Annual Report Summary 2024
The Warden
Besides his duties as Warden, John Vickers continued to work with Mark Armstrong on issues in the economics of competition and regulation, including in relation to multi-brand firms. He gave the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s Bellamy Lecture on the consumer welfare standard in competition law, and lectured at the Lear Competition Festival in Rome and at the Northwestern Antitrust Economics conference in Chicago. He also gave a keynote at the Oxford Macro Finance conference on monetary policy making at the Bank of England.
Senior Research Fellows
Francis Brown worked on algebraic geometry and number theory with application to high-energy physics. His recent work focused on the cohomology of the general linear group over the integers. He constructed exponentially many new cohomology classes where previously only finitely many were known, and introduced a new method of proof of Borel’s results on the rational algebraic K-theory of the integers. During his sabbatical at the University of Geneva, he gave lectures on this and other topics, including a public lecture and live debate on particle physics and mathematics which was featured in Le Temps.
Santanu Das worked on the Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing and completed a couple of chapters for his monograph on modernist literature. He was the Hurst Visiting Professor at the University of Washington at St Louis and gave lectures in the UK and the US. He was commissioned to co-edit the final part of the three-volume Cambridge History of London in Literature. He was an editor of the Cambridge Quarterly.
Colin Burrow wrote articles on Shakespeare’s ‘Let the Bird of Loudest Lay’ and on Edmund Spenser, and (for the London Review of Books) on topics including Henry James and Zadie Smith. He recorded a series of podcasts with Clare Bucknell on Satire from Erasmus to Evelyn Waugh. He completed several chapters for the Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English Literary History, a series of which he is a General Editor. He served as General Editor of Review of English Studies.
Cécile Fabre made progress on her book manuscript Value, Justice and Humankind’s Common Cultural Heritage contributed to two journal symposia on her book Spying Through a Glass Darkly, and, as a side project, wrote two draft papers on the moral duty to vote. She gave talks in Lund, Athens and Barcelona. In addition to her research, she took an active part in College and University governance.
Ruth Harris was writing a new monograph entitled The Oriental Christ: What India Did with Jesus. She conducted research in Britain, acquired documents from America as well as materials from several places in India. She was drafting chapters on Hindu and Islamic religious figures, while examining Russia’s romantic imperialism and the importance of the ‘Oriental Christ’ in envisaging alliances with Buddhist populations in Central Asia. She also finished four articles on other aspects of global spirituality.
Thomas Hegghammer published two books: a volume on identity mimicry in conflict, co-edited with Quondam Fellow Diego Gambetta, and a textbook on computer programming for qualitative research. In June he organised organized a multidisciplinary workshop on artificial intelligence and mimicry in war. He continued work on a book about the long history of jihadism and became involved in a project studying social and political change in the Middle East through computational analysis of Al-Ahram newspaper from 1876 to 2020.
Paul Fendley continued his research in condensed-matter theory and mathematical physics, focusing on quantum many-body systems with strong interactions. Current themes included introducing and exploiting non-invertible dualities and symmetries, along with analysing unusual applications of integrability. With Oxford-based collaborators, he completed three papers: one developed novel two-dimensional quantum models with chiral topological order, another introduced quantum chains of a similar ilk, while a third analysed an unusual symmetry in models with long-range interactions. He gave seminars at conferences in Durham, Edinburgh, Delft, Stony Brook and Berkeley.
Cecilia Heyes is a psychologist studying the development and evolution of the human mind. She secured a contract with Penguin Random House for a book on The Invention of Thought and wrote three chapters. These weighed the evidence that human babies have sophisticated cognitive skills and examined the impact of cultural evolution on the nature of happiness. She also completed an article for Synthese on the cognitive neuroscience of social learning, and for MIT’s Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science on imitation.
Neil Kenny worked on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern France. He completed a draft of a monograph on hierarchy in the works of François Rabelais, wrote an article on Rabelais, and gave papers on him in Sheffield and Oxford. He gave a paper in Lyon on low-born thinkers, participated in Paris in a discussion event on Montaigne, and published an article on Martine de Bertereau. He stepped down as the British Academy’s Lead Fellow for Languages but continued to be involved in the BA’s policy-related work on languages in UK education and research.
Michael Lobban continued his research into the history of English and imperial law. He co-organised the 2024 Hart Workshop on ‘Historicising Jurisprudence’ at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in June. He gave a plenary lecture to the British Legal History Conference in July on ‘Political Murder, Extradition and Empire’. He presented papers in Zaragoza in May and in Naples in October, and also spoke at events in Leeds, Edinburgh and Oxford. He completed a number of articles on aspects of English legal history and continues his research for volume 10 of The Oxford History of the Laws of England.
Noel Malcolm’s book Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400–1750 was published by the Oxford University Press. He gave the British Academy’s Raleigh Lecture on this subject at Cardiff University, and a series of four lectures on it at Oxford. He continued to prepare a volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, containing Hobbes’s autobiographical and occasional writings.
Vladimir Markovic engaged in two projects. The first one concerned the distribution of random surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The second project was aimed at studying virtual homological properties of mapping class groups and proving that statistically, the existence of such virtual homological classes does not exist. He wrote two papers, and had three published in the press.
Miriam Meyerhoff published on Windward Island creoles, variation in New Zealand sign language and interactional sociolinguistic analyses of children’s interactions and healthcare. A new research grant started in early 2024 examining language diversity in the Pacific. Fieldwork in 2024 focused on knowledge exchange, and repatriating materials from early 20th century to Vanuatu communities.
Catherine Morgan completed a series of four articles on aspects of religious, political, and economic life in northwestern Greece during the Archaic and Classical periods. She began work on the publication of Late Bronze Age to Late Roman finds from the Inner Ionian Archipelago survey (University of Crete/Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports) and prepared a new archival project on the polis of Astakos in Akarnania in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oslo and the Greek Archaeological Service. She gave papers in Athens and Calabria. She completed her term as Academic Secretary of the College.
Lucia Prauscello concentrated on three things: (i) her edition of Menander and its companion volume, for which she wrote a Menandrean ‘grammar’ (phonetics, nominal and verbal morphology of Menander’s 4th century BCE Greek considered within the broader context of the developing koine); (ii) the preparation for publication of new hexametrical papyri from Oxyrhunchus, within the AHRC funded project ‘Hexameters beyond the canon’, of which she is the PI; (iii) her manuscript of a co-monograph authored with Olga Tribulato, entitled Ancient Greek Purism: The Roots of Atticism, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York which she has just handed to the press.
