College Report 2019-20 by Somerville College

SOMERVILLE COLLEGE REPORT

2019-2020

Somerville College Report 2019-20

Somerville College

Contents

Visitor, Principal, Fellows, Lecturers, Staff

The Year in Review Principal’s Report Treasurer’s Report Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities Report on Junior Research Fellowships JCR Report MCR Report Library Report

9 12 14 19 20 21 22

Members’ Notes President’s Report Horsman Awards Somerville Senior Members’ Fund Life Before Somerville: Professor Fareda Banda, 1989 Judith (Mundlak) Taylor reports on the Year of 1952 A Letter from California: Sheltering in Place Members’ News and Publications Births Deaths Obituaries

25 26 26 27 28 30 31 40 40 42

Academic Report Examination Results Prizes Students entering College

62 64 67

Somerville Association Officers and Committee

Somerville Development Board Members

Notices Legacies Dates for the Diary

72 Back cover

Editor: Liz Cooke Telephone: 01865 270632 Email: elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk

Visitor, Principal, Fellows, Lecturers, Staff Visitor The Rt Hon The Lord Patten of Barnes, CH, PC, Chancellor of the University

Principal

Fellows (in order of seniority)

Almut Maria Vera Suerbaum, MA, (Dr Phil, Staatsexamen, Münster), Associate Professor Luke Pitcher, MA, MSt, DPhil, of German and Tutor in German (PGCert Durham), Associate Professor of Classics and Tutor Fiona Stafford, MA, MPhil, in Classics DPhil, (BA Leicester), FRSE, FBA, Hon DLitt (Leics), Simon Robert Kemp, BA, Professor of English Language MPhil, (PhD Cantab), Associate and Literature, Tutor in English Professor in French and Tutor Literature in French Richard Stone, MA, DPhil, MSAE, FIMechE, Professor of Engineering Science, Tutor in Engineering Science Lois McNay, MA, (PhD Cantab), Professor of the Theory of Politics and Tutor in Politics

Jan Royall, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, PC, MA, (BA Lond)

Charles Spence, MA, (PhD Cantab), Professor of Experimental Psychology and Tutor in Experimental Psychology

Vice-Principal

Philip West, MA, (PhD Cantab), Associate Professor of English, Times Fellow and Tutor in English

Benjamin John Thompson, MA DPhil, (MA PhD Cantab), FRHistS, Associate Professor of Medieval History and Tutor in History

Julie Dickson, MA, DPhil, (LLB Glasgow), Professor of Legal Philosophy and Tutor in Law

Christopher Hare, BCL, (Dip D’Etudes Jurid Poitiers, MA Cantab, LLM Harvard), Associate Professor of Law and Tutor in Law

Michael Hayward, MA, DPhil, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Tutor in Chemistry Beate Dignas, MA, DPhil, (Staatsexamen Münster), Associate Professor of Ancient History, Barbara Craig Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History Natalia Nowakowska, MA, DPhil, Professor of Early Modern History and Tutor in History

Mari Mikkola, (PhD Sheffield), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy Renaud Lambiotte, (PhD ULB Brussels), Associate Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems and Tutor in Mathematics Elena Seiradake, PhD Heidelberg, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Tutor in Biochemistry Vivien Parmentier, PhD, Associate Professor in Physical Climate Science and Tutor in Physics

Charlotte Potts, DPhil, (BA Victoria University of Wellington, MA UCL), FSA, Sybille Haynes Associate Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Art, Katharine and Leonard Woolley Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Tutor in Classical Archaeology

Faridah Zaman, BA, MPhil, (PhD Cantab), Associate Professor in History and Tutor in History

Karen Nielsen, (Cand mag, Cand philol Trondheim, MA, PhD Cornell), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy

Robert Davies, DPhil (BSc Toronto, MSc Ottowa), Associate Professor of Statistics and Tutor in Statistics

Julian Duxfield, MA, (MSc LSE), University Director of Human Resources

Annie Sutherland, MA, DPhil, (MA Cantab), Associate Renier van der Hoorn, (BSc, Professor in Old and Middle MSc Leiden, PhD Wageningen), English, Rosemary Woolf Fellow Professor of Plant Sciences and and Tutor in English Tutor in Plant Sciences Daniel Anthony, MA, (PhD Lond), Professor of Experimental Neuropathology and Tutor in Medicine

Jonathan Burton, MA, (PhD Cantab), Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry and Tutor in Chemistry

Dan Ciubotaru, (BSc, MA Babes-Bolyai, PhD Cornell), The Diana Brown Fellow and Tutor in Pure Mathematics; Professor of Mathematics Damian Tyler, (MSci, PhD Nott), Professor of Physiological Metabolism Francesca Southerden, BA, MSt, DPhil, Associate Professor of Italian and Tutor in Italian Louise Mycock, (BA Durh, MA PhD Manc), Associate Professor of Linguistics and Tutor in Linguistics

Samantha Dieckmann, (PhD University of Sydney), Associate Professor in Music and Tutor in Music

Michelle Jackson, (BSc PhD Lond), Associate Professor of Zoology and Tutor in Biology Noa Zilberman, (PhD Tel Aviv University), Associate Professor of Engineering Science, Tutor in Engineering Science Prateek Agrawal, (BTech Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, PhD University of Maryland), Associate Professor of Physics and Tutor in Physics Robin Klemm, (PhD Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and TU -Dresden), Associate Professor in Medicine and Tutor in Medicine Patricia Owens, (BSc Bristol, MPhil Cantab, PhD Aberystwyth), Associate Professor of International Relations and Tutor in International Relations

Professorial Fellows Stephen Weatherill, MA, (MA Cantab, MSc Edinburgh), Jacques Delors Professor of European Law Rajesh Thakker, MA, DM, (MA, MD Cantab), FRS, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci, May Professor of Medicine Matthew John Andrew Wood, MA DPhil, (MB ChB Cape Town), FMedSci, Professor of Neuroscience

Colin Espie, (BSc, MAppSci, PhD, DSc(Med) Glas), FBPsS, CPsychol, Professor of Behavioural Sleep Medicine Sir Marc Feldmann, AC, BSc(Med), MB BS, PhD, MD(Hon), DMSc(Hon), FAA, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCPath, FRS, Professor of Cellular Immunology Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, (BSc Edin, MSc, PhD Imp Lond) Manuele Gragnolati, MA, (Laurea in Lettere Classiche, Pavia, PhD Columbia, DEA Paris)

Stephen Roberts, MA, DPhil, FREng, FIET, FRSS, MIOP, Sarah Gurr, MA, (BSc, PhD London, ARCS, DIC), Professor RAEng-Man Professor of of Molecular Plant Pathology Machine Learning Aditi Lahiri, CBE, (PhD Brown MA, PhD Calcutta), Professor of Linguistics Steven Simon, MA, (PhD Harvard), Professor of Theoretical and Condensed Matter Physics

