Annual Report Summary 2025
The Warden
Besides his duties as Warden, John Vickers continued to work with Mark Armstrong on the theory of competition between multi-brand firms. He gave the keynote lecture, on merger policy, at the annual conference of the Association for Competition Economics in Milan, and spoke at other conferences, including one to mark 25 years of the Competition Act. He published papers in the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, the International Journal of Industrial Organization, and the Competition Law Journal.
Senior Research Fellows
Michael Braddick saw into print his biography of Christopher Hill, the influential Marxist historian, and gave related papers in London and York. He continued to work on two major projects: the history of the English grain trade between 1315 and 1815 and the history of the English revolution. He gave papers on those projects in Aix-en-Provence, Oxford, Leiden, London and Vanderbilt University. Two articles on the revolution appeared in print and he made significant progress with further publications on both the revolution and the grain trade. A major conference on the grain trade held in College should give rise to further publications.
Francis Brown worked on algebraic geometry and number theory with application to high-energy physics. His recent work continued his study of the cohomology of the general linear group over the integers and the construction of infinitely many new cohomology classes. In addition, he wrote a definitive theory of positive geometries with Clément Dupont, and completed a long-standing project with Tiago Fonseca on the Gross-Zagier algebraicity conjecture. He was awarded a six-year ERC Synergy Grant project on the mathematics of scattering amplitudes, commencing in June.
Santanu Das has been working on a monograph on queer lives and literature in the early twentieth century, under contract with Cambridge University Press. The Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing is almost complete. He is giving the Annual Armistice Lecture 2025 and is advising the Imperial War Museum on its upcoming exhibition on India and the Second World War. He continues as one of the editors of the Cambridge Quarterly.
Colin Burrow completed final revisions to his edition of the poems of John Marston for the Oxford edition of Marston’s works. He completed an article on the Welsh occasions of Love’s Martyr, and (for The London Review of Books) pieces on the Brothers Grimm and on satire. He wrote chapters on epic and on lyric for his Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English Literary History (a series of which he is a general editor) and continued as General Editor of The Review of English Studies.
Cécile Fabre completed three chapters for her book – under contract with OUP – Value, Justice and Humankind’s Common Cultural Heritage (out of a projected seven, with two to go), as well as two papers (not for the book) on issues relating to the ethics of cultural heritage. She has continued to draft papers on the moral duty to vote. She has given talks in New York, Neuchatel, Paris, Los Angeles, and Oxford. In addition to her research, she has taken an active part in College and University governance.
Paul Fendley continued his research in condensed-matter theory and mathematical physics, focusing on quantum many-body systems with strong interactions. He completed a paper extending his results on non-invertible symmetries and dualities to two-dimensional chiral models and is finishing one providing a simple proof of the integrability of the XYZ spin chain. He gave a lecture series in São Paulo, along with conference talks in Stony Brook and Stockholm. On the community side, he joined the editorial board of Physical Review X. On the All Souls side, he completed his term as Dean of Visiting Fellows.
Ruth Harris spent the academic year at the European University Institute outside Florence. She gave the inaugural lecture in September, mentored graduate students from around Europe and continued work on the concept of the ‘Oriental Christ’ in the nineteeth century. Two articles in press were published during the year. She is currently organising an international conference on ‘Metanoia’, or processes of conversion and self-transformation, to occur at All Souls in December. Her book, Guru to the World (2022) will be honoured at a major anniversary celebration of Vivekananda, jointly sponsored by UCLA Berkeley and the Vedanta Society of Northern California in November.
Thomas Hegghammer published an article on economic deprivation in terrorism studies and a syndicated op-ed on identity mimicry in conflict. He continued work on a book about the long history of jihadism and advanced several article projects, including one using 150 years of al-Ahram newspaper text data to map Arab newsreaders’ worldviews, one on technology’s impact on manhunt timelines, and one exploring how large language models can infer jihadist motivations from first-person accounts. He also developed and taught a university course on Computational Methods for Area Studies and gave a lecture on Arabic text extraction for the Arab Council on Social Sciences.
Cecilia Heyes is a psychologist studying the development and evolution of human minds. She continued work on her book, The Invention of Thought, drafting chapters on the cultural evolution of compassion, hunger, disgust, and sexual desire. She also co-authored two articles on the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness and paranoia, respectively, and gave invited lectures to the Darwin Club for Social Science and for Darwin Day in Iran.
Neil Kenny revised his monograph on Rabelais and the social order in the light of feedback received from peer reviewers and others. It is under contract with OUP. He published an article on Rabelais and gave talks in Paris on him and other topics (including as Visiting Professor for a month at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). He did research towards a future book on early modern French literature and the social order, presenting some of it (Montpellier, Bristol). He continued his work for the BA on language policy, giving talks and publishing an opinion piece.
Michael Lobban continued his research into the history of English and imperial law. He published chapters on the law of treason in Britain’s Roman-Dutch colonies and on Bentham and Dicey and a completed an article for the Law Quarterly Review on O’Reilly v Mackman and English public law. He gave a lecture at the Inner Temple on ‘Religious disputes and the custody of children: Dr Barnardo in the House of Lords’. He also continued his research for volume 10 of the Oxford History of the Laws of England, focusing in particular on eighteenth-century public law.
Craig MacLean worked on projects aimed at understanding the evolutionary drivers of antibiotic resistance (ERC Advanced) and developing phage to target antibiotic resistant bacteria (INEOS Oxford Synergy). He published a paper testing a classic model of bacterial genome structuring and wrote a paper introducing the concept of potentiator genes as evolutionary catalysts for antibiotic resistance. He continued in his role as the founding chair of the Oxford AMR network and he co-chaired conferences on novel approaches to antimicrobial treatment and one-health approaches to human health. He gave seminars at conferences in Singapore, Bath, Oxford, and Birmingham.
Noel Malcolm continued to prepare an edition of Thomas Hobbes’s autobiographical and occasional writings, which will appear as a volume in the Clarendon Edition of the Complete Works of Hobbes. This involved archival research, the collation of printed and manuscript texts, and detailed investigation of the printing history of several of these works. His new edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan in the Oxford World’s Classics series was published in late 2024.
Miriam Meyerhoff completed chapters and articles on sociolinguistic theory and method, variation in Bislama, Nkep, New Zealand Sign Language and doctor-patient interaction. As well as working on continuing grants on Austronesian linguistics and fieldwork in Espiritu Santo, she started work on two new grants: real time language change and migration patterns in Auckland English, and mentoring a Marie Curie post-doctoral student. looking at politeness and face threat management in clinical encounters.