Ian Rumfitt had two papers appear this year, ‘Meaning and Speech Acts’ in P.F. Strawson and His Philosophical Legacy (OUP) and ‘Generalized Quantification in an Axiomatic Truth Theory’ in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He drafted two more papers, a piece on revisionism in logic for an OUP handbook, and a paper on the distinction between deep and superficial notions of necessity. Most of his time was devoted to his book on truth and meaning. He had a contract with OUP with a deadline of 31 December. The draft formed the basis of lectures he gave in Hilary Term, which generated useful feedback.
Gavin Salam was working on quantum chromodynamics and phenomenology at high-energy particle colliders. He continued his research on parton showers, funded through his ERC Advanced Grant and Royal Society Research Professorship. He published a first release of the PanScales parton-shower simulation code and developed the first ever parton showers with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy for event shapes. He delivered a keynote on the future of high-energy physics at the 2023 ICFA seminar. He was awarded the IOP Dirac Gold Medal and an ICBS Frontiers of Science Award and appointed an external member of the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
Lucia Zedner completed chapters on reliance on algorithmic prediction in criminal justice, citizenship deprivation, sentencing scholarship, and security, rights and positive obligations to protect (all in press). She wrote articles on the role of think tanks in justice policy, and the relationship between criminal law, citizenship, and civil order. She gave a public talk at the York Festival of Ideas, and papers in Oslo, Edinburgh and Oxford. She continued as a Commissioner on the Independent Commission on UK Counterterrorism Law, Policy and Practice, due to report later in 2024. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in April.
University Academic Fellows
Dapo Akande published an article on investment disputes and armed conflict and Individualization of War: Rights, Liability and Accountability in Contemporary Armed Conflict (co-editor, OUP, 2023). He delivered the keynote lecture at the Tokyo International Law Seminar, co-convened a workshop in College in honour of Judge Theodor Meron and another (with Alison MacDonald) on the competence of the United Nations General Assembly. In 2023, he became a member of the UN International Law Commission and continued to sit on the US State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law. He remained co-convenor of the Oxford Process on International Law Protections in Cyberspace.
Alongside other editorial and translation projects, Diwakar Acharya worked towards a critical edition of the Yuktidīpikā, the most elaborate and important commentary on the root text of Sāṃkhya philosophy. He visited Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, for a month as a visiting fellow and ran a workshop on the Avalokiteśvara worship across the Himalayas with source reading of the Bugmalokeśvarasādhana. He also delivered two invited lectures on identification of early Sāṃkhya texts at the Academy and University of Vienna. He visited manuscript libraries in India and Nepal and also contributed to the development of an annual graduate summer school.
Suzanne Aigrain continued to work on the detection and characterisation of exoplanets and their host stars, leading the ERC consolidator project ‘GPRV: overcoming stellar activity in radial velocity planet searches’, while working with citizen scientists to discover new planets in data from NASA’s TESS satellite, and preparing for the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission. She co-authored 13 articles in refereed astronomy journals, presented her research at international conferences in Catania (Sicily) and Leiden (Netherlands), taught lectures on Probability and Statistics and Gaussian Process Regression, and organised a workshop in All Souls College on the impact of stellar variability on the PLATO mission.
Timothy Endicott gave his inaugural lecture as Vinerian Professor of English Law on May 10, 2024, on the value of democracy and its drawbacks and on the ways in which the United Kingdom constitution is democratic. With Andrew Dickinson and Wolfgang Ernst, he edited Dicey + 100, Albert Venn Dicey: A Centennial Commemoration (Intersentia 2024), and authored one of the chapters (‘Dicey and Analytical Jurisprudence’). He worked on a book on the philosophy of legal interpretation. He gave the 2024 James Wood Lecture at the University of Glasgow School of Law, and presented his work in Paris, Guayaquil, Mendoza, Edinburgh, Lisbon, and Ottawa.
Wolfgang Ernst published a couple of book reviews and smaller articles in the field of Roman law and on 20th century monetary law theories. He co-edited a volume titled Dicey + 100. A. V. Dicey: A Centennial Commemoration. For the planned re-imaging of the Codex XV (Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona), Gaius’s Institutes, negotiations on funding and technologies were ongoing.
David Gellner published the edited volume (with Krishna Adhikari) Nepal’s Dalits in Transition (Vajra, 2024) with many contributions by Nepali and Dalit scholars. His MN Srinivas Lecture ‘The Persistence of Hierarchy: Paradoxes of Dominance in Nepal and Beyond’ and his Ladislav Holy Lecture ‘Liberalism and Hierarchy: A Tension-filled Relationship as seen from Social Anthropology’ came out. ‘The Far West of Nepal as a Remote Area’ appeared online in Far Western Review. With Sanjay Kumar Panday and Shashank Chaturvedi he published ‘The 2022 State Elections in Uttar Pradesh and the RSS-isation of the BJP’ (South Asia, 2023). Research on the 2024 Indian national elections is ongoing.
Stathis Kalyvas went on academic leave in January 2024, working on various dimensions of political violence. His latest publications included articles in World Politics, Italian Political Science, and Politics. He gave invited talks at, among others, King’s College, Northwestern, Yale, Oslo and Trondheim. He wrote and fronted a five-part historical documentary covering the 50 years of democratic life in Greece (1974–2024) to be broadcast in October by Greek public broadcaster ERT.
Ian Loader continued work from his ESRC-funded research on place, insecurity and everyday life. He co-authored papers in the British Journal of Criminology and Criminological Encounters and was co-writing a book based on the study. Ian also started work on the harms of automobility. He wrote a review article on the car as a criminological object, forthcoming in the Annual Review of Criminology. He prepared and delivered a new MSc option on ‘Criminology and the car’. Ian was interviewed for a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme on the political power of motorists and is writing an article for the Oxford Mail.
Debin Ma continued to research the relationship between state capacity and long-term economic growth in China and East Asia. As part of joint research, one thousand years of fiscal revenues for imperial China in a global comparative perspective were produced. Building from these data series, a theoretical framework that unifies the evolution of monetary, fiscal institutions with political ideology and state building in imperial China was constructed. On the role of ideology, he explored specific case studies on the differential development of China and Japan in the modern era as well as important literary works by writers such Lu Xun.