Administrative Fellows Anne Manuel, MA, (LLB Reading, MA, MSc, PhD Bristol), Librarian, Archivist and Head of Information Services and Keeper of College Pictures Stephen Rayner, MA, (PhD Durham), FRAS, MInstP, Senior Tutor, Tutor for Graduates and Tutor for Admissions Andrew Parker, MA, (BA Liverpool), ACMA, Treasurer Sara Kalim, MA, Director of Development

Senior Research Fellows Tony Bell, (MA, PhD Cantab), FRS, FRAS, MinstP, CPhys Amalia Coldea, (MA, PhD Cluj-Napoca) Stephanie Dalley, MA, (MA Cantab, Hon PhD London), FSA

John Ingram, (BSc KCL, MSc R'dg, PhD Wageningen NL) Joanna Innes, MA, (MA Cantab) Muhammad Kassim Javaid, (BMedSci, MBBS, PhD London), MRCP Patricia Kingori, (BA MSc RHUL, MSc UCL, PhD LSHTM Philip Kreager, DPhil Catherine Mary MacRobert, MA, DPhil Boris Motik, (MSc Zagreb, PhD Karlsruhe), Professor of Computer Science Frans Plank, (Statsexamen Munich, MLitt Edin, MA Regensburg, DPhil Hanover) Philip Poole, (BSc, PhD Murdoch) Mason Porter, MA, (BS Caltech, MS PhD Cornell) Franklyn Prochaska, (PhD Northwestern University), FRHS Michael Proffitt, BA Tessa Rajak, MA, DPhil, FRSA Owen Rees, MA, (PhD Cantab), ARCO, Professor of Music

Alex David Rogers, (BSc, PhD Liv) Roman Walczak, MA, (MSc Warsaw, Dr rer nat Heidelberg) Premila Webster, MBE, DPhil, FHEA, FFPH Jennifer Welsh, MA, DPhil (BA Saskatchewan)

Junior Research Fellows Robert Beagrie, (BA, MSc Cantab, PhD Imp), Biochemistry, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Lauren Burgeno, (BS California Irvine, PhD Washington), Experimental Psychology, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Gabe Cler, (PhD Boston), Experimental Psychology, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Xiaowen Dong, (BEng Zhejiang University China, MSc Edin, PhD Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne), Engineering Science, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Susan Dunning, (BA Seattle Pacific, MA PhD Toronto), Classics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Ana Laura Edelhoff, (BA MA Freie University Berlin), Philosophy, Mary Somerville Junior Research Fellow Peter Krafft, (PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Computer Science, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Justin Lau, (BSc Queen’s University Kingston Canada, DPhil Toronto), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Ferenc Mozes, DPhil (BEng MSc Petru Maior University), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow

Belinda Nicholson, (BSc MSc University of Melbourne, PhD University of Southern Queensland), Physics, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Thomas Nicol, (BBMedSci PhD), MRSB, Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Godelinde Perk, (BA BSc MA, PhD Umea), English, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Fay Probert, (BSc, MSc, PhD Warwick), Medicine, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Ritu Raj, DPhil (BS, MS IISER Kolkata India), Biochemistry, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Beth Romano, (BA Wellesley College, PhD Boston College), Mathematics, Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics Abhijit Sarkar, DPhil (BA Presidency University, MA MPhil Jawaharfal Nehru University), History, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Joulia Smortchkova, (BA Bologna, MSc Paris V, PhD Institut Jean Nicod Paris), Philosophy, Fulford Junior Research Fellow Priya Subramanian, (PhD Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India), Mathematics, Hooke Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics Martin Walker, (BASc Waterloo, MASc Toronto, PhD Cantab) AFHEA, Engineering Science, Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow

British Academy Fellows Lisa Forsberg, (MA, PhD KCL), British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow Nelson Goering, MPhil, DPhil, British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow

Vilija Velyvyte, MJur MPhil DPhil, (BLaw MLaw Mykolas Romeris), Law, British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow

Foundation Fellows

Career Development Fellow

Sir Geoffrey Leigh

Isabelle Roland, (MSc, PhD LSE), Economics

Lord Powell of Bayswater, KCMG, OBE

Emeritus Fellows Margaret Adams, MA, DPhil

Carole Hillenbrand, CBE, OBE, BA, (BA Cantab, PhD Edinburgh), FBA, FRSE, FRAS, FRHistS

Doreen Elizabeth Boyce, MA, (PhD Pittsburgh)

Angela McLean, DBE, BA, (MA Berkeley, PhD Lond), FRS

Ruth Hilary Finnegan, OBE, MA, BLitt, DPhil, FBA

Michele Moody-Adams, BA, (BA Wellesley, PhD Harvard) Judith Parker, DBE, QC, MA

Mr Gavin Ralston, MA

Janet Margaret Bately, CBE, MA, FBA

Wafic Rida Saïd

Margaret Kenyon (Mrs), MA

Esther Rantzen, DBE, CBE, MA

Kevin Scollan, MA

Clara Elizabeth Mary Freeman (Mrs), OBE, MA

Caroline Barron, OBE, MA, (PhD London), FRHistS

Jenny Glusker, MA, DPhil

Fiona Caldicott, DBE, BM BCh MA, (MD (Hon) Birm, DSc (Hon) Warwick), FRCPsych, FRCP, FRCPI, FRCGP, FMedSci

Lady Margaret Elliott, MBE, MA

Robert Ng

Pauline Adams, MA, BLitt, (Dipl Lib Lond)

Susan Scollan, MA

Lesley Brown, BPhil, MA

Gopal Subramanium, SA, Bencher (Hon.), Gray’s Inn

Marian Ellina Stamp Dawkins, CBE, MA DPhil, FRS Katherine Duncan-Jones, MA, BLitt, FRSL Karin Erdmann, MA, (Dr rer nat Giessen) Mary Jane Hands, MA

Honorary Fellows Baroness Williams of Crosby, CH, PC, MA Kiri Jeanette Te Kanawa, DBE, AC ONZ, Hon DMus

Ann Rosamund Oakley, MA, (PhD London, Hon DLitt Salford), AcSS Theresa Joyce Stewart, MA

Emma Rothschild, CMG, MA

Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, DBE, CMG, MA

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Kt, (BSc Baroda, PhD Ohio), Nobel Laureate, FRS (President)

Judith Ann Kathleen Howard, CBE, DPhil, (BSc Bristol), FRS

Tessa Ross, CBE, BA Joanna Haigh, CBE, MA, DPhil, FRS, FRMetS

Carolyn Emma Kirkby, DBE, OBE, MA, Hon DMus, (Hon DMus Bath, Hon DLitt Salf), FGSM

Victoria Glendinning, CBE, MA Nicola Ralston, BA

Akua Kuenyehia, BCL, (LLB University of Ghana)

