Annual Report Summary 2023
The Warden
Besides his duties as Warden, John Vickers continued to work with Mark Armstrong on issues in the economics of competition and regulation. Their paper on price-cost relationships for multi-product firms, partly inspired by Edgeworth’s paradox of taxation, was accepted by the Journal of Political Economy. They are now working on multi-brand firms. John Vickers gave the Adam Smith lecture to the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society, and a Beesley lecture on 25 years of the Monetary Policy Committee. He gave evidence on financial regulation to the Treasury Select Committee and to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.
Senior Research Fellows
Susanne Bobzien spent the year on sabbatical leave at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies to complete her book manuscript on Hypothetical Syllogistic from Aristotle to the end of antiquity. She also wrote a chapter on ‘Peripatetic Syllogistic in Sextus Empiricus’ for a CUP volume on Logic in Sextus Empiricus and gave the 2022-23 Mesthene Lecture at the philosophy department of Rutgers University on the topic of plagiarism in the history of philosophy, as well as several online talks, including one on the expressibility of indexical propositions in Stoic and Frege’s philosophy at UCLA.
Francis Brown works on algebraic geometry and number theory with application to high-energy physics. His recent work also does the reverse: taking ideas from scattering amplitudes in physics and using them to prove results in topology. Via a new theory of integrals of biinvariant differential forms, and an algebraic interpretation of the Borel-Serre compactification of the symmetric space associated to the linear group, he has constructed infinitely many new unstable cohomology classes in the cohomology of the general and special linear groups, the moduli stacks of curves and abelian varieties, and their tropical versions. He gave virtual lectures on this and other topics.
Santanu Das worked on the Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing and completed a couple of chapters for his book on the idea of ‘experience’ in early twentieth-century literature and culture. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge Quarterly and, as part of the coordinating committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL), he co-organised with colleagues from Brussels and Luxembourg, a two-day conference on ‘Lived Experience and Literary History’ in College. He did some archival work in the US for his sea project and gave lectures in Canada, India and the UK.
Colin Burrow has written articles on Shakespeare’s relationship to the novella tradition, and (for the London Review of Books) on topics including George Orwell, rules, and Roald Dahl. He has worked on the Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English Literary History, a series of which he is a General Editor, drafting wide-ranging chapters on satire and on narrative fiction. He has given lectures in the UK and Italy on Shakespeare and related topics. He is General Editor of Review of English Studies.
Cécile Fabre published papers on the ethics of gossip, the ethics of military intervention in inter-state conflicts, and victims’ duties to wrongdoers. She secured a publishing contract from Oxford University Press on the ethics of protecting humankind’s common cultural heritage. She spent two weeks at the University of St Andrews in September 2022 as the Scots Philosophical Association Centenary Fellow, and two weeks in March 2023 as a Visiting Fellow at the University of British Columbia. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in May 2023.
Ruth Harris’ book Guru to the World: the Life and Legacy of Swami Vivekananda was published in October 2023; she spoke in various venues in Britain and was shortlisted for two major prizes, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Elizabeth Longford Prize. She also appeared at the Jaipur Literature Festival in early 2023, after which she gave another six lectures in various parts of India. She has since completed two articles, and is currently working on a new book on the ‘Oriental Christ’, which examines the widespread turn-of-century belief that Jesus must have studied in the Indian subcontinent.
Thomas Hegghammer joined the College on 1 October 2022 as a new Senior Research Fellow in politics. His main interest is rebel groups in the Middle East, and this year he continued working on a history of jihadism for Penguin press. He also completed and submitted two co-authored articles on extremism-related topics and a co-edited volume on identity mimicry in civil war. He embarked on two new article projects: one on the use of computer vision to analyse extremist visual propaganda and another using machine learning to study changes in topic prevalence in Middle East Studies journals in the past fifty years.
Paul Fendley continued his research in condensed-matter theory and mathematical physics, focusing on quantum many-body systems with strong interactions. One current theme is understanding the interplay between topology and integrability, in particular developing and exploiting non-invertible ‘dualities’ and symmetries. He completed a pair of papers utilising these tools to find the phase diagram of a ladder of Rydberg-blockade atoms. Another result brought unusual free-fermion behaviour into a new realm by further extending a method for solving such models. He gave seminars at conferences in Vienna, Lausanne, Santa Barbara, Benasque and Edinburgh.
Cecilia Heyes continued her interdisciplinary work on the evolution of human cognition. Her published papers distinguished types of causal understanding, examined inferential problems in the computational neuroscience of social learning, advanced evidence that social learning depends on the same psychological mechanisms in humans and other animals, and asked whether modern humans are more fearful than our ancestors. Another article responded to 14 published commentaries on her theory that human understanding of social norms is rooted in cultural rather than genetic evolution. She spoke at conferences in Indiana, London, Nijmegen, Oslo, Oxford, and Tel Aviv.
Neil Kenny worked on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern France. He continued writing a monograph on hierarchy in the works of François Rabelais. He wrote three papers on Rabelais, publishing one of them and presenting the others in Rennes and Oxford. He gave a paper in Paris on Martine de Bertereau, and participated in an event in Dijon devoted to his book on literary families. He continued doing policy-related work as the British Academy’s Lead Fellow for Languages.
Michael Lobban has been conducting research for the forthcoming volume 10 of the Oxford History of the Laws of England, which he is writing with James Oldham. Over the past year, he has focused in particular on the law relating to English landed estates and family property in the reign of George III. He has also published an article on ‘The Travels of Treason’ in the Modern Law Review.
Noel Malcolm submitted to the Oxford University Press his monograph exploring the history of homosexuality in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and the European colonies during the early modern period. He also continued to prepare a volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, containing Hobbes’s autobiographical and occasional writings. This involved the translation of several works from the Latin, the collation of manuscripts and early editions, and the annotating of the texts.
Vladimir Markovic continued his work on minimal surfaces in symmetric spaces and also started a new project regarding the distribution of random surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds. He wrote two papers, while one of his papers appeared in the press. He delivered a number of conference and seminar talks including the Terry Wall Distinguished Public Lecture at the University of Liverpool.