Catherine Morgan published two articles (on excavations which she co-directed in the ancient theatre of Sparta and on pottery production in the Ionian islands) and submitted to press a co-edited book on western Greek polychrome pottery and a further article on ancient Greek federalism. She directed the first of two study seasons in preparation for publication of 1930s British excavations in the polis of Astakos in Akarnania, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oslo and the Greek Archaeological Service. She gave papers in Oxford, London, and Edinburgh.
Lucia Prauscello focused on two major projects: revising The Roots of Atticism, co-authored with O. Tribulato and F. Favi, published by De Gruyter in December 2024; and co-editing volume 88 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, released in May 2025, featuring new texts from the AHRC project Hexameters beyond the canon, where she was PI. She wrote four articles, examined three PhD theses, and gave papers in Naples, Milan, and Oxford. She continued editorial work on The Cambridge Classical Journal, the Sozomena volumes, and the Cambridge Classical Text and Commentaries series, and delivered the keynote at the 31st International Congress of Papyrology.
Ian Rumfitt spent most of the year working on his book on truth and meaning, which is now entitled Wise Men's Counters: Knowledge of Meaning; Reasons for Speaking. He presented part of the work in a seminar in Hilary Term and hopes to send OUP the final version this autumn. He was also one of the organisers of a three-day conference to mark the centenary of Michael Dummett (Fellow 1950–1979) which was held in College and at Christ Church in June/July. He presented a new paper ('Alternative Questions and Logical Laws') at that event.
Gavin Salam has been working on quantum chromodynamics and phenomenology at high-energy particle colliders. He has continued his research on parton showers, funded through his Royal Society Research Professorship. He wrote an article on a key outstanding element for general next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accurate parton showers, showed how to ensure positivity when combining parton showers with next-to-leading order calculations, and brought insight into the energy scaling of non-perturbative corrections. He spoke on collider physics and its future goals to CERN council, and gave the concluding theory talk at the annual Higgs Hunting conference.
Lucia Zedner published articles and chapters on sentencing, citizenship deprivation, changing influences on criminal justice policy, and algorithmic risk assessment. She wrote papers on legal dilemmas in tackling extremism and on draconian new border control and immigration laws. She gave talks at Southampton, LSE, Oxford, the Opening Plenary at the Norwegian Criminology Conference, Oslo, and co-hosted a workshop on ‘War as Punishment, Punishment as War’ with Israeli colleagues. She continues as a Commissioner on the Independent Commission on Counterterrorism Law, Policy and Practice, which reports in September and gave expert advice to the Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences.
University Academic Fellows
Dapo Akande continued work as a member of the UN International Law Commission, particularly on immunity of state officials from foreign criminal jurisdiction, and general principles of law as a source of international law (both topics on the agenda of the Commission). He convened workshops in Oxford on the latter and on Treaty Regimes in International Law. He served as an expert adviser to a Working Group of States on international criminal accountability for chemical weapons use, and on an Expert Group examining the future development of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He was awarded an honorary DCL by Durham University
Diwakar Acharya completed an annotated critical edition of the Yuktidīpikā, the most significant polemic work on Sāṃkhya, and submitted it for publication. For the first time, he translated the Yuktyanuśāsana of Samantabhadra, a prominent Jain philosopher, for the first Jain Studies Conference at Oxford. He contributed in a Conceptual Workshop on Consciousness (Oxford) organised by the Berggruen Institute. He spoke on the royal and religious archives of Nepal at the Vienna workshop on Manuscript Collections across EurAsia. He also ran a graduate summer school in Kathmandu, and while in Nepal, he also consulted a number of scholars and manuscript archives.
Suzanne Aigrain was on sabbatical leave for the 2024‒2025 academic year. She spent the year visiting the Institut de Planetologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), working with Professor Nadège Meunier on the detection and characterisation of Earth-like exoplanets, while continuing to lead the ERC consolidator project ‘GPRV: overcoming stellar activity in radial velocity planet searches’ remotely, and preparing for the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission and the Terra Hunting experiment. She co-authored 17 articles in refereed astronomy journals, presented her research at international conferences in Marseille, and taught guest lectures on Gaussian Process Regression.
Timothy Endicott worked on a book on the philosophy of legal interpretation. He also published a chapter on constitutional interpretation in The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory, and a chapter on ‘The Parliamentary Executive’ in Catherine Marshall and Céline Roynier eds, Twenty-First Perspectives on the Scholarship of A. V. Dicey (Hart 2024). He is one of four editors and twenty authors working on a book about what happened next in sixteen former British colonies after they adopted the Westminster parliamentary system. He began the work for a 6th edition of his textbook, Administrative Law (5th ed, OUP 2021).
Wolfgang Ernst brought together numismatists, economic historians and Roman law scholars for a conference at All Souls on ‘Money in Roman Law‘. He hosted the International Roman Law Moot Court, welcoming eight teams for a four-day competition in Oxford. He offered assistance to the ‘Legal Interests in a World of Climate Change’ conference held at All Souls. He published case notes on two UK Supreme Court decisions and gave a series of invited talks on civil law matters, e.g. on breach of terms marring the assignments of choses in action.
Stathis Kalyvas published articles in the American Political Science Review and the Annual Review of Political Science. He gave invited talks, including keynote addresses at Cornell, Georgetown, the World Bank, Pompeu Fabra, Bristol, Thessaloniki, NYU-Abu Dhabi, Arizona State University, the European Conference of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the European Popular Party Summer University, and the 29th Annual Economist Government Roundtable. He completed a book manuscript on authoritarianism and culture.
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, Criminology & Criminal Justice and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and is co-writing a short book Ecologies of Security. Ian was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for a project entitled 'Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology'. The study seeks to use the car as an object through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. The three-year Fellowship begins in September
Sheilagh Ogilvie continued her research on institutions and economic history. She published a book, Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid (Princeton, 2025), and essays on premodern trust and Polish guilds. She wrote an article on serfdom for the Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte. She delivered the Adam Smith Lecture in Edinburgh, book talks at the Oxford Literary Festival and the World Economic History Congress in Lund, and research seminars in Padua, Milan, Cambridge, Oxford, and Manchester. She recorded podcasts for Conversations with Tyler and Terra-X. She supervised seven DPhil students and examined a doctoral dissertation.
Catriona Seth conducted research in archives in London, Paris, Geneva, Vienna, Parma and Modena. She gave keynotes/papers in France, Italy and the UK and lectures at the Wallace Collection and the Institut Français d’Ecosse. She hosted several French and Francophone authors for public conversations. She chaired the Institut Universitaire de France’s Senior Awards panel, continued her stint as external member of the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Conseil de la Recherche, was on the University of Basel’s Scientific Advisory Board and was made a board member of the Château de Versailles’ Research Centre.
