up in the men’s charts, in Division 3, and were surrounded by first boats. They rowed incredibly well, however were bumped every day and therefore gained spoons. M1 started the week with an incredibly strong row over at fifth on the river, however some fast crews behind them meant they matched their Torpids results and went -3, finishing eighth on the river in men’s Division 1. W1 started the week at sixth on the river in Women’s Division 1, and had some fantastic row-overs, as well as a bump on Pembroke in the gut on day two meaning they went +1 and are now fifth on the river – their highest position in seven years! Summer VIIIs results: W1 +1 M1 -3 M2 -4 W2 +4 BLADES W3 -3

On the Saturday of Summer VIIIs, we held a charity BBQ, raising money for Bone Cancer Research Trust (BCRT), in memory of Matt Greenwood, an alumnus of the Hall who sadly passed away from bone cancer in 2016. Our vice president, Raggy Ravichandran, put in a huge amount of effort organising the BBQ with the help of our treasurer Julien Kress. With thanks also to alumni and current members who ran the BBQ on the day, we managed to raise over £1200 for BCRT!

In the eighth week of Trinity, SEHBC competed in Oriel Regatta, which is a mixed VIIIs regatta. The format splits into two categories; mixed college VIIIs, and crewdVIIIs where colleges are randomly matched to other colleges. We entered crews into both categories, and all crews performed fantastically! Our crewdVIII composite with Brasenose finished third of crewdVIII crews, and our mixed college crew also came third of the mixed college crews!

SEHBC has had a fantastic season, and the boat club has grown in both talent and size throughout the year. We are ready to go into next year with our same determination to perform, as well as to create a vibrant atmosphere for all rowers and coxes! It has been a privilege to work alongside such incredible members, as well as the Committee, and our senior member Charlotte Sweeney. I’d like to thank them for their work in progressing the boat club to the inclusive, accessible, and successful club it is.

India Brough (2019, DPhil Cellular and Molecular Medicine)

Men’s Rugby

Captain: Hector Skipworth After a frustrating season last year due to Covid it was great to see the traditions of SEHRFC back up and running – starting with the Old Boys Game at the beginning of the season. The blistering heat and a clear lack of fitness made it a very tough match to start off the season however the old boys just came through with the victory. After that we got straight into training and our much-anticipated morning fitness sessions as our first Cuppers game was in less than two weeks. This paid off as we won our first Cuppers game against Hertford 48-7. After dropouts from both Balliol and Magdalen, we found ourselves in the semi-final of Cuppers against New. It was a hard-fought game, but we just came up short 8-9. We still had plenty of the season left and we didn’t want that game alone to define our season. Next up we had the Mixed Touch Cuppers in which we lost the final last year. Having

three University touch players really helped teach us union players that touch is a very different game with different tactics all round. We had an excellent day storming through the rest of the colleges and winning the trophy. Throughout the whole day we scored 26 tries while only conceding 4. We ended the season with the Cuppers Sevens hoping to defend our title from last year. After a disappointing first game we found ourselves in the Plate, but we still wanted to walk away with silverware. We went on to beat New in the Plate semifinals which was a very sweet victory after our Cuppers loss to them and then we beat Balliol, winning the Plate.

It was great to be back in the bar singing our songs and playing Cuppers rugby again. We can only build from here on and we look forward to playing the Old Boys again come October.

Hector Skipworth (Earth Sciences, 2020)

Swimming

Captains: Lauren Irwin and Adam Hawkins 2022 saw the long¬-awaited return of Swimming Cuppers to the hallowed pools of Iffley Road. Teddy Hall entered the contest as defending champions after a dominant performance in 2018. But, as many moons have passed since that fateful day, responsibility rested on the shoulders of the senior members of the club to pass down the secrets to success that have filtered down through many generations of Hall swimmers. Armed with the memories of silverware glinting off the waters of history, Captains Lauren Irwin and Adam Hawkins set about building their squad for the big day. It is often said that quality takes precedent over quantity; but why have one when you can have both? By tapping into the ample appetite for success possessed by the students of the Hall (and by messaging every group chat and Facebook page in the College relentlessly for weeks), SEHSC amassed an enormous squad of buoyant brilliance, arriving at the Rosenblatt Pool with some 52 of the fiercest floaters, most serious scullers, and best breast strokers that Oxford has ever seen.