Miriam Meyerhoff published articles and handbook chapters on language variation and change in creoles and continued to publish on the discourse of preschoolers. Fieldwork in Vanuatu, and with colleagues in New Zealand, is focused on language variation in Bislama, Nkep and NZ Sign Language. In Vanuatu, she continues to work with local colleagues on language policy and planning for vernacular languages. She started research with a colleague in Primary Health Care and a British Academy Researcher at Risk examining the functions of false starts and repairs in clinical discourse. She was Visiting Professor in Brussels and Berlin.
Catherine Morgan co-edited a volume Feasting with the Greeks (based on a conference held in College) and completed two excavation reports – on a campaign which she directed in the ancient theatre of Sparta, and on Wilhelm Dörpfeld’s 1901 excavation on the acropolis of Leukas (publishing artefacts and archival material in the German Archaeological Institute in Athens). She gave papers on her Ionian island research in Bologna, Geneva, Athens, and Uppsala, and taught on a graduate field school in Arkadia. She served as the College Academic Secretary.
Lucia Prauscello spent most of the year working with her team on her new AHRC funded project Hexameters beyond the canon: new poetry on papyri from Roman and Byzantine Egypt (edition and commentary of ca. 120 unpublished hexametrical papyri from Oxyrhynchus), while continuing working at her OCT edition of Menander (revision of the first draft of the first six comedies). She has written articles on Atticist lexicography, the interaction of documentary and literary language in inscriptions and the festival programme of the Ptolemaic Theadelpheia in the newly discovered Deir el-Banat papyrus.
Ian Rumfitt has continued to work on a large-scale book on the philosophy of language. He now has a contract with OUP. The final part of the project is to relate the theory of meaning developed there to Frege’s notion of Sinn. To ensure that the book is not overburdened with technicality, some of the formal apparatus is appearing in journals. ‘In Defence of PKF’ came out in Synthèse in January 2023, ‘Generalized Quantification in an Axiomatic Truth Theory’ is forthcoming in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and ‘The Partial Logic of Some Restricted Quantifiers’ is under consideration at a logic journal.
Gavin Salam has been working on quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and phenomenology at high-energy particle colliders. He has continued his research on parton showers, funded through his ERC Advanced Grant and Royal Society Research Professorship (the latter just renewed for a further five years). Two papers demonstrated the first ever steps towards parton shower accuracy beyond so-called next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, and two further papers explored multi-parton scattering and the flavour of jets. He also delivered the keynote physics perspectives talk at the annual international Future Circular Collider conference.
Lucia Zedner co-edited Privatising Border Control: Law at the Limits of the Sovereign State (December 2022, OUP) to which she contributed two chapters. She also wrote papers on the use of algorithms in criminal justice, on criminalisation, immigration offences, and citizenship deprivation. She gave talks in Oxford, Athens, and Frankfurt, at the Queensland Supreme Court judges seminar, and online at Penn Law School, Humboldt University, and CUNY. She continues as a Commissioner on the Independent Commission on UK Counterterrorism Law, Policy, and Practice, which is due to report in 2024. Her Conjoint Professorship at UNSW Sydney Law School was renewed to 2025.
University Academic Fellows
Debin Ma pursues research in the field of long-run economic growth in China and East Asia in a global setting. He has produced papers that empirically examine the historical unity of China under a single ruler for two millennia. He is extending his work on how China’s history unity impacts long-term evolution in its fiscal and monetary capacities. His second main line of research is re-examining the role of ideology as a critical factor for understanding institutional and economic transformation in the modern era. He is conducting an in-depth comparison on the case of differential development of Japan and China after the mid-nineteenth century.
Diwakar Acharya delivered the last instalment of the Georg Bühler Lecture Series of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, on poetic devices and literary styles in early Indic epigraphs, and a keynote lecture on knowing and thinking about the ultimate in Hindu theology at the Sixth Annual Conference of the European Academy of Religion held at St Andrews. He visited manuscript libraries in Darbhanga, India, and also in Nepal, and continued with his editorial and translation projects.
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 also 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 re-designed and taught an eight-lecture course on Probability and Statistics for second year Physics undergraduates, led a review article on Gaussian processes for time-domain astronomy for Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and co-authored a further eight refereed papers.
Timothy Endicott worked on the nature and development of executive power in the UK constitution, and on the theory of legal interpretation. He published articles on why law should not generally be used to pursue justice, and on the potential objectivity of legal interpretation and misinterpretation. With Hafsteinn Dan Kristjánsson and Sebastian Lewis, he edited Philosophical Foundations of Precedent (OUP 2023), a collection of essays by 43 authors. He spoke at the Inner Temple in London, and presented his work in Oxford, Durham, Jodhpur, Graz, and Genoa. He served as Chair of Oxford’s Public Law Research Group.
Wolfgang Ernst published a journal article on the origin of the lex Aquilia. Another article deals with the individual responsibility for participation in collective decision-making. He assisted in the production of a new handbook on Roman Private law, by the German publisher Mohr Siebeck, to which he contributed the chapter on Roman sales law. A small conference brought together colleagues who planned an international research project on ‘Money in Roman Law’.
David Gellner’s British Academy-funded grant for ‘The Dalit Search for Dignity: State, Society, and Mobilisation from Below in Far West Nepal’ finally ended in May 2023 after two no-cost extensions. Much of the work of analysis remains to be done. Publications include ‘The Spaces of Religion: A View from South Asia’ (Henry Myers Lecture 2020) JRAI 2023 and (with K. P. Adhikari) ‘Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Dalit Experiences of Primary and Secondary Education in West-Central Nepal’ in K. Valentin & U. Pradhan (eds.) Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformation and Avenues of Learning (Delhi: OUP, 2022).
Stathis Kalyvas has continued his research on various aspects of political violence. Two papers are currently under review and a book manuscript is nearing completion. Field research on an ESRC-funded project about ‘Governance and Trust’ was completed in the spring. His edited symposium on Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (organised in 2020 at All Souls) is forthcoming in Politics. He gave invited talks at, among others, LSE, Columbia, Frankfurt, Doha, Zurich, Munich, and Genova.