Julianne Mott Jack, MA

Joyce Maire Reynolds, MA, (Hon DLitt Newcastle-uponTyne), FBA

Antonia Byatt, DBE, CBE, BA, FRSL

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, CBE, BA, MPhil

Carole Jordan, DBE, MA, (PhD London), FRS

Hazel Mary Fox (Lady Fox), CMG, QC, MA

Anna Laura Momigliano Lepschy, MA, BLitt

Lorna Margaret Hutson, BA, DPhil, FBA

Norma MacManaway, MA, (MA, MPhil Dublin, DEA Paris)

Averil Millicent Cameron, DBE, MA, DLitt (PhD London), FBA, FSA

Rosalind Mary Marsden, DCMG, MA, DPhil

Caroline Mary Series, BA, (PhD Harvard), FRS

Sarah Broadie, OBE, BPhil MA, (PhD Edinburgh), FBA

Sacha Romanovitch, BA

Harriet Maunsell, OBE, MA

Alice Prochaska, MA, DPhil, FRHistS

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey, MA, BLitt, FBA, FRHistS, CBE Judith Heyer, MA, (PhD London)

Helen Morton, MA, (MSc Boston, MA Cantab) Hilary Ockendon, MA, DPhil, (Hon DSc Southampton) Josephine Peach, BSc, MA, DPhil

Julia Stretton Higgins, DBE, CBE, MA, DPhil, Hon DSc, FRS, CChem, FRSC, CEng, FIM, FREng

Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, CH, CBE, MA Hon DCL, (PhD Harvard), FBA, Hon FRS, FMedSci

Stephen Guy Pulman, MA, (MA, PhD Essex), FBA

Kay Elizabeth Davies, DBE, CBE, MA, DPhil, (Hon DSc Victoria Canada), FRS, FMedSci

Frances Julia Stewart, MA, DPhil

Baroness Jay of Paddington, PC, BA

Adrianne Tooke, MA, (BA London, PhD Cantab)

Irangani Manel Abeysekera, MA

Angela Vincent, MA, MB, BS, (MSc London), FRS, FMedSci

Paula Pimlott Brownlee, MA, DPhil

Hilary Spurling, CBE, BA Catherine Jane Royle de Camprubi, MA Nancy Rothwell, DBE, BSc, DS, (PhD London), FMedSci, FRS Baroness Shriti Vadera, PC, BA Elizabeth Mary Keegan, DBE, MA

Margaret Casely-Hayford, CBE, MA Dame Elan Closs Stephens, DBE, BA

Stipendiary Lecturers Ayla Barutchu, (BSc, DPhil La Trobe), Psychology Achas Burin, BCL, DPhil, (LLB Leeds), Law

Oliver Clarkson, (BA Leeds, MA PhD Durham), English Yvonne Couch, MSc, DPhil, Medicine Xon de Ros, DPhil, (Fellow of LMH), Spanish Kamel El Omari, (BSc Paris VII, MSc, PhD Paris VI), Biochemistry Andrew Elliott, MPhil, DPhil, (BA Cantab), Economics

Retaining Fee Lectures

Victoria Wilson, Scholarships and Funding Officer

Susan Anthony, (MBBS London), MRCP, FRCR, Medicine

Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust

Richard Ashdowne, Jessica Mannix, (MA St MA, DPhil, Linguistics Andrews), Campaign Director Vilma de Gasperin, DPhil, (Laurea Padua), Modern Languages

Claire Cockcroft, MA (PhD Cantab), Director of the Thatcher Scholarship Programme

Alumni Relations Liz Cooke, MA, Joint Secretary to the Alumni Association Lisa Gygax, MA, Joint Secretary to the Alumni Association

Conferences & Catering Dave Simpson, Catering and Conference Manager

Rachel Exley, (BSc Leeds, PhD Paris XI), Medicine

Departmental Lecturers

Oxford India Centre

Francesco Hautmann, (Dottore in Fisica Florence), Physics

Pippa Byrne, BA MSt DPhil, History

Radhika Khosla, MPhys, (PhD Chicago), Research Director

Tiziana Imstepf, DPhil, (BA MA Bern), German Marco Scutari, (MSc, PhD Padua), Statistics

Vinita Govindarajan, (BA Christ University Bangalore, PGDip Asian College of Journalism), MSc, Partnerships and Communications Manager

Linus Ubl, MSt DPhil, (BA MA Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), German

Library

Dean Sheppard, MChem DPhil, Chemistry

Susan Elizabeth Purver, MA, Assistant Librarian

Mark Ealey, Lodge Manager

Tomas Wallenius, MPhil, DPhil, (BSocSc Helsinki), International Relations

Matthew Roper, MA, (MA Durham), Library Assistant

Chapel

Development Office

Utkarsh Sharma, (MSc Warwick, MFin Cantab, BEng Surrey), Chapel Director from January 2020

Holly Kennard, BA MPhil DPhil, Linguistics James Kirkpatrick, BPhil DPhil, (BA Reading, MLitt St Andrews), Philosophy Gustavo Mellior, (MSc University of Kent), Economics Quentin Miller, DPhil, (BMath Waterloo, Canada), Computer Science Ain Neuhaus, DPhil, Medicine Anca Popescu, (BSc Politehnica University Bucharest, PhD Cantab), Engineering

College Lecturer

Alexander Roberts, BPhil DPhil, (BA Leeds), Philosophy Nisha Singh, MSc, DPhil, Medicine Graeme Smith, MPhys, DPhil, Physics Stephen Smith, BA MPhil, (MA Open, PhD RHUL), Classical Archaeology

Hanne Eckhoff, Cand Mag Cand Philol Doctor artium Oslo, Russian

Lecturer in Medicine Helen Ashdown, BM BCh, (MA Cantab), PGDip (Health Res), DCH, MRCP, MRCPG, Janet Vaughan Tutor in Clinical Medicine

Academic Office

Erfan Soliman, DPhil, FHEA, Engineering Kerstin Timm, (PhD Cantab), Medicine

Joanne Ockwell, (BA, MA University of Gloucester), Welfare support and Policy Officer

Timothy Walker, MA, Plant Sciences

Julia Hill, (BBA University of Kent), Undergraduate Officer

Brett de Gaynesford, (BA, College of William & Mary, USA), Deputy Development Director Clare Finch, Deputy Development Director (Operations) Heather Weightman, (BA London), Annual Fund Officer

Communications Matt Phipps, (BA York, MPhil Cantab), Communications Manager

Treasury Elaine Boorman, College Accountant

IT Chris Bamber, Systems Manager

Porters’ Lodge

Music Will Dawes, (PGDip RAM, BMus (Hons) Edinburgh), Director of Chapel Music

Estates Steve Johnson, Estates Manager

Gardens Sophie Walwin, (Kew Dip), Head Gardener

Jack Evans, BA, Communications Officer

Further details of all administrative staff are to be found on the College website.

