where gambling is a new practice that stems from European contact in the 1940s. Card gambling has now developed from a single card game to a spectrum of indigenously invented card games, along with darts, bingo and slot machines. There is more to be learnt about Melanesian sociality from the humble card game than one might have suspected. Gorokans do not gamble as autonomous individuals seeking to accumulate personal wealth; they gamble as persons embedded in social relations seeking to circulate wealth. Rather than try to exploit the abstract law of probability to their own advantage, they presuppose an outcome of relatively equal wealth distribution over time and gamble as a means to compel others or to be compelled by others to release wealth. Didier Queloz Didier Queloz came from Geneva University to his appointment as Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. He is one of the discoverers of exoplanets, planets which circulate stars other than the Sun. More than 850 exoplanets are now known. The first to be discovered was a giant planet, but improvements in the sensitivity of the methods allowed Queloz to discover Earth-like planets. These may have the ability to support life as we know it, and a study of them may help to show how the Earth’s atmosphere and life have evolved. Joel Robbins Joel Robbins came from the University of California, San Diego to his appointment as Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology. His research has followed Christianity and cultural change among a remote group in Papua New Guinea and has tried to understand the social and cultural processes that have shaped
the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. He suggests that among the natives of Melanesia Christianity works as a culture: it is a transformation and not a veneer. He now has the opportunity to study the Fellows of Trinity. Oliver Shorttle Oliver Shorttle is investigating processes in the Earth’s mantle. The mantle is made of solid rock but it is convecting like boiling soup. A vast upwelling of hotter-than-usual mantle beneath Iceland causes melting and volcanism, and is sometimes responsible for disruption of air traffic. The effects are felt even in the UK: Scotland’s mountains would be low-lying ground without the uplift associated with this hot plume. Oliver combines fieldwork, geochemistry and computer modelling to investigate these deepearth processes. He has developed an elegant means of using the isotopic composition of basalts to map out the chemical and thermal structure of the Earth’s interior and to understand how this relates to volcanic activity at the surface. David Skinner David Skinner has come directly from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and is a Lecturer at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is unusual in that he combines expertise in both string theory and twistor theory, and so it is perhaps not surprising that he has been laying the foundations of twistor string theory. Textbook methods for understanding what happens when quantum particles meet are hopelessly outmatched when many particles crash together at the same time. David has realised that these processes
in fact have a hidden simplicity that becomes transparent in Penrose’s twistor space, and he has been working to understand what this new perspective teaches us about quantum field theory and gravity. Kathryn Stevens Kathryn Stevens is from Oxford via King’s College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford, she specialized in Akkadian, the principal language of ancient Mesopotamia. Her thesis is entitled ”Beyond the Muses: the Greek World and Mesopotamia in Hellenistic Intellectual History”. The conquests of Alexander the Great opened up Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture to the Greeks in the Hellenistic period. Kathryn has used her knowledge of Greek and Akkadian to treat aspects of cultural contact between Greece and the Near East, and also developments which were parallel but independent. In this way she has devised a new model of comparative scholarship for intellectual history. Ross Wilson Ross came to us from the University of East Anglia to take up a University Lectureship in Criticism at the Faculty of English. His research interests are based in the Romantic period, where he has worked on English and German poetry and philosophy. His publications extend from Kant and Coleridge to Benjamin and Adorno, and he has a new book just out on Shelley, which takes as its point of departure the poet’s essay ‘On Life’. Indeed he is quite keen on ‘life’, and has not flinched from putting his name to such modest titles as ‘On the Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics’.
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