Ian Loader continued to analyse materials and begin writing from his current ESRC-funded research on security and everyday life in an English town. Several papers are in preparation. He published a theoretical prospectus for the project ‘Security and Everyday Life in Uncertain Times’ in the seventh edition of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Ian furthermore developed a new line of research on criminology and the car and published a paper on ‘15-Minutes Cities and the Denial(s) of Auto-Freedom’ in the IPPR Progressive Review. He also had a piece on policing published in the TLS.
Sheilagh Ogilvie continued her research on institutions and economic history. An article on the Black Death and economic development came out in Oxford Economic Papers, another on ‘State Capacity and Economic Growth’ came out in the National Institute Economic Review, and an essay on ‘Economics and History’ was published in a volume on History and the Social Sciences. She delivered a keynote lecture at a conference on ‘Trust in the Premodern World’ and seminar papers in Bologna, London, and Oxford. She recorded podcasts on economic history for Econ Journal Watch and the International History Students & Historians Group.
Catriona Seth spent three weeks as a visiting researcher at the University of Bergamo, held a spring fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa and was Senior Anniversary Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She took part in several conferences, gave lectures or seminars on foundlings and literature (Collège de France), Les Liaisons dangereuses (Bergamo), Katherine Read (Edinburgh College of Art), Marie-Antoinette (Wallace Collection) etc., and delivered the lecture for the Humanities at the Académie Royale de Belgique’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
Julia Smith served as Chair of Faculty and ECR Champion in the Faculty of History. She was awarded AHRC-DFG funding for the Anglo-German project Crafting Documents, c. 500-800CE which she is undertaking with materials scientists in the Analysis of Artefacts and Cultural Assets Division of the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und-prüfung. Together, they are working to understand how documents were made in the transition period between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, c.500 to c.800.
Amia Srinivasan has written articles on effective altruism and the philosophy of education, and (for the London Review of Books where she is a Contributing Editor) on the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Andrea Dworkin and academic freedom. She gave lectures at Princeton and John Hopkins, and delivered the Dudley Knowles Memorial Lecture in Political Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the Linda Singer Memorial Lecture at Miami University, and the Jacobsen Lecture at the Institute of Philosophy, London. Her Jacobsen lecture, ‘Genealogy and the Ancients’, explored her current research on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers.
Cecilia Trifogli wrote two articles on the topics of medieval metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics. She gave a talk at the Plenary Conference of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy held in Paris, August 2022, and other invited talks in Rome and Tel-Hai. She made good progress with 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 expects to complete this work by the end of 2024. She continued to serve as Chairman of the British Academy Medieval Texts Editorial Committee.
Besides acting as Sub-Warden, Andrew Wilson pursued his research on the archaeology of the Roman economy. He published two volumes originating from workshops and conferences held by the Oxford Roman Economy Project which he co-directs: Simulating Roman Economies: Theories, Methods, and Computational Models (with T. Brughmans), and The Economy of Roman Religion (with N. Ray and A. Trentacoste). A volume on his excavations at Aphrodisias (Turkey) was submitted to press. With collaborators on the ‘Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa’ project he published an article on the discovery of three Roman marching camps in the Jordanian desert.
Peter Wilson continued to lead the European Research Council funded ‘European Fiscal-Military System 1530-1870’ project for which he published one chapter and completed another. His book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Penguin/Harvard University Press) appeared in October 2022 to critical acclaim and is also in Spanish translation with Chinese and German versions forthcoming. He completed the ‘Mapping the Thirty Years War’ project, supported by the Fell Fund, published one co-authored article and completed another. Further outputs included two articles, two chapters, papers in Austria, China, Spain, the Netherlands and Norway, and various public lectures and podcasts.
Examination Fellows
David Addison worked on his forthcoming monograph, which investigates local religious cultures in the late antique Iberian Peninsula. Alongside this, he conducted new research on medieval Iberian manuscripts in the British Library and the monastery of El Escorial. Between May and July, he was a visiting researcher at CCHS-CSIC (Madrid), where he focused his research on Paschasius of Dumium and the history of Greek texts in Iberian monasticism. He presented the preliminary results from this at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. In addition to research, he taught across graduate and undergraduate levels.
Muhammad Hameem Bin Sheik Alaudin has been reading a one-year MA in Linguistics at SOAS. He has completed the taught component of the degree, having taken classes in general linguistics, language documentation and description, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and Persian (Farsi). He audited classes in Avestan and Zoroastrianism as part of his wider intellectual interest in Iran and its languages, religious culture and history, culminating in a week-long summer school on the topic of ‘Zoroastrianism as a religious minority in contemporary Iran’. He is now working on his MA dissertation on the linguistic phenomenon of suppletion using loanwords in ordinal numerals.
Sarah Bufkin began a new position as an assistant professor in Political Theory at the University of Birmingham. She has continued to work on her monograph reading Frantz Fanon as a diagnostician of racial pathologies, delivering papers at three conferences in Rome, Leuven, and Birmingham, respectively. She also gave an invited talk on hunger strikes at a workshop on ‘Protest and the Body.’ In addition to her research, she taught undergraduate modules on the history of political thought and racism and identity in postcolonial Britain.
Jane Cooper completed the first year of her DPhil. Her thesis focuses on theories of the sublime before Burke (1650-1740), especially in the works of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. She is working on an article for publication based on her MSt thesis on ‘Rochesterian Regret’. She presented a research paper (online publication forthcoming) on Thomas West’s contribution to the picturesque movement, A Guide to the Lakes (1774), at Pembroke College, and presented other conference papers on hermeneutics and poetics in Oxford and Cambridge.
Alexander Georgiou continued his doctoral research which explores the justification for, and content of, private law remedies. He is also currently writing a paper on penalty clauses in contract law and co-authoring two papers: one on the public interest in private law remedies; the other on Sections 34 and 36 of the Law of Property Act 1925.