Other colleges had aimed to match our numbers in a quest to compete with our dynamic diving dominance. However, murmurings of a significant Christ Church presence belly-flopped spectacularly short of any challenge as Teddy Hall alone dominated an entire side of the pool. The Hall quickly raced their way to an early lead in the Individual Medley, tumble turning with a tenacity that confounded the competition. Whilst points may be given for participation, this did not feature in the thinking of the Hall who produced

podium finishes a plenty; such was the dominance of SEHSC that several races saw Teddy Hall place 1–6, as though no other college were even in the race! Unhappy at being so far behind after only one event, other athletes were forced to push their bodies to the extreme in the hopes of catching the maroon and gold blurs streaking ahead of them. This unfortunately led to a series of injuries, with three swimmers forced to seek serious medical attention and proceedings halted whilst more lifeguards were sought. Keen to continue chasing what would have surely been an all-time points record, Captains Irwin and Hawkins offered up the qualified lifeguards present on our team to allow proceedings to continue. Their offer was rejected. With the powers that be at Iffley Road breathing down his neck and with frenzied whisperings of invalidated insurance circulating should a single further splish be splashed, OUSC President Felix Gallagher Esq. rose to his feet and bravely declared the competition to be over, and the current leaders St Edmund Hall to have successfully defended their title: cue an eruption of rapturous applause from the maroon and gold masses. Within minutes, ‘We Are The Champions’ blared from a speaker and every other college left with their heads hung and “Teddy Teddy Teddy… Hall Hall Hall” ringing in their ears. The triumphant team descended on the Buttery to celebrate. There the captaincy was handed to Mauricio Alencar and Poppy Buckley, who will look to extend our dominance for many more years to come. Will anyone beat us? Can anyone beat us? Only time will tell… Adam Hawkins (2018, Chemistry)

Ultimate Frisbee Captain: Davidson Sabu This year we were combined with Balliol, LMH and Jesus Colleges for league and Cuppers tournaments. In Cuppers, we sadly didn’t make it as far as the semis, but it was wonderful to have people show up, especially considering it was the day after the Teddy Hall Ball. We had JCR and MCR representatives in Hui Wen Teh and Cyril Schroeder playing on our behalf this year, with the Hall spirit on display throughput. The baton will be carried over by Cyril Schroeder next year who will seek to rejuvenate the College Frisbee team and I wish him good luck for next year. The SEH Ultimate Frisbee team looks forward to welcoming new faces and keen athletes of any sporting ability for a bit of disc fun. Davidson Sabu (2018, Materials Science) Other sports clubs playing in 2021-2022 included Basketball, Lacrosse, MCR Football, Rugby League and Rounders.

Drama Drama Cuppers this year was a bit of a shot in the dark – the second years had only ever done theirs online but we struck out into the thespian side of Oxford with vigour. A call to arms on the Freshers’ group chat was met by Ethan Bareham, Matilda Piovella, Aminah Dixon, Felix Clayton McClure and Q Sun. After a couple of nights of brainstorming, we came up with the seed that would flower into ‘Laradise Post’. Following the triedand-true Cuppers tradition of doing a sketch, something totally absurd, or a classic reworked, we decided to recreate Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, but with lashings of bad puns and toilet humour. It might not have been Arnold Bennett, but it was certainly a lot of fun. Once a script was assembled and a haphazard rehearsal schedule was planned out, we learnt our lines (barely), cobbled together our props (scarcely) and headed out onto the Burton Taylor Studio stage (scaredly). Felix played our leather-clad, bare-chested bad boy Satan; Ethan and Elsa played Adam and Eve respectively, their modesty protected by censor bars rather than fig leaves; and Kt, Aminah and Matilda admirably hopped between the roles of demon, angel and (memorably from Kt) a nappyclad, dummy sucking cherub, while I quite literally played God. With a baby gate entrance to Heaven, a squeeze stress toy banana, plus a fake potted plant representing the Tree of Knowledge and a confetti of condoms raining down from offstage to show Adam and Eve’s lapse, we certainly weren’t highbrow, but we were effective. A few weeks later we were awarded not only Best Props (a category created this year) but also Spirit of Cuppers, the most coveted prize of all. I cannot thank our cast enough for their willingness to carry out my harebrained ideas, and the generous Freshers of Teddy for the miscellaneous items they lent. Finally, a special mention to Felix, who let me outline his eyes in biro in the darkness before we went on stage because I had forgotten my eyeliner. Rose Morley (2021, Geography)