Sheilagh Ogilvie continued her research on institutions and economic history. She wrote essays on the guild system and on premodern trust for forthcoming volumes. She completed her book, Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). She delivered the keynote lecture on state capacity at the Swedish Economic History Annual Conference and the Max Weber Lecture on pandemic history at the European University Institute. She recorded an episode of the BBC’s In Our Time on the Hanseatic League. She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024–2027) for a project on serfdom.
Catriona Seth gave keynotes in Quebec (on Katherine Read), Stirling (on Marie-Antoinette) and Glasgow (on foundlings) as well as papers and lectures in Gotha, Paris and Cracow. She wrote articles for journals and Festschrifts. She was interviewed by Le Figaro and Vienna’s Die Presse. She hosted a Franco-Italo-British conference on eighteenth-century ‘Travelling Selves’. She continued to conduct public conversations with contemporary French writers. She was on the advisory panel for the exhibition on Duels at the Musée des Invalides and published pieces both in its catalogue and that of Now You See Us. Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920 (Tate Britain).
From 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2026, Julia Smith is the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-DFG funded project Crafting Documents, c 500 – c 800 CE.
Amia Srinivasan continued work on her monograph, The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics, and saw through to publication her co-edited volume Conversations in Philosophy, Law and Politics (OUP). She delivered the Quain Lectures at University College London and the Essex Lectures in Philosophy at the University of Essex. She continued to serve as a contributing editor for the London Review of Books, an associate editor of Political Philosophy and an editorial board member of Philosophy and Public Affairs. She hosted a conversation with Judith Butler on the politics of gender at the Oxford Town Hall.
Cecilia Trifogli wrote two articles on topics of medieval natural philosophy (Francisco Suarez on time) and theory of cognition (Giles of Rome on divine ideas). She was a speaker at a Conference on Francisco Suarez at the University of Toronto. She devoted the last six months to her edition of texts about cognition by the fourteenth-century philosopher Thomas Wylton, which is to be published in the British Academy Series Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi. The edition was at an advanced stage and the expected date of submission was the end of 2024. She continued to serve as Chairman of the British Academy Medieval Texts Editorial Committee.
Andrew Wilson continued his research on Roman society and technology. A major achievement was the consignment to press of a book on his excavations of the ‘Place of Palms’ at Aphrodisias (Turkey); he also published papers on ‘Latin, literacy, and the Roman economy’, and ‘Trade in the Roman empire’, and wrote several papers on disease and pandemics in the Roman world as part of a volume he was editing on ancient catastrophes. He conducted research on Roman gold mining and participated in the making of a documentary on Roman gold.
Peter Wilson continued work on the ERC-funded ‘European Fiscal-Military System 1530–1870’ project, publishing one chapter and completing four more for edited collections. He published two articles and a chapter relating to his ‘Mapping the Thirty Years War’ project. His book, Iron and Blood. A Military History of the German-speaking Peoples since 1500, won the Wellington Medal for Military History. German and Chinese editions of two books were also published. He presented papers in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK.
Examination Fellows
David Addison continued work on his monograph, Ethics and Institution: The Church in Late Antique Hispania, and outlined a new project on the comparative history of ascetic and monastic cultures across the Atlantic seaboard of western Europe. He delivered papers at international conferences in Rome, Notre Dame (Indiana), Leeds, and Canterbury, and co-organised a workshop in Oxford on medieval ideas of the soul and embodiment. He submitted journal articles and chapters on the martyr cults of Zaragoza, the monastic translations of Paschasius of Dumium, and the sermons of an eleventh century homiliary from Santo Domingo de Silos.
Muhammad Hameem Bin Sheik Alaudin completed his MA in Linguistics and graduated with a distinction from SOAS. He was accepted for a DPhil in English starting October 2024 which will be looking at the role of ornamental alliteration in Middle English poetry composed in accentual-syllabic metres. He has spent this past year doing preparatory reading on the topic.
Jane Cooper transferred to DPhil status and continued working on her thesis, 'Theories of the Sublime in English Poetry, 1650–1740'. She gave Shakespeare tutorials (FHS Paper 1) and delivered lectures on early modern poetry and natural philosophy for the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Blackfriars Hall and the University of Belgrade. She delivered papers at international conferences and presented a DPhil chapter at Trinity College, Cambridge which she is preparing for a special conference edition of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She prepared two articles for peer review and published book reviews and poetry in newspapers and literary magazines.
Alexander Georgiou continued his research across various topics in private law. Topics of recent work included: the consideration requirement in contract law, Sections 34 and 36 of the Law of Property Act 1925, discretion in equitable remedies, remoteness in tort law, and limitation periods in the tort of negligence where damage is temporarily ameliorated by subsequent events.
Maya Krishnan continued her research on Kant. She was a visitor at Princeton University and presented conference papers on her work on Kant's theology. She has started as an Assistant Professor in philosophy at the University of Chicago
Damian Maher successfully completed and defended his DPhil in English Literature about Henry James and his reception among contemporary moral philosophers. Alongside this project, he gave papers at a variety of international conferences on topics ranging from photography to violence and the nature of forgetting. He supervised several undergraduate theses and tentatively began a new research project to examine the concepts by which we understand and delineate troublesome relationships, such as obsession and alienation.
John Merrington submitted his doctoral thesis, entitled, ‘Restraint and Reform: the Five Senses in Thought and Practice in Latin Europe, c. 500–900’. He presented on aspects of his thesis research at the Oxford Medieval History Seminar, the Oxford Late Roman Seminar and a graduate research seminar at Queen Mary University of London. He co-hosted a one-day workshop on ideas about the body and soul in late antiquity and the middle ages and organised a panel at the Leeds International Medieval Congress. He carried out undergraduate teaching and acted as an outreach tutor for the history faculty.
Ross Moncrieff continued his doctoral research on early modern British understandings of China, presenting his work at several conferences in the UK and the US. He also co-organised and co-convened two research seminar series, one on early modern global intellectual history, the other on the pre-modern history of east Asia. Alongside these, he taught European and world history to Oxford undergraduates as well as supervising an undergraduate thesis. He also spent two months at Tsinghua University, Beijing, to improve his Chinese language skills.