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 will be starting as an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Over the past academic year, Damian Maher has worked to complete his PhD Thesis on Henry James among the Moral Philosophers, for submission in September of this year. Alongside presenting at a roundtable on aesthetic education and supervising an undergraduate thesis on sexual ethics, he has begun work on a paper on John Stuart Mill, William James and life crises.
John Merrington continued his doctoral research on the five senses in early medieval thought. He presented on aspects of his thesis in eight different settings, most notably at the Oxford Late Roman Seminar, at Princeton University (at the Princeton-Oxford-Vienna-Mainz-Berlin Graduate Exchange), at an interdisciplinary conference on the senses in medieval and contemporary thought hosted at Monte Verità, Ascona, and at Leeds International Medieval Congress. He had his article ‘Bede and Gregory of Tours: a Reconsideration’ accepted by English Historical Review (forthcoming, 2024). He carried out undergraduate teaching and admissions.
Ross Moncrieff began his DPhil in history on the topic of early modern British understandings of China, successfully completing the transfer of status. He gave papers on the topic of his DPhil research at several Oxford-based seminars and conferences, as well as a hybrid symposium at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Fitzroy Morrissey began work on two new projects: a book on modern Islamic thought and a study of the status of music in Islamic law. For the former, his research concentrated on Islamic revivalism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. For the latter, he worked on articles on the views of the sixteenth-century Shāfiʿī jurist Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī and the seventeenth-century Shīʿī scholar Fayḍ al-Kāshānī. He ran another series of seminars on Muslim and Christian thought with Msgr. Michael Nazir-Ali, continued to work with Ronald Nettler on contemporary Islamic modernism, and taught papers on Sufism, Persian mystical poetry, and Islamic philosophy.
Olana Peters completed the first year of her DPhil on the political activism of overseas students in 1960s Britain. She conducted oral history interviews and presented her work at the British History Seminar. Currently, she is awaiting assessment on her transfer of status application. She has also been part of the College’s three-member working group on the CaribOx programme. Alongside her academic pursuits, she has undertaken creative projects in fiction and music.
Lucas Tse completed the third year of the DPhil in Economic and Social History, including the Confirmation of Status, and is preparing for submission of his doctoral thesis.
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Rachel Bryan completed readers’ report revisions on her monograph, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War, which is now under contract with Cambridge University Press. She co-convened a Paper 6 FHS option on ‘Tragedy’, taught courses on ‘Twentieth Century Women Writers’ and ‘Literature after 1950’, examined an MSt thesis, and has qualified as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She continues to work on her scholarly edition of Henry James’s The Other House and is writing up a journal article, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Guilty Style’, as part of her ongoing project on literary representations of post-war guilt.
Alexandros Hollender spent the academic year on a fellowship intermission at EPFL in Lausanne. In joint work, he obtained an efficient algorithm for the cake-cutting problem with four agents which will be presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, and published papers at the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing. He was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Edinburgh in June and gave invited talks at Highlights of Algorithms and at various workshops. In addition, he served on the programme committees for six conferences, co-organised a workshop on equilibrium computation, and supervised an MSc student semester project on public goods games.
Rustam Jamilov has written a new paper ‘The Regional Keynesian Cross’ (with M. Bellifemine and A. Couturier). He has initiated a new international research project with economists at Bundesbank and maintains his ongoing collaborations with the Bank of England and Norges Bank. He is scheduled to present at numerous invited seminars and conferences across the United Kingdom, United States, and Europe.
Alison John edited a special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity (slated for publication in 2025), co-authored the introduction, and contributed an article on Greek epigraphy and non-elite bilingualism in late antique Gaul. She presented papers at the Classical Association Conference in Cambridge and the Leeds International Medieval Congress, and gave invited talks in Durham, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Warsaw. She wrote a full chapter draft on the languages of the early Christian church for a conference in Liverpool and completed the full draft of her monograph on classical education in late antique Gaul.
Lisa Lodwick continued her research on the archaeobotany of Roman Britain. She published an article on how archaeobotanical remains can serve to address a wide range of archaeological and historical questions, as well as a book chapter on how farming shaped Roman social and economic history. A memorial piece was published in her honour in the Theoretical Roman Archaeological Journal (TRAJ, of which she was a founder and Editor-in-Chief), and a memorial award founded for the annual associated conference (TRAC).
Jasmine Nirody continued her research on motility through complex environments. She has articles on mechanosensation in arthropods and swimming in fungal zoospores currently under review and is finishing up several manuscripts on various biological systems. She has been invited to give seminars at Princeton, Imperial College London, UIUC, and Columbia. She began a tenure-track position in Organismal Biology at the University of Chicago in January 2023.
Kyle Pratt published two papers, one on the zeros of L-functions (joint with S. Drappeau and M. Radziwill), and one on the solutions to certain kinds of Diophantine equations (joint with H. M. Bui and A. Zaharescu). He was an invited speaker to the analytic number theory session held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut in Oberwolfach, Germany. He also gave numerous seminar talks and several colloquium talks.
Chris Scambler continues to work on a book defending a modal version of logicism, the thesis that maths reduces to logic. He organised a workshop on the use of modal ideas in mathematics at Lady Margaret Hall, and presented work on the use of imperatives in the foundations of mathematics there. In addition, he has finished three new papers, one on paradoxes and ‘revenge‘, one on modal set theory, and one on the use of imperatives in mathematics (as presented at the aforementioned workshop).
Karolina Watroba published her first book, Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (OUP, October 2022), completed the manuscript of her second book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Profile, forthcoming in May 2024), wrote one article and three book chapters, gave two keynote lectures (in Durham and Oxford) and two conference papers (in Düsseldorf and Cambridge), and taught a range of undergraduate and post-graduate classes. She also won a British Academy Talent Development Award for her research on Kafka in Korea.
Takato Yoshimura has been working on chaotic quantum many-body systems and finalising two papers on this topic. He also continues to study non-local deformations of interacting particle systems and he is finishing up two papers on integrability of classical systems that are generated by these deformations. He gave research talks in Cambridge, Ljubljana, Paris, Tokyo, and Stony Brook.