Principal’s Report 2020 is a year we will all remember. Indeed, given the perfect storm of economic, political and social upheaval that COVID-19 has unleashed, it seems likely that future generations will look back on this year as a turning point, the moment when we moved from one mode of living and working to something else altogether. The question facing us, as members of a progressive institution like Somerville, is what shape do we want society to assume when we emerge from this crisis. Will we preserve the status quo, with deepening economic inequality and climate insecurity further blighting the prospects of the least fortunate among us? Or will we go further than ever in committing ourselves to a better world, one realigned along the principles of equality, dignity and freedom? The preferred outcome, at least here at Somerville, is clear. Even just a few weeks into the crisis, our wonderful Fellows, students and staff had begun laying down the blueprint of that better world. They rallied around to work on vaccines, graduated early to help on the medical frontline, raised money to support the hardest hit members of society and began the hard task of organising new fronts of research, policy and enquiry. I am also happy to say that, thanks to the excellent financial management of Treasurer Andrew Parker and the strategic foresight of our Governing Body, the college finds itself in a secure position to weather the difficulties ahead. Make no mistake, the years to come will not be easy for any of us. The challenge of maintaining our principles and our commitment to that better world alongside the practical demands of running a college will be especially difficult. However, as I look back upon what we have done during the course of this year and consider our position, I am confident that we are well-placed to do what we have always done: to rise to the challenge of the moment and to practise an expansive, inclusive politics of hope. Our attempts to shape a better future are vastly strengthened by the appointment this year of several distinguished new Fellows. Noa Zilberman joins Somerville as a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering, combining a research focus on designing scalable, sustainable computer infrastructure with strong advocacy for women in STEM. And Prateep Agrawal looks set to be a worthy successor to Roman Walczak, our beloved Tutorial Fellow in Physics, through his combination of passion for untangling the most difficult questions of fundamental physics with cutting-edge research into dark matter and dark energy, which have impressed us all. As Tutorial Fellow in Economics, Margarita Klymak’s research into the behaviour of firms, considering factors such as child and forced labour, will give us vital insights on social equity

in the developing world. Using data to different ends, our new Tutorial Fellow in Statistics, Robert Davies has a specialism in statistical genetics that could facilitate more accurate phenotype prediction from genotype with potential clinical applications. Another medical pioneer is Medical Fellow Robin Klemm, whose research on the spatial and molecular organisation of fat metabolism has the potential to revolutionise the medical toolset for treating metabolic disorders such as type-II-diabetes and obesity. Finally, we are immensely privileged to welcome Patricia Owens as our new Fellow in International Relations. Joining us following lectureships at Princeton, UCLA and Harvard, Patricia is currently Principal Director of a Leverhulme Research Project, ‘Women and the History of International Thought’, which looks set to rewrite the intellectual and disciplinary history of International Relations – all of which sounds distinctly Somervillian. For all the hardship this year has brought, there have also been many happy moments – not least of which was the pleasure of seeing so many of our academics gain recognition in their fields. In medicine, I am delighted that two of our Fellows, Professor Sir Marc Feldmann and Professor Matthew Wood, have been honoured – Marc with the 2020 Tang Prize for Biopharmaceutical Science and Matthew with his election to the Academy of Medical Sciences.

PROFESSOR NOA ZILBERMAN

PROFESSOR SIR MARC FELDMANN

I am also delighted that Dr Radhika Khosla, Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD), won the Environmental Research Letters award for her co-authored paper on the future of India’s energy and emissions. Such research has the power to shift public opinion and governmental policy both in India and beyond, and will play a vital role in our fight against the existential threat of climate change.

The brilliance of our students is all their own – but it is undoubtedly empowered by the loyal and generous support of our community. In a year when giving was complicated by the clear and pressing need to support the most vulnerable members of society, I have been overwhelmed by the continued generosity of our donors, as well as the resourcefulness of our wonderful Development team led by Sara Kalim.

In the humanities, I am in awe of Professor Aditi Lahiri, FBA. This year she not only received a CBE for her services to the Study of Linguistics, but was also appointed Chair of the Faculty of Linguistics and Philology, returning to the role after serving as the faculty’s founding chair in 2008. And though I shall miss his counsel deeply, I am also very pleased that our current VicePrincipal, Professor Benjamin Thompson, was appointed Associate Head for Education of the Humanities Division, where he is coordinating undergraduate teaching and learning across Oxford’s ten humanities faculties.

Having fully endowed the Sue and Kevin Scollan Fellowship in Organic Chemistry, Sue Scollan (1978, Chemistry) and her husband Kevin have continued their extraordinary support of Inorganic Chemistry at Somerville as part of a long-term plan to secure the future of Chemistry at the College.

Of course, our Fellows are only one, but immensely important, side of the story. Our students have not gone without laurels this year, despite having been obliged to migrate to a world of online learning and examination (a move they made with characteristic aplomb). Althea Sovani (2018, Classics with Oriental Studies) was awarded the Chancellor’s Latin Prose Prize for her translation from Runciman’s Sicily, while Raphael Reinbold (2017, Bioscience) won the Lilly Prize for Excellence in Organic Chemistry Research 2018-2019 for ‘excellence in the first year of postgraduate research.’ My congratulations to them both and the many others who distinguished themselves this year.

The Somerville Choir has been flourishing under the direction of Will Dawes over recent years, and steadily weaving into every aspect of College life, to our great benefit. Their work – which has continued via socially distanced rehearsals and recordings during lockdown – was reinforced and supported this year by generous donations from Virginia Ross (1966, MSt International Studies) and Helen Morton, former College Treasurer. We were also immensely grateful this year to Trevor Hughes and Penelope Lee (1950, Classics) for their generous gifts of shares, which they have kindly allowed the College to direct towards the areas of greatest need. The Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust has been strengthened immeasurably this year through the extraordinary generosity of Lord Glendonbrook. His recent gift enabled the MTST to fund the Michael Bishop Foundation

PROFESSOR ADITI LAHIRI

DAME JOAN BAKEWELL AND REBECCA JONES JOINED JAN ROYALL IN ONE SOMERVILLE AT HOME SEASON TWO EVENT

Thatcher Scholarship fully for three students this year, in addition to Lord Glendonbrook’s continued support for widening access at Somerville.

The pandemic has changed all our lives. For me personally, it has meant that I have not been able to meet in person with many of you since March – a source of great regret. The wonderful October celebrations of our 140th Birthday remain, however, a treasured recollection from the period before lockdown, as I hope they do for many of you.

The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development has been similarly active in attracting support, including a new five-year partnership with multinational agribusiness UPL. All of which has enabled the OICSD to award a record 19 scholarships this coming year – a phenomenal expansion from its relatively humble beginnings in 2013, and a testament to the vitality and importance of the OICSD’s research across everything from climate change to health and gender equality. We were also delighted this year to announce the first Somerville Sanctuary Scholarship. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of many friends and alumni, we are now in a position to fund five years of the Scholarship and look forward to welcoming our first student this academic year. Somerville has also been fortunate to receive a significant philanthropic contribution to establish a sports and wellbeing fund. Supporting extra-curricular sporting activities for students and wellbeing activities for whole community, this fund provided a vital source of wellbeing during lockdown and will continue to do so in the coming year. This year also saw us create a new Visiting Scholarship for BAME early-career academics. Developed in partnership with the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and through the assistance of Somerville SRF Patricia Kingori, this scholarship represents a small, decisive step towards becoming a consciously anti-racist institution in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and all it highlighted.