Music Society Secretary: Jasmin Kreutzer This year, the Teddy Hall Music Society had a strong communal function. It helped musicians of the Hall reach out to each other by grouping those with the same musical interests (for example forming a band or a chamber group) in a mailing list, thus allowing them to communicate more easily with each other and to know who is around. The music room in the rear quad was also much used for practising, both by individuals and various ensembles: bands, violin/piano, vocal ensembles and more. A great range of the Hall’s musicians then brought their beautiful music to the rest of the College at the recitals during Formal Dinner on Thursdays. The recitals were much enjoyed by the students and even posted about on social media to share the lovely atmosphere of the Teddy Hall community. The Music Society also organised events for those members of the Hall who like to appreciate music rather than making it themselves. During the Michaelmas and Hilary terms, the Society screened ballet and opera performances in the Doctorow Hall on every Saturday night. The screened shows included The Nutcracker, La Traviata, Giselle, La Boheme, Mayerling, and Lady Macbeth, as well as less famous

works. The free screenings created a great alternative to regular concerts because of their more relaxed setting, and there were always free snacks and soft drinks! The Music Society will be very happy to continue the screenings in the next academic year if people show interest. Students who would like to get involved with the Music Society are encouraged to make themselves known at Freshers Fair at the start of Michaelmas. Alternatively, they can write an email to the Director of Music or to Jasmin Kreutzer, the society’s Secretary. They should especially get in touch if they want to become part of the Committee, wish to perform next year, or to suggest a music project. Jasmin Kreutzer (2020, English)

Writer’s Workshop Creativity in the Hall has continued to flourish over the past year, with the Teddy Hall Creative Writing group going from strength to strength. In returning to its rightful home – the warmth of the College bar – post Covid-marquees and Zoom calls, the society has built an everchanging, diverse and (most importantly) friendly community of budding writers. In Michaelmas, the influx of Freshers and Visiting Students brought great numbers to our weekly workshops, establishing a melting pot of genres and styles. Amy Deng presented poetry, playful and meticulously crafted, in ‘Apophthegm to a fly (to my dearest roommate)’, while Aili Channer profoundly explored a world of snorkelling, coconut milk and acquired elephant tusks through short story ‘Skin and Bone’. Our collaboration reached so far as readings of a new TV pilot script, ‘Flockings’ (by William Heath), scene by scene, week by week. Whereas poetry writing appeared most popular in many of last year’s meetings, the short story seemed to be the ‘going thing’ for 2022. Jasmin Kreutzer first presented a painstakingly attentive look at ‘fashionable colours’, art, black patent shoes and what it means to be a muse in work now out in the published world, taking talk as far as the specific shade of turquoise in Barbra Streisand’s armchairs. Hilary also saw a resurgence of group staples: Aili Channer began work towards the revival of Teddy Hall’s arts magazine, A Gallery, while the group’s talent pool expanded beyond college, welcoming talented newcomers from outside the Hall. This was a lovely turn after Covid’s hamperings last year. Further creative collaboration outside the Hall came in Trinity, expanding our reach through new writing experiences. Teamed up with Merton’s Poetry Society (and now writing in the room), five-minute writing challenges such as headline-based prompts and speed-written limericks led us across new ground. In a broader sense, I have most enjoyed exploring such new ground in leading the St Edmund Hall writing group this year, alongside my co-presidents. I am proud of the group’s continued resurgence across the year and look forward to continued collaboration on Alex Abrahams’ return to leadership for 2022-2023. William Heath (2020, English)