Julia Moore was accepted to begin a DPhil in English and French Literature in Michaelmas 2024. She began work on this thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Dance-Poetry: Body, Soul and Movement in Early Twentieth-Century Poetry’. She read and spoke at a symposium on poet C. P. Cavafy, helped judge the 2024 Choix Goncourt du Royaume-Uni (the organisation of which she would jointly take over in 2024–25), and organised two workshops on scansion with Alicia Stallings, the Professor of Poetry.
Augustus Smith completed the second year of his MPhil in Economics, taking classes in empirical and mathematical methods, industrial organisation, and labour economics. He completed a thesis analysing the UK’s proposed ban on non-electric vehicles. This, along with a project measuring the changing level of market power and markups in different British industries, would form the basis of his doctoral thesis.
Lucas Tse completed the fourth year of the DPhil in Economic and Social History and was preparing for submission of his doctoral thesis.
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Rachel Bryan’s monograph, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War, was published by Cambridge University Press in October. She continued work on her scholarly edition of Henry James’s novel The Other House for Cambridge University Press and organised an international conference on James at All Souls in April 2024. She also convened a FHS course, gave a number of talks, and was in the process of qualifying as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She was writing a chapter on W. H. Auden, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Golden Age detective fiction.
Nuno Castel-Branco submitted to the University of Chicago Press the last version of his book on Nicolaus Steno and the intersection of disciplines in early modern science. He also started working on the first chapter of his second monograph. He published two academic articles in Isis, a leading journal in the history of science, and another in Lusitania Sacra, a journal on the history of religion of Portugal. He also gave talks on the history of science in the UK and the US and published two essays in Physics Today and Expresso, the oldest periodical in Portugal.
Paula Chan devoted much of the academic year to revising her dissertation for publication as a monograph. She had articles accepted by the journals Slavic Review and Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and presented new research at conferences in Czechia, France, and the United States. At Oxford, she delivered a lecture series about the Soviet Union during World War II. She received grant funding from Yad Vashem as well as Google Cloud. In addition, she won the 2024 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Humanities at Georgetown University.
Alexandros Hollender co-authored papers on the complexity of various solution concepts, including stationary points in quadratic programming and market equilibria in Fisher markets, which were published at the STOC and EC conferences. He was invited to give talks at Stanford, Liverpool, ETH Zurich, and Essex, as well as at a workshop on fair division at SAGT. In addition, he served on the programme committees for five conferences, and supervised an MSc dissertation on fair division of indivisible goods.
Rustam Jamilov wrote four new papers in various areas of economics and finance in collaboration with colleagues from the United Kingdom, Norway, Singapore, and Germany. His research was presented at numerous seminars and conferences across the UK, the United States, and Europe. He was awarded the European Central Bank’s Lamfalussy Fellowship and the John Fell Fund Early Career Researcher grant.
Alison John wrote a paper about the use of code-switching between Latin and Greek in Ausonius’ Ep. 6, arguing that Ausonius is engaging with Horace’s literary aesthetics espoused in his Satires 1.10, where Horace stages a debate about the correct usage of Greek within Roman literature, especially satire. She presented this research at the Nottingham Classics Research Seminar and revised it as a journal article. Her first monograph was accepted by CUP and is in production, slated for publication in 2025. She also completed other publications, including journal articles, book chapters, and an edited special issue.
Charlotte Linton spent two months in Amami Oshima, Japan carrying out research and organising an archival photo exhibition with colleagues at the University of Kagoshima, which travelled across thirteen locations. She gave talks on this work in Japan and Oxford and lectured and supervised students in anthropology. She submitted the reader’s report revisions on her monograph: Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan (Duke University Press, 2025) and wrote two articles. She also carried out three months of fieldwork in Scotland with local shepherds as part of her ongoing study of bioregional fibre systems.
Matan Mazor developed a computational model of inference about absence as counterfactual perception, currently under review. He published preprints about self-simulation in epistemic pretence and, separately, unconscious processing, and co-authored papers about self-models in anosognosia, visual search in OCD, model-free fMRI analysis, and metacognition in visual imagery. Matan supervised two MSc students in experimental psychology and served as secondary supervisor to two PhD students. He chaired an invited symposium about model-based perception at the annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, gave invited talks at LSE and Mount Sinai Hospital, and presented at three international conferences.
Chris Scambler continues to work on a book defending a modal version of logicism, the thesis that maths reduces to logic. He also wrote a paper on mathematical potentialism for a special issue of Philosophia Mathematica, and is writing a paper on relativism about the transfinite cardinalities for an OUP volume on the philosophy of set theory. He presented related work at various conferences and research seminars, including at Bristol, Oslo, and Lisbon.
Jane Tan published two preprints resolving conjectures concerning generalised chromatic polynomials (with Emma Hogan, Alex Scott and Youri Tamitegama) and semi-strong hypergraph colourings (with Kevin Hendrey, Freddie Illingworth and Nina Kamčev). Three of her earlier papers were accepted to mathematics journals and have appeared in press. Through research visits, she made progress on two new structural graph theory projects, as well as continued her ongoing project on aspects of graph reconstruction based in Oxford. She also gave invited seminar talks at the University of Warwick, TU Graz (Austria), and the Institute for Basic Science (South Korea).
During her last year in Fellowship, Karolina Watroba published her second book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (London: Profile, May 2024), co-curated ‘Kafka: Making of an Icon’, an exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York, and completed ‘Kafka in Korea: Case Study for Diversifying Modern Languages’, a research project funded by a British Academy Talent Development Award [TDA22\220037]. From September 2024 she has been a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, before taking up a tenured position in German Studies at the University of Edinburgh in June 2025.
Antonia Weberling focused on investigating early reptile embryogenesis to identify the timepoint of naïve pluripotency for embryonic stem cell generation. To this end, she carried out two staging series of pre-oviposition embryogenesis on the brown anole and the veiled chameleon. Two corresponding manuscripts were submitted by the end of summer 2024. She furthermore established a collaboration with several institutes in Colombia, and the German Academy for Hunt and Environment to gain access to the reproductive organs of the invasive hippopotamus population and all middle European Game shot for population control, respectively.
Anne Wolf continued her research on revolutions and authoritarianism. She published a journal article on authoritarian collapse in Tunisia in Comparative Political Studies and another article on ruling parties and the Arab Uprisings in Politics. Wolf edited The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics for which the online publishing of chapters had commenced. She also convened a conference on contention in formal institutions in authoritarian regimes at All Souls College and organised a special issue based on the conference proceedings. In addition, Wolf took up the position of Book Review Editor at Perspectives on Politics.