Other Fellows
Ross Anderson is a Royal Society University Research Fellow who uses the early fossil record to understand how complex life first evolved on the Earth. This year he published a major article on how we can use evidence of absence to help determine the antiquity of animals, continued investigation of some of the first multicellular fossils, and initiated experimental work examining the roles of clays in the preservation of fossil soft tissues. Anderson gave a talk to the Geological Society of America and seminars at Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, and Vanderbilt. He taught undergraduate palaeobiology courses and mentored students.
Clare Bucknell’s book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, came out in February. She spoke about it at public events in London, Birmingham and Newcastle. She signed a writing contract with the London Review of Books (LRB) (to produce a number of pieces every year) and also wrote for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s and Apollo. With Colin Burrow, she began work on a ‘Close Readings’ podcast series for the LRB, to air next year.
Rima Dapous served as Domestic Bursar and Academic Administrator until 31 March 2023.
Simon Green conducted research on his proposed contribution to volume 2 of the College History. This will be a 30,000-word chapter on ‘Blackstone’s Achievement’, evaluating the context, composition and consequences of Blackstone’s famous Commentaries (1765-9). He also submitted a synopsis, a chapter outline and a completed specimen chapter (ch. 10. ‘Imperialists and Commonwealthsmen’, c. 10,000 words) of the projected third volume of the College History, for consideration by Oxford University Press. He continued to work on volume 3 more generally.
In January 2023 Launcelot Henderson was appointed as a Court of Appeal Judge (sitting in retirement) for a two-year term. He sits in that capacity in the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales as and when opportunities arise. He has also continued to chair the Trust Law Committee, and in June 2023 he was elected a trustee of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.
Peregrine Horden conducted research on the history of the College in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. He published a collection of College memorial addresses covering the period 1990-2020 and wrote papers on the history of medieval healthcare.
Dmitri Levitin spent most of the academic year 2022-23 at Caltech and the Huntington Library, where he succeeded Anthony Grafton as the Visiting Research Professor at the Rogers Institute for the History of Science. There, he completed a book, The Structure of Intellectual Evolution: Transforming the Sciences and the Humanities from the Ancient Mesopotamians to the Age of Newton, intended for both academic and general audiences. It tells a long-term intellectual history, with educational institutions at its heart, and challenging revolutionary models of intellectual change. In May 2023, he took up a permanent post at the University of Utrecht.
Tess Little has been working on two manuscripts: her next novel and her DPhil thesis monograph on the 1970s women’s liberation movement in the UK, US, and France in transnational perspective. She has given lectures both in history and creative writing and has written various book reviews and essays.
Alex Mullen continued her work as Principal Investigator of ERC-funded LatinNow and UKRI-funded Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools, as Co-I of SSHRC and British Academy projects on Roman writing tablets, and as expert in sociolinguistics on Gaulish and everyday Roman writing projects in France and Spain. As part of the LatinNow outputs she has been shepherding three research volumes through OUP, has written several chapters and articles, and launched a web GIS: https://gis.latinnow.eu/. She delivered several papers, including a keynote in Leuven. She served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Roman Studies, Britannia, and the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Jesse Norman completed work on a historical novel, The Winding Stair, focusing on the intertwining lives and rivalry of Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, which was published in June. In March, he led a seminar on ‘The British Para-constitution’ with Colin Kidd. Outside college, he organised a seminar on ‘Sovereignty and the People’s Will’, and gave invited speeches at Adam Smith’s home Panmure House, at the Engineering Professors Council, and at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. He also continued his work as MP for Hereford and Minister of State for Decarbonisation and Technology at the Department for Transport.
Philipp Nothaft spent part of the year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (NJ), where he continued his work on various aspects of the history of pre-modern science. His publications of the past year include three books, among them Graeco-Arabic Astronomy for Twelfth-Century Latin Readers (2023, Brill), three journal articles, and two co-written chapters in Vol. II of The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste. He hosted a workshop on medieval astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and gave invited talks at conferences and seminars in Athens, Pasadena (CA), Princeton (NJ), Dublin, and Belfast.
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. In April 2023, Cambridge University Press published Advocacy, a revised version of his Hamlyn Lectures delivered in 2021. He gave other lectures and published occasional newspaper articles on legal topics.
Erik Panzer published two preprints on Feynman integrals: a paper with Marko Berghoff explaining the vanishing of certain double discontinuities, and another paper with Karen Yeats that relates point-counts (arithmetic) to spanning tree partitions (combinatorics) and proves a conjecture from 2013. He also continued a research project with Brent Pym and Clement Dupont on logarithmic geometry in deformation quantisation, and started a new project on Apery limits. Furthermore he lectured on electromagnetism to undergraduates, organised two conferences, and gave research talks in five countries.
John Redwood has written a comparative study of five leading Central Banks, asking why the Fed, ECB and Bank of England got their inflation forecasts so wrong. It makes recommendations for reform. He published a study of wider ownership, looking at options to promote self-employment, home ownership and share owning, and a study of post Brexit opportunities for the UK. He has given talks and lectures on economic and public policy topics and has continued to write his daily blogs on www.johnredwood.com.
Katherine Rundell published a non-fiction account on the topic of endangered animals and climate change, The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, published by Faber, and spoke on Radio 3, 4 and 6 about her book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. She completed the first book in a fantasy trilogy for children, Impossible Creatures. She spoke at several literary festivals across the country and abroad, and wrote articles for, among others, the LRB, The New York Times and The Guardian.
Paul Seabright completed the book manuscript begun during the first year of his Two-Year Fellowship. It will be published by Princeton University Press in May 2024 under the title The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People. He also published two co-authored research papers (‘What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China’ in Economic Development and Cultural Change and ‘Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture’ in Biological Reviews) and continued to work on research papers in the economics of religion and the psychology of individual decision-making.
William Waldegrave 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 ceased to be Chair of Coutts & Co on 31 December 2022.