In the absence of our normal programme of events, we launched our ‘Somerville at Home’ online programme in April of this year. What began as a temporary response to lockdown soon emerged as a powerful tool for keeping our global community connected and spirits most definitely raised, thanks to the contributions of guests such as Lord Dubs, Natasha Kaplinsky, Lord Powell and Dame Esther Rantzen. Season Two of Somerville at Home will have commenced by the time you receive this, featuring conversations between Simon RussellBeale and Shakespearean scholar Emma Smith and myself and Dame Joan Bakewell – I do encourage you to search them out. I now begin my fourth year as Principal of Somerville. Many plans we devised have had to change because of COVID-19 – but others will not. I may not be able to meet with you all as I would like, but our newly refurbished kitchens will be ready to feast you in style when circumstances permit. I may not be able to implement some of the plans I dreamt of, but others relating to sustainability, community and access are more important than ever now. The work continues, as always, and Somerville remains at the forefront of all our minds. JAN ROYALL, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, Principal of Somerville

Treasurer’s Report It will not be a great surprise to anybody that the dominant influence on 2019-20 and the 2020-21 year to come has been, and will be, Covid-19.

COLLEGE INCOME

£’000S

Reduced endowment income

275

Reduced student rents (no TT rents and reduced vacation residence)

950

41%

1,150

72%

150

19%

Reduced net conference income (no Easter or summer conferences) Reduced rental income from our commercial tenants Total reduction in income

2,525

22%

The sharply reduced level of activity from Easter onwards and the government’s furlough scheme allowed us to reduce our expenditure by c. £850k, which means that we are anticipating a deficit of £1.7m which compares to an expectation of breakeven pre-Covid. This level of deficit is typical of a mixed college of our size. There are smaller colleges with smaller endowments which have fared considerably worse than this and some are even having to contemplate significant corrective action, including redundancies. I’m afraid that we expect 2020-21 to bring more of the same. Endowment income will be down again, reflecting reduced capital values and lower dividends. Our commercial tenants will continue to struggle and will look to us for support. It is also inevitable that we will need to fund sharply increased costs for academic pensions as the USS pension fund deficit continues its inexorable rise. We have looked to trim our cloth accordingly, without compromising long term capability, and we expect this to reduce our costs by £500k. Despite our best efforts, we still anticipate a loss for 2020-21 of between £1.5m and £2m. We are fortunate that the growth in our endowment in recent years, thanks to the generosity of the Somerville community, has given us the financial heft to absorb these losses. We have built up unrestricted reserves of £1.5m which will broadly cover the 2019-20 loss, but at some point, when capital values have recovered, we will need to dip into our endowment to restore our liquidity and to cover the 2020-21 deficit.

Picture by John Cairns

Coronavirus has had a dramatic impact on our income in 2019-20. The numbers behind this are set out below:

ANDREW PARKER, COLLEGE TREASURER

Refurbishing our kitchen and pantry Against this backdrop, we have taken what might be seen as a counter-intuitive decision to replenish our kitchen and pantry at a cost of £4m this year. The need has been clear for some time. The kitchen has not had any serious investment since the mid-1990s and we have been nursing our kitchen and pantry equipment for many years. There are only so many times the Head Chef can cope with the gas supply giving up the ghost an hour before a guest night! We have been building up funds to cover this for the last few years with the money being invested alongside our endowment and we had everything lined up to start this summer. Our initial reaction, once the impact of Covid became fully apparent, was to postpone for a year in the hope that our investment asset values might have had the chance to recover somewhat by then. However, in the end we took the view that asset values were just as likely to deteriorate further in a year’s time, and that together with the strong negotiating position we had with contractors due the scarcity of work during the pandemic, persuaded us to push on this year. It has proved to be a good decision. We were able to take £2.2m out of our investments without incurring any capital loss (the balance being funded by a temporary overdraft), and the absence of any conferences over the summer has allowed us to make an early start and get ahead of programme. Temporary kitchen and dining hall facilities on the quad are being assembled as I write, and by the time you read this will be catering to our staff and students. With a following wind the work should be completed by the end of April 2021. ANDREW PARKER August 2020

Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities Biochemistry Professor Elena Seiradake has published two major research articles. For this one: https://www.some.ox.ac. uk/news/how-to-build-a-brain/ her lab led the research, collaborating with labs in Germany and France. Her second article reveals that mutations in the gene NTNG2, which codes for netrin-G2, cause neurodevelopmental disorders, a collaborative project with an extensive list of international collaborators https://linkinghub. elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00029297(19)30386-6

Biology Michelle Jackson moved to Somerville and the Department of Zoology from Imperial College London in September 2019. She spent her first year learning the ropes, applying for funding to build her first research team, and teaching tutorials to Somerville’s Biology students. She also continues her research investigating the effects that humans have on the plants and animals that live in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. With colleagues from South Africa, she has recently published a paper which shows how the increasing temperatures associated with climate change cause predator loss in streams (Jackson et al. 2020, ‘Food web properties vary with climate and land use in South African streams’. Functional Ecology, 34(8)). She has also spent some time in the laboratory over the last year, processing samples and data collected in the Arctic and Antarctic – here, she is investigating how temperature alters the diversity of everything from microbes to fish. Because of the pandemic, this is the first time in more than ten years that she has not gone on fieldwork over the summer, either to the Arctic or to South Africa! Timothy Walker reports: ‘I have written a book on Pollination aimed at first year undergraduates and interested gardeners. It is being published by Princeton University Press. I don’t know when it will hit the bookshops.

‘Tutorials via Teams were not as good as face to face BUT it was interesting to have the first one at 9am with a student in China, at 10.30 with a student in the UK, at 2pm with one in Portugal and finishing at 3.30 with one in Massachusetts. It was therefore possible to get very up to date reports on the COVID-19 situation in different countries and different views. For reasons that no one has yet explained, tutorials take longer when delivered via Teams and so do lectures. The majority of students prefer to have lectures recorded because they can slow them down and go over the tricky bits again and again until it makes sense. ‘We have also discovered that some succulent house plants can survive sixteen weeks without watering.’