Takato Yoshimura finished five papers on topics such as many-body quantum chaos in Floquet circuits, new classical integrable systems from TTbar-deformation, and anomalous current fluctuations in charged cellular automata. He gave talks at BIMSA Beijing (online), CIRM Marseille, and the University of Tokyo. He was also invited to give a talk at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in Strasbourg.
Other Fellows
Ross Anderson was Senior Researcher of Natural History and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford’s University Museum of Natural History. He uses the early fossil record to understand how complex life first evolved on the Earth. This year he continued investigation of some of the first multicellular fossils from Svalbard, initiated major fieldwork in the Mackenzie Mountains of north-west Canada, and continued work on early embryo-like forms from Mongolia. Anderson gave seminars at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting, and at UC Santa Barbara and the University of York. He taught undergraduate palaeobiology courses and mentored students.
Clare Bucknell continued to write for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and Apollo. With Burrow, she wrote and hosted nine episodes of the LRB’s Close Readings podcast, ‘On Satire’. In the academic sphere, she published on Jonathan Swift and spoke at a conference on Lord Byron. She worked with the art historian Rye Dag Holmboe on his critical biography Howard Hodgkin: Art, Life, Interiors (Yale University Press).
Andrew Burrows continued to serve as a Justice of the UK Supreme Court, which is the final appeal court for disputes on questions of law in the UK. As a Supreme Court Justice, he also sat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which is the final appeal court for over 30 jurisdictions, mainly countries from what was the British Commonwealth. He gave several public lectures including the Toulson Annual Memorial Lecture on ‘Precedent and Overruling in the UK Supreme Court’; and gave a paper, or was Chair at various symposia on, for example, Restitution.
John Drury’s historical guide to the chapel came out.
Simon Green continued to work on the College History. He completed a 30,000-word chapter on ‘Blackstone’s Achievement’, to be included in volume 2. He conducted original research on the early career of Richard Pares to form part of a key chapter in volume 3. He also worked towards the completion of volume 3, more generally.
Claire Hall continued her research as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Durham, writing a first draft of a book on Greek and Roman conceptions of the future. She also published an article on Foucault, and wrote for the London Review of Books on topics in ancient philosophy and medicine.
Launcelot Henderson continued to sit part-time as a retired member of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, hearing appeals in the Civil Division of the Court. He wrote leading judgments in cases concerning taxation and planning law. He also chaired the Trust Law Committee, and was a trustee of the Society for the promotion of Hellenic Studies.
Peregrine Horden prepared for publication by Oxford University Press the three-volume multi-author history of the College and conducted research into the attitudes of Christopher Codrington to enslavement.
Dmitri Levitin continued teaching and researching at the University of Utrecht. He completed a final draft of his book, Ivory Towers: a New History of the Sciences and the Humanities from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Age of Newton for Penguin (and Harvard UP). He wrote academic articles and public life pieces, including a high-profile piece on Russian imperialism. He delivered the Dacre Lecture in Oxford on ‘The Origins of Modern Eurocentrism, 1700–1800’. He co-organised at Caltech a major international conference: ‘Isaac Newton: Friends, Foes, Followers’. In College, he served as a general examiner and continued to sit on the Library Committee.
Tess Little completed the manuscript of her DPhil thesis monograph on the 1970s women’s liberation movement in the UK, US, and France in transnational perspective, and began to research her second history book, visiting archives and conducting interviews in various countries. She wrote book reviews for Literary Review, an essay for The Paris Review Daily, and a book chapter for forthcoming anthology Writing the Murder; she also continued work on her second novel.
Alison Macdonald continued to practice as a barrister at Essex Court Chambers, London, specialising in public international law, international arbitration, and human rights law. She spoke on legal issues relating to her fields of practice at a number of conferences and seminars, both in the UK and abroad, and (with Akande) convened a workshop in College on the role of the United Nations General Assembly in promoting international peace and security.
Alex Mullen published two volumes incorporating ancient sociolinguistics, Social Factors in Latinization and Languages and Communities (ed. with Woudhuysen), and a third was in production. She continued to recover texts from Roman writing tablets: co-writing Roman Inscriptions of Britain IV with Alan Bowman (BA-funded); uncovering the best assistive technology (SSHRC-funded); and exploring the tablets of the RMO (Leiden). She undertook a lecture tour in Canada. She lead Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools and served on various boards, including for Britannia, Journal of Roman Archaeology, the Centre for the study of Ancient Documents and the ICS.
Jesse Norman published The Winding Stair in paperback, with an afterword on the historical novel. He led seminars on ‘The British Paraconstitution’ with Colin Kidd and on ‘Truth and Fiction/Truth in Fiction’ with Clare Bucknell and Jonathan Freedland. He prepared a colloquium on ‘Confronting Autocracy in Peace and War’, and gave invited talks on The Winding Stair at book festivals and podcasts; on Adam Smith, Edward Coke/Francis Bacon, and on building Civil Service capability at the Saïd School. He continued work on his new NMITE university, www.nmite.ac.uk, and was elected to the Defence Committee, and re-elected as an MP.
Philipp Nothaft spent most of the year collaborating with Ildar Garipzanov (Oslo) on the book project Minuscule Texts and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages. He was also a visiting fellow at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (project ‘Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus’), where completed research for a study on Pseudo-Ptolemaic ‘Combustion Tables’ in medieval Europe. Among his publications of 2023–2024 were seven new journal articles and two book chapters. In September 2023 he spoke on medieval astronomy at the World Copernican Congress in Torún, Poland.
David Pannick continued in practice at the Bar, specialising in constitutional and administrative law, and appellate advocacy. He also continued his work as a Crossbench member of the House of Lords. He spoke to schools and universities on advocacy and contributed to newspapers on legal topics.
Erik Panzer published two preprints: one, together with Francis Brown and Simone Hu, constructed unstable cohomology classes of the general linear group, and cohomology classes of the odd commutative graph complex. The other preprint was a joint work with Clement Dupont and Brent Pym, developing an algebraic theory using logarithmic geometry to define regularised integrals on manifolds with corners that satisfy Stokes’ formula. Erik continued research on Apery limits from Feynman integrals, and he supervised a summer research project with four students to develop further new combinatorial invariants of Feynman integrals from cuts of graphs.