Alpa Shah ran the ‘New Frontiers of Ethnographic Fieldwork’ seminars and began editing the papers for JRAI. She organised ‘In the Footsteps of Jaipal Singh Munda’ and wrote a chapter on Munda for Race, Resistance and Belonging at the University of Oxford (Bloomsbury). A Macgeorge Fellow in Melbourne, she won the Times of India AutHER award for The Incarcerations and was named by PrintIndia as a nonfiction writer shaping public debate. She spoke about her book from Berkeley to the BBC and UK House of Lords, where it sparked parliamentary debate. She also served on editorial boards, edited a book series, and as book prize jury.
Julia Smith continued her collaboration with materials scientists in Berlin on the project Crafting Documents, c 500 – c 800 CE, funded by the AHRC and the DFG. This included undertaking archival work in France and Switzerland and attending project team meetings in Berlin and Oxford. She published two articles, gave research seminars in Oxford and Cambridge and delivered the Early Medieval Europe plenary lecture at the 2025 International Medieval Congress in Leeds.
Amia Srinivasan continued work on her monograph, The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics, supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She delivered lectures based on the book material at UC Berkeley (as the Townsend Visitor), UC Irvine (as a Visiting Scholar), UCLA, University of Nevada Reno, and Northern Arizona University. 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 Free and Equal.
Cecilia Trifogli devoted most of the year to her edition of texts about cognition by the fourteenth-century philosopher Thomas Wylton, which will be published in the British Academy Series Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi. She submitted the full draft to the British Academy Medieval Texts Editorial Committee for feedback in December 2024 and she then worked on the Indexes. The edition is now ready to go into production. She continued to serve as Chairman of the British Academy Medieval Texts Editorial Committee.
Andrew Wilson published a book on his excavations of the ‘Place of Palms’ at Aphrodisias (Turkey), an article on the linguistic landscape of late antique North Africa, and co-authored articles on smallpox in Roman Britain and on the maintenance regime of the Roman aqueduct of Cahors as deduced from carbonate deposits in its channel. He prepared two other edited volumes and several more articles on various aspects of the Roman economy, ancient pandemics, and gold mining and technology. He gave an invited paper on Roman gold mining at a conference at Tresminas (Portugal).
Peter Wilson continued work on the European Fiscal-Military System 1530-1870 project, publishing three chapters in edited collections, writing another two, expanding the database of European auxiliary and subsidy contracts, and completing most of the typescript for a co-authored book. He also completed a further chapter on the Thirty Years War and presented papers in Germany, the UK, and USA.
Noam Yuchtman devoted much of his time to studying the role of the coercive power of states in shaping economic growth. He published several papers and gave a variety of talks on this topic, covering cases from the British Empire, to contemporary China, to the future of property rights in space. In addition to his research, Noam finished his term as president of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies and served as co-editor of the Review of Economic Studies. Noam was honoured to be named a Founding Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, alongside the Warden.
Examination Fellows
Muhammad Hameem Bin Sheik Alaudin transferred to DPhil status and has continued working on his thesis concerning the topic of medieval English poetics, provisionally entitled The Alliterative Survival: Ornamental Alliteration in Rhymed Accentual-Syllabic Verse in Middle English from 1300‒1550. He also presented a conference paper at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Jane Cooper worked on her DPhil thesis, Theories of the Sublime in English Poetics, 1650-1740, focussing on the intersection of Royalist (and, later, Tory) poetic theory and natural philosophy. She completed articles on generic changes in satire in the long seventeenth century and on Scriblerian satire and Whig-Tory aesthetic divides. She presented papers on seventeenth century Pindaric odes and the sublime at several conferences and taught Shakespeare and early modern poetry to Oxford undergraduates, co-hosted a conference on philosophy and poetics at All Souls and worked on a trade book on dynastic change as told through poetry in the seventeenth century.
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, ‘Hollander’ orders, cost of cure damages, and the ‘market rule’ in the assessment of damages. He has also begun work on a planned monograph on the law of damages based on his doctoral thesis.
Shastikk Kumaran continued and will complete his LLM at the University of Law. He will begin his BCL in Michaelmas Term 2025. He presented a paper at a conference in Berlin on the application of the rights to freedom of expression and assembly in situations of occupation and is pursuing further research initiatives in the international law of armed conflict.
Damian Maher has worked towards converting his DPhil thesis Making Good on Henry James: Moral Philosophers on Aesthetic Education’s Imperfections into a monograph. He has also written several reviews for academic and public journals, contributed a chapter to a forthcoming collected edition on aesthetic education, and has presented at several conferences as well as giving a paper on Stanley Cavell at the New School in New York.
John Merrington completed his doctorate in medieval history. He held a visiting researcher position at Princeton University. He presented on aspects of his research at the History of Science Programme Seminar in Princeton, at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and at the Leeds International Medieval Congress. He also carried out undergraduate teaching and acted as an outreach co-ordinator for the History Faculty. He has now begun work turning his thesis into a book.
Ross Moncrieff continued his doctoral research on early modern British understandings of China, passing his confirmation of status. He had articles accepted for publication by English Historical Review and Global Intellectual History. In May 2025, he ran a methodology workshop on global intellectual history for early career researchers, and he co-organised the Janus Project’s annual conference on Moral education between East Asian and Graeco-Roman Classics held in Oxford in June 2025. He also co-convened two research seminar series on ‘Early modern global intellectual history and the pre-modern history of east Asia’. He taught various Oxford undergraduate papers.
Julia Moore transferred to DPhil status and continued working on her thesis on dance and poetry in the early twentieth century. She taught an undergraduate course in French literary theory, and tutorials on the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. She is also preparing a journal article on Mallarmé. She gave a seminar paper in the Classics Faculty and hosted a book event for the Maison Française. She also co-organised the Choix Goncourt literary prize and co-founded a small poetry press.
Olana Peters has made steady progress on her DPhil, conducting archival research, drafting chapters, and preparing for her Confirmation of Status. With Professor Stephen Tuck, she co-authored the essay ‘A Place to Live, A Place to Belong: Student Protest in 1960s Oxford’ forthcoming in Race, Resistance and Belonging in the University: The Case of Oxford (Bloomsbury). In Michaelmas 2025, she will join Queen’s College as a Non-Stipendiary Lecturer.