Marina Warner published Temporale (Cahier 39, Sylph Editions/American University in Paris), an essay on the experience of time in lockdown. Her study of the artist Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court also appeared (Afterall Books). She is continuing to review for the New York Review of Books; is reactivating ‘Stories in Transit’, the project with forced migrants in Palermo, which was interrupted by the pandemic; and is close to finishing her book about Sanctuary: Ways of Dwelling, Ways of Telling.
Frederick Wilmot-Smith continued to practice as a barrister at Brick Court Chambers in London. He also continued his academic research, publishing various papers and attending conferences.
George Woudhuysen is an assistant professor in Roman history at the University of Nottingham. A list of recent publications and activities can be found here.
Honorary and Emeritus Fellows
Andrew Ashworth has brought to completion his paper on actus reus in criminal law and his paper on offences against non-existent victims, and both are with publishers. He has expanded his work on ‘failure to rescue’ offences and is collaborating with Professor Pina (Chile) with a view to developing a multi-jurisdictional study.
Margaret Bent continues to run a well-attended online seminar series on medieval and renaissance music. She has been occupied with the final stages of a major book, The Motet in the Late Middle Ages, due out from OUP before year-end, and several articles are in press. She has been awarded the Nino Pirrotta prize of the Centro Studi sull’ Ars nova in Certaldo for her work in Italian music.
Paul Brand is working on editing and translating later thirteenth century English law reports and is completing a further volume in his series of Earliest English Law Reports for the Selden Society. His paper on ‘Magna Carta and its contribution to the development of English Law, 1215-1307’ given to the Annual General Meeting of the Selden Society in 2015 has been published, as has his paper on ‘Magna Carta in Ireland, 1215-1320’ given to a Dublin conference in 2016, which is now published in a volume of papers given at that conference. He continues work on his volume in The Oxford History of the Laws of England.
Robin Briggs has continued to work on his general history of North-Western Europe, covering an immense time span; he expects to finish his first draft by the end of this year.
John Cardy continued to work in theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He contributed a chapter for a book to honour the work and ongoing influence of Michael E. Fisher, FRS, deceased. Recently he submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters which resolves a long-standing paradox in the physics of disordered magnets and fluids. He gave several invited remote presentations at international meetings.
Vincent Crawford continued work on nonparametric estimation of behavioural models of consumer behaviour, the cognition underlying Nash equilibrium by analysing experimental subjects’ searches for hidden information about the games they play, and Shanghai cabdrivers’ labour supply. He gave a plenary lecture at the University of East Anglia’s Workshop on ‘Behavioural Game Theory’. He continued to serve as editor of Games and Economic Behavior and the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, and on the boards of other journals. He also remained a trustee of the Sanjaya Lall Memorial Foundation.
Guy Goodwin-Gill, now primarily resident in Ottawa, continues to supervise doctoral students at the University of New South Wales where he remains an Honorary Professor. In keeping with his interest in refugees and statelessness, he advised the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on litigation challenging the United Kingdom’s proposals to ‘stop the boats’ and to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda. He also gave the inaugural lecture on ‘Protecting Refugees, without Borders’ at the (B)OrderS initiative, Queen Mary University of London, and he is currently working on a short advanced introduction to international refugee law.
Christopher Hood received an honorary doctorate in social science from the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong and gave two lectures there. Based on a Nuffield-funded research project with three colleagues, he also completed the manuscript of a book entitled Where the Money Goes, chronicling developments in UK public expenditure control from 1993 to 2015.
Jane Humphries acted as President of the Economic History Association in 2022-23, delivering the Presidential Address at the annual conference in Pittsburgh in September. She published a paper (with co-authors) in Economic History Review and has another forthcoming in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She gave papers at Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Yale, and Wesleyan Universities and several professional conferences. Research for a monograph on the economic history of caring labour is underway. She continues to combine teaching graduate students in Oxford with her Centennial Chair at LSE.
Edward Hussey has continued work on and around two long-term projects. One is an investigation of some of the ways in which language – both in actual use as the medium of thought and its communication, and as itself a topic for philosophy – is significant for Plato and Aristotle. The project is given focus and direction by a close examination of their usage of the verb ‘legein’ (speak, say). The other project is a study of Aristotle’s theory and practice in the application of mathematics in his natural science.
After the fourth edition of the text on The Law of the Sea (with Robin Churchill and Amy Sander) had been published, Vaughan Lowe began work as rapporteur of the Institut de Droit International on the applicability of international law to cyber activities. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens.
Ian Maclean continued to work on intellectual and book history in the early modern period. His contributions to Neil Kenny’s collection on early modern social hierarchy and to the ‘Sacrobosco’ project of the MPIWG were published, as well as two other articles on Renaissance law and the Reformer Philip Melanchthon. He co-organised an international conference on early modern publishers in St Andrews and gave seminars there and in Edinburgh. He continues to serve on various editorial boards and international review bodies.
James Malcomson has 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 has completed two papers for publication, 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 is now considered a classic in the literature on relational contracts.
Avner Offer has written two papers this year outside his beaten track. ‘The Social Value of Dark Energy’ (with Ofer Lahav, former Visiting Fellow) evaluates the social utility of astrophysics. It has been submitted to a journal and issued as a working paper. ‘The decisive moment in nineteenth century painting’ investigates the depiction of motion in twentieth century photojournalism and its anticipation in nineteenth century painting. It is largely complete. His main preoccupation, however, has been with Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, with the prospect of a period of co-dependence between AI and humanity.
David Parkin presented online, ‘Swahili Language and Civilisation’ to the Biennial China Forum, SW Minzu University, Chengdu in November 2022; and online, ‘Anthropology, language and communication’, at Zhejiang University, China. He submitted a collaborative application to the ‘Difu Simo’ Project for research on illness and stigma in East Africa with S. Grassi and M. Bitta, in association with an Oxford University project under Professor C. Newton, PI NeuroGAP-Psychosis and NeuroDEV at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme, ‘Kilifi’. This continues collaborative cross-cultural work with Grassi on schizophrenia among the Giriama of Kenya.