William Waldegrave [Lord Waldegrave of North Hill] continued as Provost of Eton College, as a member of the House of Lords and as Trustee of a number of charities. He contributed a number of articles to various publications including the New Statesman. He was a member of the President of the Royal Society’s Advisory Committee and a Council Member of St George’s House, Windsor.
Marina Warner finished her book Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (Harper Collins, 2025), and curated a show, ‘The Shelter of Stories’, exploring the same themes, for Compton Verney,to open 2025–26. Her collection of essays, Forms of Enchantment came out in paperback. She continued reviewing for The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and other journals, took part in discussion events in London, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, and contributed to documentaries on television and radio, including one on bananas.
Frederick Wilmot-Smith continued to practice as a barrister at Brick Court Chambers in London. He also continued his academic research, working on a number of papers and attending conferences.
George Woudhuysen was an assistant professor in Roman history at the University of Nottingham. A list of recent publications and activities could be found here.
Honorary and Emeritus Fellows
Andrew Ashworth’s principal research activity for the year to July 2024 was a co-authored study (with Professor Juan Ignacio Pina Rochefort, of Santiago, Chile) of what is often called ‘the duty of easy rescue’, or ‘bad Samaritan laws’. The study took in English law, comparative laws from continental legal systems, and elements of political theory. Publication of a book, in Spanish and in English, was envisaged for 2025.
Margaret Bent published a major book: The Motet in the Late Middle Ages (New York, Oxford University Press, 2023). Several articles were due out, and she hoped to make progress with other long-running projects. She continued to curate a well-attended online seminar series.
Paul Brand successfully completed a fifth volume of his Earliest English Law Reports covering the years 1290–91 for future publication by the Selden Society. His chapter on ‘England in the Thirteenth Century’ appeared in vol. II of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom and wrote a chapter in the Festschrift for John Maddicott published by the Pipe Roll Society. Most recently his essay on ‘Proof by Witnesses in Proceedings in the English Common Law Courts in the Thirteenth Century’ appeared in La Culture judiciaire anglaise au Moyen Age (Paris, 2024).
Robin Briggs has delivered the full text and other materials for his book on the history of north-western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the First World War to the publisher (Wiley). The book was in production and should be published in the coming year.
John Cardy continued to work in theoretical physics. The highlight was the award of the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, presented at a gala ceremony in Los Angeles. He published a single-author paper in Physical Review Letters, which was chosen as an Editor's Suggestion. It resolved a long-standing paradox in the physics of disordered magnets and fluids. He gave an invited seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and several remote presentations.
Vincent Crawford completed work on nonparametric estimation of behavioural models of consumer behaviour and continued work on the cognition underlying Nash equilibrium. He started work on a book with working title Strategic Thinking. He gave a plenary lecture at the Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design in Budapest (held partly in his honour), a ‘semi-plenary’ lecture at the International Conference on Public Economic Theory in Lyon, and several other talks. He continued to serve as editor of Games and Economic Behavior and the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design and as a trustee of the Sanjaya Lall Memorial Foundation.
Guy Goodwin-Gill provided advice in proceedings for an advisory opinion on the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He advised the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on international refugee law, published an introduction to the UK Supreme Court’s November 2023 judgment in the Rwanda case, and recalled evidence he gave more than 25 years ago in advising a US non-governmental organisation on the safe third country agreement with Canada. He continued to give talks, including at the 2024 conference of the Cambridge International Law Journal where he spoke on the need to protect those displaced by climate change.
Christopher Hood completed his Nuffield-funded research on the history of public spending control in the UK from 1993 to 2015; published (with three co-authors) the book resulting from the project (The Way the Money Goes, OUP 2023); and presented findings from the study both at academic conferences and at practitioner meetings, including HM Treasury, the Institute for Government, the IMF Fiscal Affairs Department, the National Audit Office, the Overseas Development Institute and the EY Innovations conference.
Jane Humphries delivered the Presidential Address at the annual conference of the Economic History Association in Pittsburgh. Among her publications were sole-authored papers in both leading field journals drawing on her ongoing Leverhulme-supported research into the economic history of caring labour. She gave the Kalb lecture at Rice University and the Royal Economic Society Annual Public Lecture in Glasgow, seminars at Cambridge, Rice, Geneva, and Sant’Anna Pisa, and papers at several conferences, as well as participating in podcasts and round-table discussions. She combined teaching graduate students in Oxford with the final year of her Centennial Chair at LSE.
Edward Hussey continued to work in the general area of language in Plato and Aristotle. This broadened out from an initial investigation of certain problems relating to the verbs einai 'be' and legein 'say'. It was producing promising results in the shape of new interpretations of Plato's Sophist, Aristotle's Categories, and Aristotle's modal logic, as well as throwing light on the history of the verbs themselves and the connections between them.
Vaughan Lowe worked mainly on two research projects as a member of international study groups. One was the report on ‘the Applicability of International Law to Cyber Activities’, for the Institut de droit international, for which he was co-rapporteur. The other was ongoing work on international law and critical undersea infrastructure convened by NATO.
Ian Maclean continued to work on intellectual and book history in the early modern period. He made progress on an intellectual biography of Girolamo Cardano. He gave papers (some virtually) on dissidence in Early Modern Europe and on Cardano’s late philosophy in Lyon, Pisa, and Oxford. An article on Hippocrates, Bacon and the aphorism appeared, as well as a web publication of the chronology of Cardano’s writings. He was preparing the papers delivered at the 2023 conference in St Andrews on early modern publishers for publication. He continued to serve on various editorial boards and international review bodies.
James Malcomson continued research on relational contracts: ongoing relationships in which not all details are fully specified in a legally enforceable way. (Standard examples are employment, commercial supply relationships and purchase of services.) This year he published two papers on this: one on the implications of relational contracts for the impact of uncertainty on investment by firms, and the other on developments stemming from his early research with Bentley MacLeod, now at Princeton University, that was considered a classic in the literature on relational contracts.
Avner Offer completed an article on ‘Markets and Public Goods’ which was published in August. It was mostly concerned with the norms of integrity, truth, and patience as social assets. Another article (with Ofer Lahav) on the social value of astrophysics was under review by a journal. His main research revisited British finance in the First World War. This was motivated by recent controversies in the understanding of money. He tried to keep up with the social implications of Artificial Intelligence, and sometimes pondered its implications for the future of the College.