Justas Petrauskas completed the first year of his two-year MPhil in Politics (Comparative Government), taking courses in comparative politics and political science research methods. He began work on his MPhil thesis, which explores the relationship between power-sharing institutions and the formation of inclusive national identities in ethnically plural societies, drawing, in part, on country case studies from the Western Balkans. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review.
Augustus Smith began his doctorate in economics, studying the economics of competition. Alongside completing coursework in microeconomic theory, he worked on his paper considering a potential ban on the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines which he presented to audiences at the Network of Industrial Economists Symposium, where it won the prize for the best paper, at the RES Easter School, and in Oxford. He has begun work, with Segye Shin and Howard Smith, on a paper accounting for incumbency advantage in repeated procurement auctions. He convened the department’s industrial organisation reading group and carried out undergraduate teaching.
Lucas Tse completed the DPhil in Economic and Social History. He has one chapter forthcoming in an edited volume and has one article in preparation for submission.
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Nuno Castel-Branco continued his research while maintaining affiliations with the ERC RUTTER and NOTCOM projects. His book The Traveling Anatomist (UChicago Press) was finalised for publication, he advanced his edited volume on religious experience and science (forthcoming with Cambridge), and continued research for his second monograph. He delivered invited talks across Europe and the US and taught at Oxford. He co-convened seminars, mentored students – including two supervisees at the University of Lisbon– and held committee roles. He also secured awards from multiple institutions such as Harvard’s I Tatti, the Royal Society, and Oxford’s John Fell Fund.
Paula Chan completed revisions of her first book manuscript, which is now under peer review. She then focused on data collection and coding for her second book project. During this time, she had articles accepted for publication in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, the Journal of Modern History, and Information & Culture, and contributed a chapter to the forthcoming edited volume Interrogating the Interrogators: History, Politics, and the Opening of Secret Police Archives in Ukraine. She also worked on co-editing the volume Defining Soviet Antisemitism: Everyday Jewish Experiences in the USSR and delivered invited talks in Oxford and Berlin.
Alexandros Hollender co-authored papers on equilibrium computation in team games and in auctions, and published at the EC, WINE, and ICLR conferences, as well as in the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing. He was invited to give talks at Dagstuhl, Singapore, Edinburgh, Southampton, Milan, and at the ALGA workshop. In addition, he organised two workshops, one in Edinburgh and one in Prague, served on the programme committees for three conferences and started co-supervising a DPhil student at the department of Computer Science.
Rustam Jamilov published in two leading economic journals: The Review of Economic Studies and Journal of International Economics. He has also completed two new papers with co-authors from Germany, Singapore, and Australia. He taught graduate courses at the University of Oxford and London Business School. His research was presented at numerous seminars and conferences across the UK, North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
Alison John prepared a major funding application for an ERC Starting Grant (Greek in the West: language communities, migration and the transformation of society in western Europe, 300-700 CE). The proposal was successful, and the project will begin in April 2026. She also finalised her monograph with Cambridge University Press, which will appear in print in December 2025, and wrote an article about the Greek poetry of Ausonius.
Charlotte Linton scompleted the manuscript of her monograph Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan to be published in October 2025 with Duke University Press. She published in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus and has another article under review. She supervised two undergraduate dissertations to completion, gave lectures to post-graduates in anthropology and taught undergraduate tutorials at Magdalen College. She also gave talks on her research in Oxford, Berlin and Glasgow. Charlotte spent two months in Shetland and Orkney on fieldwork and began writing the introduction and first chapter of her second book.
Matan Mazor published three papers on the role of counterfactuals in perception (a computational account and new empirical findings), a paper on the limits of unconscious processing, and a preprint on metacognition and mental health. He secured funding to investigate self-modelling in memory reconstruction through large-scale behavioural testing and neuroimaging, served as secondary supervisor to a DPhil student, and hosted two visiting PhD students in his group. He chaired a symposium at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, gave invited talks at UCL, KCL, and Cambridge, and presented at four international conferences.
Chris Scambler finalised his book manuscript Eliminative Logicism for submission to OUP in summer 2025 and prepared a chapter on Frege’s theory of real numbers for separate publication. He published a paper on set-theoretic potentialism in a Palgrave Companion, revised a paper on modality and mathematics for Philosophia Mathematica, and wrote papers on cardinality relativism and the axiom of choice. He co-organised the Michael Dummett Centenary Conference, held jointly with Christ Church, with Ian Rumfitt, Fabian Pregel, and Dan Isaacson, and is preparing a proposal for an edited volume based on the conference, in collaboration with the other organisers.
Jane Tan has completed five preprints on a range of combinatorial topics. Two highlights this year were a new probabilistic tool for studying random graphs that is the culmination of a multi-year Oxford-based collaboration, and the resolution of a 30-year-old conjecture on graph colouring with a group of international collaborators. Jane was invited to give talks on this and earlier work at numerous conferences and seminars in London, Bristol, Glasgow, Melbourne, Brussels and Budapest.
Antonia Weberling continued with her work on early reptile embryogenesis and managed to add two more clades (geckos and turtles). Her article on brown anole embryogenesis was published in Developmental Dynamics in April. She wrote up two further studies, on egg-cell maturation in the brown anole and on early embryo development of the veiled chameleon. She proceeded in setting up collaborations and conducting pilot studies across the globe to gain access to one species per clade for all amniotes (30,000 species altogether) and has by now access to about 100 species covering a substantial amount of the amniote phylum
Anne Wolf co-founded the Oxford Authoritarian Politics Network, and she co-organised five network events and a one-day conference at All Souls College on 23 April 2025 to engage the democratic and authoritarian politics literature in conversation. In addition, Wolf wrote three chapters on the topics of authoritarian parties, authoritarian informal institutions, and authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, which are forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics. She has also published an editorial, entitled ‘Rumours, Propaganda, and Conspiracies: New Insights on the Ideological Dimensions of Democratic Backsliding and Autocratization’, in Perspectives on Politics.
Takato Yoshimura wrote two papers on topics he has been working on in the last two years. One is about providing the first coherent theory of quantum many-body Ruelle-Pollicott resonances, and another one is on establishing a framework for studying hydrodynamic fluctuations in linearly degenerate systems. He has been also been invited to give talks/seminars at Cambridge, Les Disablerets, Beijing, and Les Houches. He was awarded the Frontiers of Science Award 2025 by the International Congress of Basic Science.
Other Fellows
Ross Anderson is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford’s University Museum of Natural History, where he has served as Interim Head of Research for the past year. He uses the early fossil record to understand how complex life first evolved. This year he has continued investigation of some of the Earth’s first multicellular fossils in northwest Canada and worked on a significant new discovery of early animal fossils in south China. Anderson gave seminars, including at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Boston, USA. He taught undergraduate palaeobiology courses and mentored students.