In early August, Nicholas Rodger delivered a draft of the third Volume of his Naval History of Britain, to be entitled ‘The Price of Victory, 1815-1945’. He intends to add an Epilogue to complete the book and look forward into the post-war years far enough to bridge what would otherwise be abrupt discontinuities. He anticipates an extra chapter covering selected themes over fifteen or twenty years at most. By the time he next reports this will have to have been resolved. He will be busy all next year and beyond in seeing the volume through the press.
Dan Segal has been exploring conditions for axiomatisability in the universe of profinite groups, an area on the borderline between group theory and model theory. Results obtained recently have appeared in the Journal of Algebra and a few arXiv posts.
Graeme Segal works on the foundations of quantum field theory and its relations to the geometry of space-time. He has made more progress with the smooth homotopy category, connecting it to the differentiable cohomology appearing in string theory. A new project, joint with Ralph Cohen, is to study how the Morse decomposition of a manifold changes with the height function by the algebraic-geometrical wall-crossing techniques of Bridgeland and others: the motivation is to understand better the role of stability conditions. Besides that, he has been writing one third of the American Mathematical Society’s memorial volume on Michael Atiyah.
Amartya Sen published an autobiography and a number of publications of a more technical nature, including one focusing on the distinction between maximality and optimality.
Boudewijn Sirks’ book The Colonate in the Roman Empire was completed and will be published in the beginning of 2024. He attended several conferences, was included in the Comitato Direttivo of the Associazione Storico-Giuridico Costantiniana, and is directing a working group of Ravenna Capitale. He is also involved in an edition of Van Bleiswijk Decisiones, a project which will continue in 2023-2024.
Stephen Smith’s big book on folk religion in Mao Zedong’s China is currently undergoing review by external readers for Cambridge University Press. His article ‘Ideology versus expediency: the battle to eliminate “superstitious products” in the Mao era’ will appear in Emily Baum and Albert Wu (eds.), Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History, which is in production with Harvard University Press. He gave papers to the American Asian Studies conference in Boston, USA, and to the History Department at Warsaw University, and two talks to branches of the University of the Third Age.
Eva Margareta Steinby organised a workshop in Rome to discuss, on the one hand her steadily growing edition Bolli doliari romani dell’Italia centro-occidentale (www.bollidoliari.org), on the other the still unpublished editions of major and minor collections. As the scheme of BDRICO was approved and has already been generally adopted, it should be possible to create a programme that could be used by anybody working in the field and would enormously speed up publication. Professor John Bodel generously offered to create a template. They agreed on repeating the stimulating workshop yearly.
The war in Ukraine has continued to take much of Hew Strachan’s time, with trips to Washington, Warsaw and Kyiv, and the organisation of a major conference and two workshops for the British Academy. His edited volume, The British Home Front and the First World War, was published by Cambridge in February 2023 and an essay on Clausewitz appeared in the new edition of the Makers of Modern Strategy in May.
Michael Teper has continued his research on quantum field theories using lattice field theory techniques. He published a conference paper on the spectrum of ‘glueball’ states in Quantum Chromodynamics with four light quark flavours (arXiv:2212.02080), as well as a paper identifying massive modes on confining strings in a Z2 gauge theory (arXiv:2301.00034). In July he gave a set of lectures at the IAS Princeton. He is currently accompanying one of the Dyson Fellows of Oxford Theoretical Physics on a research project. He continues to be part of the recently funded Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
Keith Thomas continues to work on a collection of his essays. During the year he has published appreciations of the works of his fellow-historians, Sir Brian Harrison and the late Sir John Elliott, and contributed articles on historical subjects to The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.
Charles Webster has recently published a volume of four extended essays, the seventeenth-century element of which relates to Samuel Hartlib and his associates in Eastern Europe. The third section concerns the graphic work of Ernst Barlach and Jakob Steinhardt, especially with respect to their travels in Ukraine and Lithuania. The final section mainly focuses on the forced labour camps of Silesia during World War II. He is now preparing two further publications relating to Samuel Hartlib. He also continues his long-standing involvement with issues relating to health care and the NHS.
Chris Wickham has published The donkey and the boat (Oxford, 2023), the book on the Mediterranean economy which he has been working on since 2016. Translations into Italian and Spanish are under way. He is now focusing on the internal development of Italian city communes in the late twelfth century for a book provisionally entitled Le due volte del comune consolare.
Andrew Wilkinson was the co-chair of the UK National Neonatal Research Database, which now has clinical data of 1 million babies and 10 million days of care and forms the basis for a wide range of research projects. Collaboration with NHS England continues. He was the co-chair of the UK Guideline for Screening and Treatment of Blinding Retinopathy of Prematurity (4th Ed.) with evidence-based recommendations, and information for parents which has reduced unnecessary interventions. He worked on the NIHR randomised controlled trials investigating an antibiotic and an artificial surfactant in reducing chronic lung disease in preterm infants.
Visiting Fellows (Terms in residence and parent academic institution)
Sophie Ambler (Michaelmas Term, Lancaster University, History) worked on her book on low-status combatants in later medieval Europe, for Picador, and developed research on battlefield landscape and the battlefield cult of Simon de Montfort at Evesham. She also completed a special issue of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography on the Falklands War, co-edited with Thomas Mills. She delivered the Lord of Bowland Lecture and a talk for the Society of Antiquaries of London, as well as public lectures, and participated in a new AHRC research network on ‘Barons and the Public Good in Medieval Afro-Eurasia’.
Richard Drayton (Trinity Term, King’s College London, History) conducted research in Oxford libraries on the legal history of English expansion (c. 1620-1800), with special reference to slavery and the Caribbean. In April he completed one article, and on 13 June, he presented to the VF colloquium what will be the core of another. On 15 June the International Curators Forum filmed his conversation with Sonia Barrett (the German-British-Jamaican contemporary artist) about her exhibit `We the extracted’. The First Commissioner of the Church of England interviewed him (19 June) for membership of the Oversight Committee for the fund for reparatory justice.