David Parkin continued working on the ‘Difu Simo’ project, now investigating Swahili and related indigenous dialect concepts on illness and stigma in coastal East Africa. A paper to be published linked findings from the above project and showed how an extended notion of prosody could be a popular linguistic means of avoiding such stigma. Parkin was also preparing to co-edit a volume assessing the sociolinguistic publications of the late Jan Blommaert. His research interest in China continued through association and virtual meetings with the China Global Academy based in Beijing, Shanghai and the UK.
Nicholas Rodger’s activities during the past year were heavily committed to finishing his book, now entitled The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain, 1815–1945. That title notwithstanding, he yielded to his publisher's pressure to add an Epilogue which briefly carried the story down to the early years of this century. He was reading the first proofs, and the book was published in October.
Alexis Sanderson worked on a book on the history of religion in Kashmir. He published two articles, one on a key term of Buddhist Logic and the other on the evidence of early Tantric Śaivism found in the works of the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti. He gave a series of ten lectures for Taisho University, which were translated into Japanese for publication, and three others at other Institutes in the Tokyo area. He continued to work on his main project, the writing of a critical edition and translation with commentary of the Tantrāloka, the magnum opus of the tenth-century Kashmirian scholar Abhinavagupta.
Dan Segal continued to study conditions for axiomatisability in profinite groups. In the particular case of free pro-p groups this seemed to lead to some simple, but apparently difficult, algebraic questions. He gave talks about this work in Germany and Italy.
Graeme Segal continued his work on the implications of quantum field theory for the nature of space-time, in the context of much recent interest in the fundamental physics community in attempts to formulate more clearly the questions of a quantum theory of gravity (i.e. of space-time). Segal felt honoured to be asked to lecture last October at Edward Witten's Hamburg Prize award meeting, it led to his giving four lectures in Edinburgh on the formulation of spatial scaling properties in abstract quantum field theory. He planned to expand these more systematically.
Boudewijn Sirks’s book The Colonate in the Roman Empire was published (CUP). He also published articles on the colonate after 500 AD, on the legislation regarding natural children in Late Antiquity, on arbitration in the early modern Netherlands and on the methodology of legal history. He edited the Decisiones of Johan van Bleiswijk.
Stephen Smith was contracted with Cambridge University Press to submit two books at the end of September 2024. The first reconstructed and evaluated the policies of the Chinese Communist Party towards the five religions that it officially recognised, and towards folk religion, which it did not. The second was a social and cultural history of folk religion and of ritual specialists under Mao Zedong, which explored how folk religion survived, despite prolonged ideological and political assault.
Eva Margareta Steinby’s focus was still on the edition of brick stamps from Central Italy, Bolli doliari romani dell'Italia centro-occidentale (address bollidoliari.org). These stamps are documents that yielded sorts of information not found in literary sources. The mission of the project is to provide users with reliable transcriptions, interpretations and dating. As new material comes from excavations, all archaeologists should be convinced to publish their stamps properly and with good photos, giving the reader the opportunity to verify the transcription. Such efforts and a chase for good figures took up most time in the past year.
Hew Strachan continued to serve as an adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Security Strategy until the dissolution of Parliament in June 2024 and to be involved with projects on the war in Ukraine.
Michael Teper continued his research on quantum field theories using lattice field theory techniques. He co-authored two conference papers, one on the physics of ZN gauge theories (arXiv:2312.03855) and a second on the spectrum of glueball particles in Quantum Chromodynamics with just one flavour of quark (arXiv:2312.00470). In July he gave a set of lectures at the IAS Princeton, and he was invited to give a talk in June on his research at the annual String Theory conference. He continued to be part of the recently funded Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings and this funded a DPhil student to work with him, starting this Autumn.
Keith Thomas continued to prepare a three-volume collection of his essays and articles.
Charles Webster completed a volume of essays entitled In Times of Strife which was published by the Taylor Institution, Oxford. Part of this volume relates to the work of Samuel Hartlib, an important figure in the affairs of interregnum Britain. He was well-advanced on a study specifically relating to Samuel Hartlib, which was provisionally entitled, A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib. He continued his long-standing involvement with issues relating to health care and the NHS.
Chris Wickham continued to work on his book on communal Italy around 1200, and aimed to complete it in the next year. The Italian translation of The Donkey and the Boat came out in May, and six articles reached publication. He lectured in Tübingen, Valencia, Lisbon, Ravenna, Bologna, Catania, Rome, Bergamo, London and Edinburgh, and gave the keynote lecture at the Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo at Spoleto and at the Semana Internacional de Estudios Medievales at Estella.
Andrew Wilkinson continued as co-chair of the UK National Neonatal Research Database, which compiled clinical data of over 1 million babies and 10 million days of intensive care, that forms the basis for a wide range of national and international research projects. As author (co-chair) of the published NICE Guideline for Screening and Treatment of Blinding Retinopathy of Prematurity (4th Ed.) he revised a further update of recently published evidence. He was on NIHR data monitoring committees for randomised controlled trials of an antibiotic and a new artificial surfactant aimed at reducing chronic lung disease in preterm infants.
Visiting Fellows
Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Hilary Term) studied the role of attitudes such as ‘hope despite evidence’ in deliberative contexts marked by uncertainty, interdependence, and value-pluralism. During the term, she finalised a paper on the metaphor of orientation in moral thinking, comparing Kant and Murdoch; a paper on the role of hope in humanity in Kant’s conception of diachronic social agency; and drafted three new essays on hope as an attitude of practical assent, and as a requirement for normative change, and for resistance under oppression. She also presented her work at the VF Colloquium and gave talks at the Department of Philosophy at Oxford University, and at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome.
Janine Barchas (University of Texas at Austin, Hilary and Trinity Terms) conducted research in archives and special collections in and around Oxford (including the National Archives at Kew) for her book about positional goods and the early rental economy during the time of Jane Austen. In addition, she gave public talks about her research, met with Austen family descendants and experts, and undertook site visits to Austen-related locations. She also worked on two public exhibitions to be held in 2025 in honour of Austen’s 250th birthday (hosted in NYC and Bath) plus a graphic novel/biography about Austen with illustrator Isabel Greenberg.