Clare Bucknell wrote for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and Granta. She completed a chapter on Byron for a forthcoming academic essay collection. She hosted two Close Readings podcasts for the LRB, On Satire and Novel Approaches. She continued to work with the art historian Rye Dag Holmboe on his 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 on the work of a Supreme Court Justice at the Oxford Union, on ‘Omissions in the Tort of Negligence’ at the launch of the 2025 Oxford University Undergraduate Law Journal, and on ‘Some Issues on Statutory Interpretation’ at the Statute Law Society Annual Conference.
Rachel Carnegie joined the College in October 2024 as its new Chaplain, having stepped down from her role as Executive Director of the Anglican Alliance, which connects the global Anglican Communion in tackling issues of poverty, inequality and environmental crises. Alongside her chaplaincy duties, she is focused on the role of faith in international development and is currently supporting the Anglican Church in Jerusalem in its humanitarian responses.
Claire Hall began a lectureship in Classics and Ancient History in Bristol, teaching a third-year course and supervising dissertations. She continued work on a book on ideas of the future in the Graeco-Roman world and submitted articles on the Greek and Latin language of the future and on Galen’s concept of prognosis. She also completed a course in Charity Law and Governance with the Chartered Governance Institute.
Launcelot Henderson has continued to sit part-time in the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal, and to chair the Trust Law Committee. He was also a trustee of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and was actively involved in governance issues on behalf of the College
Peregrine Horden negotiated for publication by Oxford University Press the three-volume history of the College and oversaw its final editorial stages in consultation with his co-authors, R. Darwall-Smith and S. J. D. Green. He conducted research into the economic history of the Codrington estates in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. He also published articles on the ecological history of the Mediterranean and on early medieval public health.
Dmitri Levitin taught at Utrecht University. His research focused on four projects: (i) an edition of the recently discovered notebook of Isaac Newton’s university roommate; (ii) an edition of a verbatim transcript of a sixteenth-century university disputation; (iii) an edition of a 17th-century treatise on the history of ancient sexuality; (iv) early modern scholarship of the Presocratics. He gave a keynote lecture at a conference on pre-modern intellectual history at UCL. Public life activities include writing for the Literary Review and recording a podcast with Anthony Grafton. In College, he served on the Library Committee.
Tess Little finalised the manuscript of her DPhil thesis monograph, forthcoming with Oxford University Press as Transnational Women’s Liberation: Feminist Activism in the US, UK, and France, 1967‒79. She also continued writing fiction, including work on her second novel, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Angela McLean was the Government Chief Scientific Adviser. Her role was to ensure that there was excellent science advice at the heart of government decision making.
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. With Anderson, Ernst and Meyerhoff, she convened a one-day conference in College on climate change, in June 2025. This followed on from the College’s previous climate change conference, in December 2022, and formed part of the week-long Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit held by the University in partnership with UN Human Rights.
Alex Mullen published the fifth volume of her ERC-funded project: Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies (OUP). She continued work on the fourth volume of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain with Alan Bowman, and on a book on Britain and Gaul. She collaborated on various projects, including on AI for reconstructing/contextualising Roman inscriptions (published in Nature), on advanced digital imaging, and on revitalising ancient history in schools. She served on various journal/management boards, e.g. Britannia, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Diglossi@, the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, the British Epigraphy Society, and the Institute for Classical Studies.
Philipp Nothaft spent most of the past year working on early medieval manuscripts for the project MINiTEXTS at the University of Oslo. Together with Ildar Garipzanov (Oslo), he completed and submitted a draft of a book entitled Minuscule Texts and the Transmission of Practical Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages. Among his publications of 2024‒2025 are six new journal articles and a chapter in the new Cambridge History of the Papacy. He delivered presentations at conferences/seminars in Würzburg, Oslo, and Oxford.
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 gave occasional lectures and talks on a range of legal topics.
Erik Panzer discovered a connection between an invariant of matroids defined by Speyer and Feynman integrals, which appeared as a preprint on graph-theoretic properties of this invariant. He also published one preprint with Brent Pym and Clément Dupont, explaining in particular how logarithmic morphisms encode tangential basepoints in the theory of motives and periods in algebraic geometry. In ongoing work, Erik studied the asymptotics of the tropical limit of scalar field theory and combinatorial Feynman graph invariants related to cuts and perfect matchings. He presented his work at research seminars and conferences in five countries.
John Redwood continued to provide daily analyses of main political and economic issues here, published a short book on being a boy, developed his critique of the Bank of England's bond and monetary policies, set out a tool kit to recover lost UK public sector productivity and began a critique of UK Regulatory quangos.
Justin Stover continued his work with George Woudhuysen on the translation of Aurelius Victor as part of his AHRC-funded Last Historians of Rome project. He has also been working on Victor producing a new critical edition of the Latin text of Victor's Historiae abbreviatae.
Simon Swain continued in his role of Vice-President at Warwick leading on the university’s innovation agenda and community engagement. At the British Academy he took over the chair of the Early Career Researcher Network and oversaw the preparation for the Network’s expansion nationally. He continued to act as PI of his Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award on the ’small texts’ of medieval Arabic medicine and to work on the Greek author Synesius with the help of Oxford’s community of imperial and late-antique Greek specialists.
William Waldegrave demitted as provost of Eton on 1 September 2024 and since then has become an active member of the House of Lords, serving on the Constitution Select Committee. He contributed articles and book reviews to a number of magazines and newspapers.
Marina Warner study, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, was published by William Collins in July 2025; meanwhile she has been working on the selection and structure of a complementary exhibition, ‘The Shelter of Stories’, at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, from 25 October till 22 February 2026. She continued reviewing for the New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and other journals, recorded a 12-part series of podcasts, on Fiction and the Fantastic for The London Review of Books’ Close Readings, gave the Carnegie Lecture in Edinburgh, and other talks in Paris, London, and elsewhere in the UK, and contributed to other events, podcasts, and documentaries on television and radio.
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, and he published an essay in the London Review of Books on the idea of the rule of law.
George Woudhuysen is an Associate Professor in Roman History at the University of Nottingham. In the past year, he has been working as part of the AHRC-funded Last Historians of Rome Project, directed by Professor Gavin Kelly at the University of Edinburgh. Alongside this, he published a chapter on Huns and Romans in the fourth century, wrote a number of reviews for The Critic and Engelsberg Ideas, and delivered papers in Munich and Bamberg. He was also awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Classics.