Engineering Professor Steve Roberts continues to work to bring scalable machine learning to science, industry and commerce. He is involved in several new projects in economics and finance as well as starting a large study, with colleagues from the Department of Zoology, on mosquito detection. The latter is funded via a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Richard Stone reports that Engineering at Somerville flourishes with three 1st class degrees in Finals and three 2.1s. Success has not just been in exams as this cohort have also been playing for the England Ladies’ Lacrosse Team, being Vice-Captain of the University Basketball Team, and playing Bridge for England. With the arrival of Noa Zilberman we are now back to full strength with two Tutorial Fellows. There has also been a departure as Martin Walker (Mary Ewart JRF) has been appointed as a Lecturer at Surrey University. He made significant contributions to the teaching of Statics, Dynamics and Structures. Lockdown is still at the front of Richard Stone’s mind as he and his colleagues are yet to return to their labs. Teaching

last term has been remote with various use of webcams and slates in Teams. This has been mostly for the First Years as their lectures continued. They have remained very well engaged with their work despite having had their exams cancelled, and responded well to past papers and mock exams. Fortunately Richard’s research was in steady-state with no active experiments at the start of lockdown. His team has had plenty to do with analysing data, writing papers and designing a Stirling engine. Despite conferences being cancelled this summer Richard will be busy as there have been revisions made to the Year 2 Thermodynamics module and he wants to record most of his lectures before the start of the academic year. Professor Noa Zilberman joined Somerville College in January as a Tutorial Fellow and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science. Her research is concerned with designing computing infrastructure that is scalable, sustainable and resilient. Of particular interest is how we can improve computing infrastructure in the face of global warming and its effects. In-networking computing is one emerging solution, where applications are offloaded to run within the network, as data is sent from users to the cloud. In a recent publication since joining Oxford, Zilberman and her collaborators have demonstrated x10,000 performance improvement in distributed services, following previous work where they have demonstrated x1,000 power saving. This means that hundreds of computers can be replaced with a single in-network computing device, and each device will save 1GWh/year. Computing infrastructure also has societal effects, and another recent publication considered aspects of trustworthy AI development. Additional publications since joining Somerville considered trading latency for computing with the network, and reproducibility in networked-systems research.

English Fiona Stafford had an exciting summer, with the performance of her play at the Edinburgh Fringe. She also gave a lecture at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, and on Coleridge’s Trees at the ‘Coleridge and the Natural World’ Summer Weekend in Devon (now published in the Coleridge Bulletin) and was delighted to be invited to curate a collection of books about trees in the Women’s Library at Compton Verney. A bike accident at the end of August put a stop to other activities, which, as it’s turned out, has been a recurrent feature of this unusual year. In Michaelmas and Hilary, she much enjoyed teaching Victorian Literature to the English First Years, eighteenth-century literature to the Second Years and the Romantic period to Finalists. She was also running an MSt course on Place and Nature Writing for graduates and was delighted to see their engagement with urgent environmental questions. With Seamus Perry, she continued to run the Romantic Research Seminar and to chair the Environmental Humanities network at TORCH. Among the highlights of the programme was the lecture and showing of a film by Scottish landscape artist Victoria Crowe. All seminars, like everything else, were somewhat disrupted by strike action and then cancelled or postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the College closed, all teaching and supervision moved online, and many other conferences, lectures and events have been postponed. She published an essay on the legacies of Irish Romantic Literature and contributed a short essay and video to the John Clare 2020 celebration, which had to move online. Fiona is pleased to have become a Visitor at the Oxford Botanic Garden and contributed to their Winter Lecture series just before the lockdown. In Somerville, she has also enjoyed discussing the College gardens with the new Head Gardener, Sophie Walwin. This year, Annie Sutherland has been busy with her edition of a group of thirteenth-century prayers associated with reclusive women, and hopes to complete work on this project in 2021. With Almut Suerbaum, she has also completed editorial work on a collection of essays entitled Medieval Temporalities – The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, which is currently

in press with Boydell and Brewer. In her teaching, she has continued to work in association with the Ashmolean Museum, encouraging students to think about literary and material cultures in tandem. Phil West completed a busy and absorbing two-year stint as Chair of the English Faculty by hosting the Faculty’s first ever online Faculty Meeting in Trinity Term. He is looking forward to fewer administrative meetings in 2020-21, and also to teaching a new final-year optional paper, ‘Language, Persuasion, People, Things’, which he is co-convening with Lynda Mugglestone (Professor of English Language at Pembroke College, and also a former Somerville English student!). Like many tutors this year, he was disappointed to have a conference paper cancelled due to the pandemic, in his case on the pre-Civil War poetry of the AngloWelsh writer Henry Vaughan (16211695) whose 400th anniversary will be celebrated in 2021. He greatly missed teaching his students in person in Trinity Term, but was enormously impressed by the courage and resourcefulness with which they carried on their studies (via online classes and tutorials) despite challenges and hardships.

History Pippa Byrne has very much enjoyed being personal tutor to the History finalists this year, and she is proud of them for enduring remote examinations and achieving a fine set of results. Her research this year has maintained a legal theme, and she has published articles on law codes and jurisprudence in medieval Germany, medieval Italy, and medieval England. Work on her book on education and translation in twelfth-century Sicily continues, though research trips to the island itself will have to wait for another year. In the past academic year, Natalia Nowakowska was pleased to learn that her recent monograph, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalisation (OUP, 2018), had won a number of international prizes: winner of the George Blazyca Prize and Gerald Strauss Prize, co-winner of the Kulczycki Prize and the British Association of Slav and East European Studies Women’s Forum

Prize, and also runner up for the Reginald Zelnik Prize. In 2019, she went on an illuminating research trip to the Vistula Delta, and gave a lecture in Budapest at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. As well as becoming Vice-Principal for the year, Benjamin Thompson took up the post of Associate Head of the Humanities Division. This normally involves co-ordinating everything to do with Education policy and practice across the ten Humanities Faculties. The special interest of the post was the new Schwarzman Humanities Centre which will be built next to Somerville, incorporating the majority of our Faculties, a consolidated Library, and a 500-seat concert hall with other cultural spaces. However, in March this became almost a full-time COVID-19 coordination post, as the University rapidly moved its teaching and examining online for Trinity Term, then started planning for mixed-mode teaching in 2020-21. This was still being done at the time of writing, and time will tell how things play out. ‘An unexpected, but challenging and interesting, year.’ Faridah Zaman reports: ‘This has of course been a strange academic year in all sorts of ways – and definitely a year of two halves. Aside from teaching new papers and taking on a fresh batch of graduate students, I’ve continued my own research and writing, which has been presented at seminars and conferences in Cambridge, New York, and Oxford. Since the pandemic began, much of our attention has naturally refocused towards converting reading lists to online-resources only, recording lectures at home, planning remote classes, and, fundamentally, thinking about how to continue providing students with a high standard of teaching during a lockdown. The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests globally at the beginning of the summer provided another, quite different, opportunity to take stock – as Chair of the History Faculty’s Race Equality Working Group, I’ve been closely involved in the Faculty’s response to urgent calls for change and helping to co-ordinate ideas around redressing systemic inequalities and encouraging more inclusive histories. In student news, the Somerville History Society has held a number of successful social and academic events, several History students have

flourished in key JCR Committee posts, and a group of our most enterprising historians have together founded a new history magazine called Kronos – they plan to publish their first issue, aptly themed ‘Distance’, in September.’