Jeffrey Brodsky (University of Pittsburgh, Michaelmas Term) engaged in discussions with faculty at the University in his area of specialisation, including those in Structural Biology, the Kavli Institute, the Department of Paediatrics and Pharmacology, and the Dunn School of Pathology, and he was the external member for an M.Sc. exam in Paediatrics. A new scientific collaboration was established with the Chair of Pharmacology, and he presented for the Departments of Biochemistry and Structural Biology. Discussions and associated literature reviews augmented completion of a grant application and several publications. A highlight was the preparation, presentation, and discussions associated with his VF lecture on 17 October.
William Dalrymple (Independent Researcher, Trinity Term) worked on the manuscript for his book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, making use of the Bodleian Library resources and conversations with current Fellows. While in Oxford he gave two lectures to the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies on the above text, and one on his last book, The Anarchy at the Fitzhugh Auditorium.
Alison Duxbury (University of Melbourne, Michaelmas and Hilary Terms) focused on her co-authored book on the application of international human rights law to members of armed forces. While at All Souls, she participated in the activities of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and gave presentations at the Bonavero Institute, the Oxford Public International Law Research Seminar series, and the All Souls Visiting Fellow Colloquium. Alison also participated in an expert committee established by the Commonwealth Secretariat, culminating in a meeting in South Africa in November, to draft the Commonwealth Military Justice Principles.
Gunnel Ekroth (Uppsala Universitet, Trinity Term) continued her project on ancient Greek sanctuaries as spaces for interaction between gods and humans, which would be published as a monograph. She wrote a paper on sacrificial Greek terminology, presented in a conference at the EPHE in Paris, and gave two seminars in Oxford. She also finished editorial work on three volumes; on Greek sacrifice, the Swedish scholar Martin P. Nilsson and Logistics in Greek sanctuaries, all of which will be published in 2024.
Oren Gazal-Ayal (University of Haifa, Michaelmas and Hilary Terms) continued his research on prison overcrowding and approaches to addressing the issue, as well as the study of alternatives to imprisonment. He finalised several other studies on the effects of bail on dangerousness, the influence of judges' gender and professional backgrounds on sentencing decisions, the impact of judicial specialisation on exclusionary rule rulings, and criminal sentence disparity. He also researched false confessions. He presented his works in several forums in Oxford, including the Visiting Fellows Colloquium and the All-Souls Criminology Seminar Series.
Edith Gonzalez (University at Buffalo, Trinity Term) made public and professional presentations at the Bodleian Library, The British Library, and the Society for Historical Archaeology annual conference. As a result, she would be editing a volume on the history and archaeology of Barbuda with Springer Publishing, and was in progress with a book contract for Bodleian Library Press. She expected to submit two more scholarly articles for publication in the Fall term and was scheduled for two additional presentations - one as an invited speaker to the annual Humanities Institute at her home university, the second as part of a Caribbean focused session at an international archaeology conference.
Daniel Handler (Independent Researcher, Michaelmas and Hilary Terms) spent several hours each day researching in the library and engaging in conversation with College/University colleagues. He anticipated this would lead to the publication of a work of fiction in perhaps two years.
Selim S. Kuru (University of Washington, Michaelmas and Hilary Terms) completed research for a monograph, The Empire and Poetics of Desire, which he presented at the VF Colloquium. He also completed the edition of two late eighteenth-century narrative poems, ‘Book of Young Men and Women’, and began translation for a collaborative project commissioned by the Davis Collection, Copenhagen, Denmark on which he gave an invited lecture at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He also carried out preliminary research on three Ottoman Turkish manuscripts in the Bodleian.
Elisabeth Lorans (Université de Tours, Michaelmas and Trinity Terms) mainly worked on a book about the transformation of urban settlements in Northern France and England between the 4th and 11th centuries, in a comparative perspective. She collected and read a large quantity of recent publications regarding England but also, to some extent, France, using the facilities offered by the Bodleian Library. She also organised at the College, in May, a day-seminar with half a dozen speakers on urban settlements in England in the early Middle Ages.
Simon Mills (Newcastle University, Michaelmas Term) finished an article on looted manuscripts and the study of Islam among 18th-century Pietists in Halle. He wrote a chapter for a forthcoming volume on two 18th-century Arabic Bibles printed in London, which benefited from research on little-studied manuscripts and rare books in the Bodleian Library (including a hitherto unknown copy of the Gospels, printed in Aleppo in 1706). He also prepared and presented a lecture for the Visiting Fellows Colloquium. This would furnish material for a book on the Syrian Christian traveller and scholar, Theocharis Dadichi.
Timothy Raylor (Carleton College, Trinity Term) progressed his editorial project on Hobbe's teaching of, and writings about, rhetoric. He utilised resources at the Bodlieian library, and completed his bibliographical analysis of 17th-century editions of the English translation. While focusing on the pursuit of larger-scale research projects, he was also able to undertake smaller scale projects, such as a paper on Hobbes's place within the Cavendish family, which was delivered at a workshop on 'The Cavendish Circle: Philosophical Networks of the 17th Century' at University Ca'Foscari Venezia, Italy on 30 April 2024. He revised this for a special issue of the journal, Hobbes Studies.
Benjamin D. Simons (University of Cambridge, Hilary Term) used his visit to develop collaborations with researchers in both theoretical physics and the biomedical sciences. Specifically, he worked on the development of biophysical models to study the role of mechanical cues in the regulation of cell state transitions and plasticity during the maintenance and repair of epithelial tissue. He also completed a study on mutant cell dynamics in the mouse mammary gland epithelium. He gave research presentations in the Department of Theoretical Physics, at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, and the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology.
Aaron Tikuisis (University of Ottawa, Hilary and Trinity Terms) conducted research on the classification of C*-algebras. He collaborated with Professor Stuart White at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, and began projects with Shanshan Hua and Robert Neagu, both PhD students at the Mathematical Institute. He also took advantage of the proximity to Germany in order to visit and work with Grigoris Kopsacheilis and Andrea Vaccaro at the University of Munster.
Andrew Wathey (The National Archives, UK, Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity Terms) drafted portions of a book on the composer, poet, bishop, and correspondent of Petrarch, Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361), dealing mainly with his bureaucratic and intellectual involvements in Paris and Avignon in the period before he became a bishop in 1351. He also coordinated the fortnightly Visiting Fellow Colloquia, and two events: (i) a colloquium 'Higher Education in Britain in 2030', with involvement from universities, sector agencies and policy professionals; and (ii) a presentation and small exhibition on the work of The National Archives, with staff from the College's Library and from TNA in Kew.