Honorary and Emeritus Fellows
Andrew Ashworth has completed, with his Chilean co-author Professor Juan Ignacio Piña Rochefort, the text of a monograph entitled Altruism and the Criminal Law: Duties of Rescue and Tolerance. The English version was published by Bloomsbury in September 2025, with the Spanish version published in Madrid in 2024. Further work on the general part of the criminal law would follow.
Margaret Bent continued to work on two long-running projects on early fifteen-century topics, one on an English manuscript and one on networks of composers in the Veneto. She published chapters in two edited volumes. She continued to curate a well-attended online seminar series and has been an active participant in specialist conferences.
Paul Brand completed his contribution to a Festchrift for an erstwhile colleague of his (when he taught in Dublin) on quo warranto law in medieval Ireland and published another such contribution to a Festschrift for the now retired Regius Professor of Civil Law in Cambridge David Ibbetson on the strange history of the interpretation of c. seven of the statute of Gloucester (1278). He has also been working on manuscripts of the earliest surviving common law lectures delivered c.1280.
This year finally saw the publication of Robin Briggs’s A History of North-Western Europe (Wiley Blackwell, July 2025). He then started work on a study of Richelieu’s France, covering various aspects of French history in the period 1610-1661.
John Cardy gave a talk as a contribution to an oral history of Conformal Field Theory, posted here. He continued working on some unsolved problems of statistical physics, in particular directed percolation, which is equivalent to finding the inverse of a matrix acting on the space of random walks. He investigated the conformal geometry of the Hawksmoor ceiling in the Buttery with the aim of writing a short note on this. Following his award of the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, he sat on the committee to choose the 2025 laureates.
Vincent Crawford completed a book draft on modelling the cognition underlying people’s initial responses to games. He continued work on nonparametric estimation of behavioural models of consumer demand and labour supply. He gave minicourses on his game-theoretic research and research seminars on consumer demand at the University of Crete, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Penn State, and LUISS University, Rome. He gave a plenary address at a conference in his honour at Corvinus University, Budapest. He served as co-editor of Games and Economic Behavior and the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design; and as trustee of the Sanjaya Lall Memorial Foundation.
Guy Goodwin-Gill has been commenting on the legal implications of Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and provided advice in connection with the advisory opinion given by the International Court of Justice in July 2024. He drafted opinions in two high-profile asylum cases in the UK, commented on draft guidelines on expulsion proposed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (later published in volume 37 of the International Journal of Refugee Law), and he finalised an expanded version of the talk given in 2024 at a conference in Cambridge (available on the Social Sciences Research Network).
Simon Green completed a 50,000-word contribution on 'Blackstone: Life, Work and Significance', for inclusion in volume ii of the College History.
Christopher Hood collaborated with Ruth Dixon to write the chapter ‘The UK civil service then and now’ in What Happened? The Decline of the Public Service in Democratic Governments edited by Guy Peters and Donald Savoie (2025) and with Helen Margetts to draft a chapter ‘Tools Approaches’ for the 2nd edition of Contemporary Approaches to Public Policy edited by Guy Peters and Philippe Zittoun. His book (written with three others) The Way the Money Goes OUP 2023 won the PSA WJM Mackenzie Book Prize 2023/24 in April 2025.
Jane Humphries added to her publications on the economic history of caring labour with one paper forthcoming in an economics journal and another in an edited collection. She also contributed to a volume on The State of Economic History as well as shorter pieces to TLS, Contributions to Political Economy, etc. In February, she received the Alice Murray Medal and gave the associated public lecture at Trinity College, Dublin. She gave keynotes at conferences in Tubingen, Brescia, SDU, and Geneva, and papers at Humboldt and the World Economic History Congress in Lund. She continues to teach graduate students in Oxford and LSE.
Edward Hussey continued his investigation of the verb legein as used in earlier Greek philosophy. The substantive work was complete. He was very happy with the results but writing them up was proving time consuming. At the same time he began what should be an extended essay on the well-known logical and semantic paradoxes (Russell's paradox, the Liar, the Sorites etc.). This too seemed to be leading in interesting directions.
Vaughan Lowe prepared an initial report on the Applicability of International Law to Cyber Activities for the Institut de Droit International, addressing problems of attributing authorship, location, and time to cyber activities. He participated in a number of academic colloquia, acted as counsel in cases before the International Court of Justice and as an arbitrator on several international tribunals. He was awarded the Collar Degree of the Order of Timor-Leste.
Ian Maclean continued to work on intellectual and book history in the early modern period. He has made progress on an intellectual biography of Girolamo Cardano. The co-edited book Early Modern Publishers appeared in the Brill series Library of the Written Word. Two articles on dissidents in Early Modern Europe, and another on Cardano and Scaliger, are due to appear. He continues 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 a paper on the implications for getting parties to reveal information about their characteristics that only they know. He has also been working with former post-doctoral fellow Tom Norman on the implications of forward induction for one of the fundamental building blocks (incomplete contracts theory) in recent research on firms.
Avner Offer published two articles, ‘Markets and public goods: Integrity, trust and climate change’ in Society, and (with six co-authors) the finance section in ‘Six provocations on the origins and impacts of the UK housing emergency’ in Journal of the British Academy. The Social Value of Dark Energy (with Ofer Lahav) was accepted for publication. One of its predictions (a populist onslaught on science) was borne out. His main work was on British finance in World War I, exploring the demand side of finance in wartime and more generally. Several presentations were given in the UK and one in Barcelona, and two doctoral supervisions continue.
David Parkin submitted a paper on indirect verbal strategies used to discuss illness in rural eastern Africa. Illnesses deemed physically, mentally, or ritually contaminating were publicly concealed to avoid stigma. Patients approached trusted local healers rather than biomedical practitioners, using oblique language — innuendo, hints, and coded references – to describe their conditions. The rise of mobile phones, though welcomed by medical authorities, disadvantaged poorer individuals without access, reinforcing reliance on traditional healers. This dynamic perpetuated the socio-cultural divide between medical and complementary healing systems. Parkin also continued co-editing a Festschrift for sociolinguist Jan Blommaert, expected to be published in the next academic year.
Nicholas Rodger was largely engaged with various lectures and events connected with the publication of the third volume of his Naval History of Britain, The Price of Victory, 1815‒1945 (with an Epilogue sketching in a dozen pages British naval history from 1945 to 2004). This work was published in Britain by Allen Lane in October 2024, and by W.W. Norton in the U.S.A. in May 2025.
Alexis Sanderson has been writing on the history of pre-Islamic Kashmir and pressing on with his edition and translation of the Tantrāloka. He has also given a series of lectures on the Rise of Tantric Buddhism while holding a Visiting Professorship at the International College for Postgraduate Studies in Tokyo.