Law Professor Julie Dickson was on sabbatical leave in Michaelmas 2019, and managed to finish a complete draft of her new book, working title: Elucidating Law. In Hilary term she returned to her teaching duties, and found it a real pleasure to be back working with her wonderful colleagues, Professor Chris Hare, who is the other Tutorial Fellow in Law at Somerville, and Achas Burin, our early career Lecturer in Law who is a fantastic scholar, teacher, and colleague – Achas’ post was also made possible by generous donations from members of the Somerville Lawyers alumni group. Just as Professor Dickson and her colleagues were preparing their First Year Law students for Law Moderations exams, COVID-19 struck, and with it the lockdown, and the First Years’ exams were cancelled on just 48 hours’ notice in mid-March. For the remainder of the academic year, Professor Dickson tried her best to comfort students, help them with logistics and with planning for rescheduled online Law Mods, and online Law Finals, and moved all her teaching for Trinity term online. Like all her colleagues, this involved her using the Easter vacation to prepare new teaching and revision materials, to learn how to use online teaching platforms, and to try to organise to teach across seven time zones at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. ‘The students rose admirably to the challenge of Online Trinity Term, but for academic staff it has been a very tiring and stressful time, and it is with trepidation that we look ahead to Michaelmas 2020, which will be very far from business as usual.’ Professor Stephen Weatherill continues to teach European Union law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels while also supervising a platoon of research students whose work covers matters such as competition law, state aid, consumer law, constitutional identity, procedural protection in tax investigations, and the digital economy.

He enjoyed sabbatical leave during Hilary and Trinity terms in 2020, though an enticing array of planned visits to continental European universities was replaced by lockdown in Summertown. His research work lately has included investigation of the choices made and to be made by the UK as a withdrawing and now withdrawn Member State of the EU, and he has paid particular attention to the arrangements designed for the island of Ireland – see for example http://eulawanalysis.blogspot. com/2020/03/the-protocol-onireland-northern.html. Spoiler alert – he thinks it is an open question whether the UK government scores higher marks for incompetence or for dishonesty.

Linguistics Louise Mycock reports: ‘In this most challenging of years, the community of Linguistics students at Somerville has continued to expand and thrive. The College has admitted students studying Philosophy and Linguistics since 2017, but this year Somerville welcomed its first undergraduates studying Psychology and Linguistics. Results have been very pleasing all round, with a strong showing in Preliminary Examinations in particular, including the awarding of the Stephen Parkinson Prize for best performance in Prelims Linguistics by a Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics students to a Somervillian. The students displayed fortitude when we all had to switch to online teaching and assessment for Trinity term, and continued to work hard at what was undoubtedly a difficult time. Open Days were also held online in July 2020, and I participated in University and College events, answering questions live that were subsequently made available for viewing via YouTube. The Linguistics session which I ran for Sixth Form students at the Somerville Study Day in February 2020 received positive feedback. ‘My work on ProTag constructions (It’s an interesting question, that) continues, with an article on this construction as it appears in the works of Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare (This may haue credit, and chimes reason, this! from Jonson’s ‘The New Inn’) published in the journal English Language and Linguistics. Another article on how

ProTags may combine with other elements in Present Day British English (It’s a good book, that, isn’t it?) is currently under review. Also submitted is work on the intonation of questions in Bengali, with Fellow of Somerville and Chair of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, Professor Aditi Lahiri. This year, I have given presentations at network meetings in Dresden and Giessen, and an invited talk at the Germanic Linguistics Society in Oxford. The major reference book on the theoretical framework of LexicalFunctional Grammar, of which I am an author, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2019.’

Mathematics Dan Ciubotaru reports: ‘This year I’ve continued my research in representation theory (the study of symmetry) and my teaching for the College and lecturing in the Maths Institute. I’ve published three papers, two in good journals and one as a book chapter in a Festschrift, and I’ve written two more preprints. One of them opens up a new direction of research that I find very exciting and I expect that it will keep me busy for a while. Because of the pandemic, three international conferences where I would have been an invited speaker have been moved to next year, but I managed to lecture on this new research at the beginning of February at a large conference in representation theory in Paris. Lecturing for the Maths Institute unexpectedly brought my fifteen minutes of fame: the first lecture for my Introduction to Calculus course was posted on YouTube in October and has gathered almost 4 million views since. In college, I’ve enjoyed teaching algebra and complex analysis to the First and Second Year students, face-to-face for the first two terms, then online via Teams in Trinity. Like everybody else, I’ve been really missing the college during the past five months.’ Renaud Lambiotte reports that the last academic year has been very strange and abnormal in many respects. Until February, his research focused on his core topics and he was happy to see the publication, amongst others, of two technical works that he is very fond of, one on the clustering of time series, and another on dynamics on hypergraphs. With the lockdown and school closure,

several projects have been put on hold, as he focused his energy on his teaching, but he also redirected his research towards COVID-19 topics, helping to delimit the potential benefits, limitations and dangers of using mobile phone data to track and model the epidemics. This work resulted in an editorial in Science https://advances.sciencemag.org/ content/6/23/eabc0764.abstract and in the release of the Oxford COVID-19 impact monitor, https://www.oxfordcovid-19.com//.

Medicine Within a few days of lockdown commencing, Somerville Professorial Fellow and May Professor of Medicine, Rajesh Thakker, was asked to contribute to a COVID-19 response report by the Royal College of Physicians. Acting in his capacity as President of the Society for Endocrinology, Professor Thakker solicited responses from twentyseven senior academic and clinical endocrinologists. The combined feedback was translated into a report on the effects of COVID-19 upon current clinical services and activities, and how the various branches of medicine propose to deliver patient care, teaching and research in the future. Professor Thakker has also co-authored an article on the management of neuroendocrine tumours during the COVID-19 pandemic with a view to what were the critical emergency investigations and treatment – this report was published in the European Journal of Endocrinology, June 2020. Finally, Professor Thakker provided advice and input to two patient groups (AMEND, for which he is patron, and ParathyroidUK) for their documents detailing responses to FAQs. Damian Tyler reports that his team has completed the first trial of a new imaging technique called ‘hyperpolarized magnetic resonance’ which increases the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging by more than 10,000 times. This new approach enables one to look at changes in the way the heart burns fats and sugars, commonly called metabolism. The study has shown that it is possible to detect changes in the balance between using fats and sugars when people fast overnight and also when they have type II diabetes – this work was published

in Circulation Research (https:// www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ CIRCRESAHA.119.316260).