Coulter George (Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity Terms, University of Virginia, Classics) worked on a monograph that applies recent advances in the linguistic analysis of Ancient Greek to a better understanding of Greek prose style of the fourth century BC, finishing drafts of nearly four of five projected chapters. He gave presentations on related material in Cambridge, Paris, Oxford, and Newcastle, in addition to completing an article on Greek word order, an article-length review of a major new Spanish-language syntax of Greek, and a shorter review of a book on prepositional use in the New Testament.
Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Trinity Term, John Hopkins, Language and Literature) worked intensively on the monograph Critical Ecology in Literary Modernism, writing a new chapter and revising drafts of others. She consulted manuscripts by Franz Kafka in the Bodleian Library Special Collections. She gave three presentations: ‘Imagination, Ecology, and Modernism’ for the Visiting Fellows Colloquium and the Modern and Contemporary Literature Seminar, both at All Souls, and ‘Stormy Weather: Climate and Consciousness in Literary Modernism’ for the Oxford German Research Seminar at Queens College. She attended lectures, several of which were directly relevant to her research project.
Kinch Hoekstra (Trinity Term, University of California, Berkeley, History) worked on a critical edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Thucydides. He consulted regularly with Sir Noel Malcolm, who is general editor of the Clarendon Edition of Hobbes. Publications that will result from the fellowship include this critical edition, and a chapter he worked on, on Bodin and Hobbes’s theories of extreme democracy (for The Cambridge History of Democracy).
John Keown (Hilary and Trinity Terms, Georgetown, Law) made good progress researching and writing a book on the concept of ‘best interests’ in relation to seriously ill children and adults. He also completed a paper on the latest House of Lords debate on physician-assisted suicide, published by Policy Exchange, a paper on the law of abortion in the US in the wake of the Dobbs case, and drafted a ten-thousand-word review essay on two books: one on assisted suicide and the European Convention on Human Rights, and the other on the right to be protected from suicide.
Jamie Lee (Michaelmas Term, King’s College London, Law) worked on project examining how legal institutions shape legal change. His immediate focus for the term was a lecture on the rhetoric of law reform in the ‘Current Legal Problems’ series at University College London in December 2022, now published as an article. He submitted written evidence on the Retained EU Law (Revocation And Reform) Bill, which was published by the Public Bill Committee. His Visiting Fellow’s Colloquium was on the Memoirs of retired UK Supreme Court Justices, which will lead to two future publications. During the term, he commenced his role as one of the general editors of the journal Legal Studies, and gave lectures for the Judicial College.
Sara Lipton (Hilary and Trinity Terms, State University of New York at Stony Brook, History) completed a book entitled The Vulgate of Experience: Looking at and Learning from Art in the High Middle Ages. She began to research and write a new book, How Pictures Hate: The Origins, Mechanisms, and Effects of Inflammatory Imagery. Specially, using resources of the Bodleian and All Souls libraries she finished revising the last two chapters of The Vulgate of Experience and began to research and draft two chapters of How Pictures Hate.
Drazen Prelec (Michaelmas Term, MIT, Psychology) continued working on economic mechanisms for collective inference in knowledge domains where ground truth cannot be verified. Such ‘truth serum’ mechanisms have two related objectives, namely, to resolve divergent judgments about an unknown world state, as well to reward honest expression of judgments irrespective of their anticipated alignment with consensus. Removing a limitation on prior methods, he obtained a solution that generates exact posterior probabilities over possible world states and that applies to small panels, including those composed of only two experts.
Rubina Raja (Hilary and Trinity Terms, Aarhus University, Archaeology) undertook research for her monograph Alternative economies in Antiquity and wrote new articles on iconography, archival material and urban development. She proofread articles, book chapters, and a two-volume monograph, connected to her research on visual culture in the Roman East and its Greek heritage. Overall, the publications focused on art, large and diverse archaeological and epigraphic datasets collected over the last decade as well as aspects of urban, societal and economic developments in the Roman Empire. She also organised, together with Andrew Wilson, an international conference held at All Souls College in April entitled ‘Catastrophes in Context’.
Jennifer Richards (Michaelmas Term, Newcastle University, English Literature) progressed the bibliographical work of her Thomas Nashe publication. She presented a paper, ‘Accidental Nashe’, in November which will feature in the Thomas Nashe edition’s editorial rationale, and will also shape the longer essay she is co-writing for Volume 6 on ‘Nashe’s Books’.
Laura Schaposnik (Hilary and Trinity Terms, University of Illinois, Mathematics) published papers on Zillow’s dataset and correlations between COVID-19 and Dengue and began several further research projects. She organised an international mathematics conference, gave an evening colloquium and eleven other presentations, and hosted poetry evenings and several school and library readings. She initiated over ten applied mathematics projects with College Fellows and visitors, and hosted over ten scholars. Additionally, she organised an international meeting in Canada and the London Mathematics Society.
Matthew Syed (Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity Terms, Independent Researcher, Psychology) worked on his non-fiction book concerning social science, energy and the significance of cousin marriage to understanding innovation. In particular, he drilled down in the significance of network structure for explaining global patterns of politics and psychology.
Max Telford (Hilary Term, University College London, Life Science) worked on his book The tree of life: a user’s manual which is to be published in 2024 by John Murray (UK) and Norton books (USA). During his term at All Souls he wrote a complete first draft of the 12 chapter (c. 100k words) book. He gave talks in the Department of Biology and the Department of Earth Sciences.
Nancy van Deusen (Hilary Term, Queen’s University, History) researched and completed a chapter on Bartolomé de Las Casas for her book, The Disappearance of the Past: Native-American Slavery, The Archive, and the Making of the Early Modern World (tentative title), copy-edited and revised three articles on Native American slavery and archives for the William and Mary Quarterly (80:2, 2023), Atlantic Studies (April 2023), and Slavery & Abolition (44:3, 2023), and completed work on another one for The Americas (80:3 July 2023). She gave lectures at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London; the Iberian History Seminar (Exeter College, Oxford); and at All Souls College, Oxford.
John Wyver (Michaelmas Term, University of Westminster, History) developed his research towards his book Magic Rays of Light: A Cultural History of British Television, 1925-1939. In particular he explored the Marconi archives at the Bodleian to investigate the company’s joint venture with EMI during the 1930s.