Dan Segal has been trying to improve his understanding of free pro-p groups, with particular focus on certain structural questions that arise in the context of axiomatisability. Some small results have been posted on the mathematics arXiv. Earlier in the year he was an invited speaker at a conference in Padua, lecturing on axiomatisable profinite groups.
Graeme Segal has been working mainly on three projects. Two elaborate the account of his lectures last year in Edinburgh explaining how the existence of quantum field theory constrains the nature of the space-time that can underlie it and proposing a crucial ‘scaling’ addition to the axiomatisation of quantum field theory. The third project arises from an invitation to talk about Peter Goddard’s work, seeking to interpret one of his most important contributions to string theory made when it aimed to describe not gravitation but the strong interactions of heavy particles, as the most fundamental introduction of noncommutativity into classical physics.
Boudewijn Sirks finished the edition of the private notes of a jurist at the Supreme Court of Holland and Zeeland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Next to that he published on the legal history of the Dutch East Indies, of Late Antiquity and on the constitution of the Dutch Republic. He is working on a revision of his study of the Theodosian Code.
Stephen Smith has two books in production with Cambridge University Press, both drawing extensively on Chinese archival research. The first explores the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward ‘modern’ and folk religions, highlighting its efforts to suppress belief in supernatural forces while simultaneously engaging in ‘supernatural politics’ through imagery and values rooted in folk religion and Confucianism. The second examines the persistence of folk religion during the Mao era, showing how it enabled adaptation and resistance amid repression and social upheaval. The study reveals the vitality and tensions of everyday life. Smith also continued co-editing a Festschrift for sociolinguist Jan Blommaert.
Eva Margareta Steinby’s focus remains on the edition of brick stamps from Central Italy, Bolli doliari romani dell'Italia centro-occidentale (address bollidoliari.org). The edition now comprises 5300 different stamps; out of them 1300 are new respect to the standard edition CIL XV.1 from 1891 and the Supplement from 1947. Before the end of the year, the edition will be transferred to a new, more user-friendly platform. This major improvement was made possible by a grant from the Societas Scientiarum Fennica who, together with All Souls College and Institutum Romanum Finlandiae have supported the project over the years.
Hew Strachan chas been a visiting professor or researcher at the Australian War College, the Indonesia Defense University and IRSEM at the École Militaire in Paris over the academic year. He has been heavily involved with the war in Ukraine and is bringing his book The Nature of War for Bodley Head to completion.
Michael Teper ontinued his research on quantum field theories using lattice field theory techniques. He co-authored a conference paper on the effective string theory describing confining flux tubes (arXiv:2411.16507), and a paper with a focus on the world sheet axion (arXiv:2411.03435). He gave an invited talk in November at the Simons Foundation in New York. He progressed with his research on the relative roles of monopole-instantons and closed vortices in generating confinement in Z(N) lattice gauge theories. He also supervised and collaborated with a DPhil student funded by a grant from the Simons Foundation.
Keith Thomas continued to prepare a three-volume collection of his essays and articles.
Charles Webster completed work on a major study, provisionally titled A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib who was a figure of importance in Cromwellian Britain and was known for his associations throughout Protestant Europe. This book now awaits the judgement of referees. The Hartlib Papers are generating further publications, the first of which was published in the autumn of 2025. Webster also continued his long-standing involvement with issues relating to health care and the NHS.
Chris Wickham’s book on communal Italy 1150-1225, Le due facce del Comune, came out in October with Viella editrice, Rome. He has given papers in Rome, Cambridge, London, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Estella. He worked on Kerala and the pepper trade.
Andrew Wilkinson co-chaired a UK wide multi-professional committee and then published a further full revision of the UK NICE Guideline for Screening and Treatment of Blinding Retinopathy of Prematurity to include more recently published evidence (5th ed.) and presented at the RCPCH Annual Conference in Glasgow. He concluded work on NIHR data monitoring committees for randomised controlled trials of novel therapies aimed at reducing severe chronic lung disease in preterm infants. He continued as a medical adviser and trustee to the children’s hospice – Helen & Douglas House.
Visiting Fellows
Clare Birchall (King’s College, London – Michaelmas Term) made progress with her co-authored book on conspiracy theories and the internet. As well as writing a book proposal for MIT Press, she completed three chapters that chart the emergence of various conspiracist threads on the early web. She also continued to serve as the PI on an EU-CHANSE funded research project. In November, she presented a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference in Sheffield and gave an online talk for the Association of Cultural Studies. While in Oxford, she attended many relevant events at the Rothermere, the Oxford Internet Institute and the English faculty.
Jeff Colgan (Brown University – Hilary Term) continued research and writing on his historical project called Why is Canada a Country? He completed a draft of the research paper and submitted it for peer review. He also presented this research at the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations and at the London School of Economics. He published a popular-audience version of this research in Maclean’s magazine on 16 April 2025
Stuart Delery (Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP; Yale Law School – Hilary and Trinity Terms) researched how rule of law principles and practices, once degraded, can be and have been restored. At All Souls, he presented a Visiting Fellows Colloquium talk on constitutional developments in the Trump Administration and spoke at the conference on Legal Interests in a World of Climate Change. He also gave talks at the Oxford Law Faculty Public Law Discussion Group, the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and the Rothermere American Institute. He completed early drafts of papers on the Trump Administration’s challenges to the separation of powers and due process.
Christophe Grellard (École Pratique des Hautes Études – Trinity Term) gave a talk at the Medieval English Research Seminar in the Faculty of English (‘Saint-Erkenwald: Orthodoxy on the edge?’). He continued work on a book on fides implicita (‘implicit faith’) in the Middle Ages. The bulk of his time was spent at the Weston Library and in several college libraries (Magdalen, New College, Merton, Corpus Christi, Christ Church, Brasenose, St John’s and All Souls) to gather manuscript evidence linked to his project on intellectual life in fifteenth century Oxford. An essay linked to this research and focusing on a student notebook (Lincoln College, MS Lat. 102) will soon be published.
Ian Haynes’s (Newcastle University – Hilary Term 2025) work at All Souls College focused on writing up his main project monograph emerging from the Rome Transformed Project. Rome Transformed is a five-year long ERC Advanced Grant-funded project which examines changes to the south-east of Rome from the first to eighth centuries CE. The research programme combines a comprehensive investigation of the archaeological evidence with an enhanced analysis of that region’s profound significance for political, religious and military developments from the classical period to late antiquity. His time at All Souls provided invaluable opportunities to write, explore these themes with fellows, and to deliver five seminar papers.
Clarissa Hayward (Washington University in St. Louis – Michaelmas Term) wrote a new paper on the role that deliberation in subaltern counter-publics plays promoting structural change. She will present this paper at the 2025 meeting of the American Political Science Association. She revised and submitted a second paper, on structural power, which she presented at the college in October and will present at Goethe University, Frankfurt in February 2025. She wrote two symposium contributions, one for Political Studies and the other in Contemporary Political Theory.
Troy Heffernan (Manchester University – Michaelmas Term) continued his work to make universities more welcoming places to students from different backgrounds. While in Oxford, he attended many relevant events at the Department of Education and Department of Sociology, and the relationships formed at these events, combined with the welcoming nature of everyone at All Souls, also led to the advanced planning of his new book, Exponential and Logarithmic Privilege: Understanding the long-term impacts of having privilege (or being denied of it) in society, which will help further our understanding of how privilege works not just in educational contexts, but in wider society.
Krista Kesselring (Dalhousie University – Michaelmas Term) conducted research on the role of the jury in witch trials and prepared drafts of a public lecture and an article on the subject. She presented a paper on the history of conspiracy in the Court of Star Chamber at seminars in both Oxford and Cambridge. She submitted a version of that paper for publication, as well as a paper on ‘Lawless women’ in the records of the same court. She participated in a workshop on divorce and child custody in Vienna and began working on a new project on the history of bastardy.
Klaas Landsman (Radboud University – Trinity Term) completed two papers in the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics, which each benefited from the stimulating atmosphere of the College. He gave a lunchtime seminar at All Souls and attended the Dummett Centennial Conference hosted in Oxford. He regularly interacted with the Oxford Philosophy of Physics group via informal meetings and seminar attendance.
Josephine McDonagh (University of Chicago – Hilary and Trinity Terms) researched representations of displaced children, especially those who moved across continents, in British literary and visual printed texts from the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing initially on illustrated miscellanies in the Bodleian, she considered their trajectories in works by writers, including the Brontës and postcolonial authors, in the context of wider histories of childhood and child refugees. She also continued a collaborative editorial project, the Oxford Handbook Literature and Migration. She made presentations at academic and public venues in Oxford, London, and Berlin, and at the Visiting Fellows Colloquium.
Dana Kay Nelkin (University of California – Hilary and Trinity Terms) made significant progress on her project, Responsibility, Obligation, and Desert, completing an article, ‘Desert and Degrees of Liability’, drafting a paper comparing the notion of standing in the law to that of standing in our interpersonal responsibility practices such as blaming, praising, and forgiving, and working on two others. During her time at All Souls, she gave several presentations on aspects of the project, including at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar, the University of Sheffield, Università Roma Tre, the Human Abilities Center of Freie Universität and HU Berlin, and a conference on responsibility and praise at Lund University.
Terri Ochiagha (The University of Edinburgh – Trinity Term) conducted research in the Booker Prize archives, African Writers Series, and the Church Missionary Society archives (at Oxford Brookes, Reading, and Birmingham, respectively), conducted five interviews, worked on a chapter of Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads (Princeton UP) and gave a Visiting Fellow Colloquium. She continued to work as editor of Achebe in Context (Cambridge UP) and convenor of the British Academy Conference, Achebe Redivivus (held in College on 3‒4 July). She wrote and submitted an application for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency programme and an essay on the final interview with Ngugi wa Thiong’o (NYRB).
Nicholas Proudfoot (University of Oregon – Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity Terms) wrote five new papers during his time at All Souls. These include a pair of papers on zonotopal algebras that together prove a conjecture relating two representations of the automorphism group of a graph, both of (very different) geometric origin. He also completed a collection of lecture notes on matroids and initiated two new collaborations with faculty at Oxford, Edinburgh, and Imperial College.
Michael Purugganan (New York University – Trinity Term) made progress in his two reviews on the nature of domestication, and submitted three papers for publication and continued work on another paper. During his stay, he gave a colloquium talk in College, and also a seminar at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. He also interacted with colleagues at the Department of Biology, the School of Archaeology and Nuffield College.
Tore Rem (University of Oslo – Michaelmas and Hilary Terms) worked on a new edition of Knut Hamsun’s On Overgrown Paths (Oxford World’s Classics, 2026) with translator Terence Cave, nearly finishing the translation and critical apparatus. He did the remaining research for a biography of the German-Jewish author and literary middleman Max Tau and drafted five of ten projected chapters. He finished the archival work for his contributions (two chapters) to a forthcoming book on the English-language reception of the Norwegian Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset (Palgrave, 2028) and completed a non-fiction book on illness, Tidligere frisk mann. En sykdomshistorie (Formerly Healthy Man. An Illness Narrative), out in Norwegian in September 2025.
Alberto Rigolio (Durham University – Michaelmas Term) completed his book manuscript (under contract with HUP). He presented aspects of his work in the Faculty and engaged in discussions with Oxford colleagues and students. He organised an international workshop titled Literary beginnings in Late Antiquity, held in College on 9 December 2025.
Kareljan Schoutens (University of Amsterdam – Hilary Term) researched quantum circuits which model the dynamics of a particular class of quantum materials. Such circuits can be evaluated on a quantum computer or quantum simulator, revealing features that are very hard to track using traditional analytic or numerical methods. He also studied the ill-understood algebraic structure underlying spectral degeneracies in a class of supersymmetric lattice models with free-fermionic structure. He gave a Visiting Fellow colloquium, two talks at the Department of Physics and a seminar at the London office of Quantinuum.
Samir Sinha (Sinai Health and the University Health Network – Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity Terms) advanced his new research focused on the responsible use of digital technologies, including AI, in older people care. He published two papers, with two more and a grant application under review, and is preparing an invited book chapter and additional publications. He presented his work at the All Souls Visiting Fellows Colloquium, Oxford’s Institute for Population Ageing, the Medical Sciences Division’s Health Research Collaborative, and also the Institute for Ethics in AI. He was honoured to serve as Convenor of Visiting Fellows and All Souls College’s Visiting Fellows Colloquium, he also mentored over thirty healthcare-oriented Rhodes Scholars.
Francesca Trivellato (Princeton – Trinity Term) completed two projects: the revisions to a chapter on artisanal wages in seventeenth-century Venice for a monograph in progress on the purchase of the concepts of equity and equality in the urban markets of early modern Europe; and the translation of and commentary on a 1977 article in Italian on social history and microanalysis. She presented both pieces of work at the Economic and Social History Seminar and a masterclass for post-graduate students, respectively. She also spoke at the inaugural symposium of The J. H. Elliott History Forum.