Modern Languages Professor Simon Kemp reports that teaching French language and literature through the lockdown has been an interesting challenge, with tutorials interrupted by children, cats and connectivity issues. The students have been remarkably stoic and good-humoured about the whole situation, though. Simon has been especially impressed with our Second Years, who have had to plan and make arrangements for a year abroad in a situation of immense uncertainty, and with our Finalists, who had an already stressful year made substantially more so by the move to online assessment and the reduced number of exams, which in some cases meant the cancellation of exams for which they had felt most confident. The First Years too found themselves exiled from Somerville almost before they had really had a chance to find their feet here, but then again, they did learn early on that all Prelims exams had been cancelled and they would proceed automatically to the Final Honours course, so there was a silver lining for them at least. Research took a hit, with libraries closed and conferences cancelled or postponed in the UK and Europe. As Simon was starting his stint as Director of Outreach for the Modern Languages Faculty this year, that left him with time to get to grips with moving our access and outreach operation online for the duration of the pandemic, including a virtual Open Day and an online Summer School. It seems things will not get back to normal for a while yet, but he is looking forward to getting back to some in-person teaching next term where possible, even if appropriately masked and socially distanced. During the academic year, Francesca Southerden has attended conferences and workshops in Venice and Paris and has undertaken research at the British Library for an article-in-progress on the contemporary poet, Caroline Bergvall, and Dante. She is currently working on completing her second monograph, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language, and on a book, co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati

(Senior Research Fellow at Somerville), on Petrarch and lyric poetry. She is also co-editing, with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi, The Oxford Handbook of Dante. Francesca is currently Schools Liaison and Outreach representative for the Italian sub-faculty and co-ordinates the beginners’ Italian programme of the UNIQ summer school in Modern Languages. Professor Almut Suerbaum reports: ‘It’s been an interesting year in which to take over as Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages: what had started as a normal year, busy with preparations for the REF, annual exams, and strategic reviews, quickly took on a very different pace. By mid-Hilary term the first students on their year abroad in Italy, France and Spain needed advice on whether to stay or attempt to return, and since linguists are adventurous in where they go for their year abroad, we rapidly developed plans for different regions and scenarios, from advice on flights from Peru to support for those students who decided to stay in their host country. Like every department, we only had four weeks to design new ways of teaching online and to adapt examination formats. It’s a tribute to colleagues and students that all of that has been possible. Working with the Somerville Medievalist Research Group has been welcome respite: Annie Sutherland and I made the final tweaks to the volume on Medieval Temporalities – The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, which is in press now, and Manuele Grangolati and I are co-editing the volume on ‘Openness in medieval culture’ which resulted from last year’s conference in Berlin. We had agreed in December that the next SMRG project would be on ecocriticism and the post-human – which has taken on a new dimension now.’

Music Dr Esther Cavett teaches music theory and analysis to the Music students in Somerville. Alongside her work at Somerville, she is Senior Research Fellow in the music department at King’s College, London, where she is involved in a project with the psychology department evaluating Music Residences and similar music interventions in mental health settings

(https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/ sound-young-minds). She is a trustee of the Society of Music Analysis (SMA), trustee ‘sponsor’ for the SMA Music Literacy research programme (https:// www.sma.ac.uk/music-literacy-project) and co-ordinator of the King’s/St George’s Academy, which runs small group, after-school music teaching for children living in Southwark, involving King’s College London students as teaching assistants (https://www. stgeorge-themartyr.co.uk/page/59/ st-georges-kings-music-academy). She set up and now assists in the running of Water City Music, a charity providing access to performance opportunities for musicians of all skills levels, working collaboratively (www.watercitymusic. com). Her recent research has focused on music and mentoring, the autoethnography of writing academically about music, and the perception of repetition in the music of English contemporary composer Howard Skempton. Since lockdown she has been busy converting her outreach work to accessible online formats.

Philosophy The past year has been mixed for Mari Mikkola. Just like everyone in college, her time since March 2020 has been largely consumed by the global pandemic. Having to engage in online and virtual teaching and admin took more or less all of her time for the past few months. In Michaelmas 2019, Mari was on a regular sabbatical and she wrote two chapters for her forthcoming book Dissident Theorizing: Tracing Nonideal Philosophical Methodology (under contract with OUP). The book focuses on philosophical methodology from feminist and anti-racist perspectives.

Politics Professor Lois McNay is nearing the end of a year’s sabbatical in which she has finished her sixth book entitled The Gender of Critical Theory. This will be published by OUP in 2021. She also completed a two year tenure as part time Professor in the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo.

Psychology Professor Charles Spence reports that this year was very much a game of two halves. Before lockdown he was busy presenting at food conferences around the world, following his last popular science book Gastrophysics: The new science of eating (2017; Penguin Viking) winning the 2019 Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from the Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. However, post-lockdown he has been using the time to finish his new popular science book Sensehacking (out with Penguin at the start of 2021). At the same time he has been working on food design with chefs and other creative entities, and thinking how to design hand-sanitisers to better encourage the new normal….

Emeritus Fellows and Former Fellows Nick Shea, Professor of Philosophy (London) and former Mary Somerville JRF, has won the Lakatos award for his book, Representation in Cognitive Science: http://www.lse.ac.uk/ philosophy/blog/2020/07/02/nicholasshea-wins-the-2020-lakatos-award/. Whilst Nick was at Somerville he built up the background in psychology and cognitive science that underlies many of the case studies in the book. He says that in many ways the success of the book traces back to the support Somerville gave him right at the start of his career, for which he is very grateful.

Senior Research Fellows Sir Marc Feldmann reports: ‘The past year has been very unusual, with COVID dominating the past six months. Like many scientists, I am now a ‘COVID’ expert, helped by joining one of the Royal Society’s committees which is trying to provide accurate information for the Government to act on wisely. This has documented the importance of Vitamin D, with a very good correlation between low blood levels (common in BAME and the elderly, with UK worst in Europe) and poor COVID outcome. So, do as I do, take 1000-2000 units

per day. Most important has been the revelation that rigorous mask usage can dramatically reduce transmission. The wearer transmits much less, but the recipient also receives less: how much less depends on the type of mask, but as infection needs a certain number of viruses, the less the better! While the University (and NHS) is convinced that wearing masks indoors is essential, in places that have done very well, e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, mask wearing is routine outdoors as well as indoors. Might we be able to learn from those who have done better? ‘Personally, the excess lung inflammation which is the major cause of severe illness and death has given me a new research opportunity. My research success was identifying TNF as the molecule to inhibit and treat rheumatoid arthritis, and anti-TNF antibodies have become best-selling medicines, useful in arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis and many other diseases. So in April I published an opinion in The Lancet that anti-TNF might be effective in COVID, and then worked with others in Oxford, especially Prof. Duncan Richards, to set up one trial, for newlyhospitalised patients needing oxygen, to keep them out of intensive care, since few emerge from ICU. ‘This has now started, and a second one for patients not yet in hospital, e.g. in care homes, is awaiting a funding decision. ‘There was a pleasant relief from COVID: my work on inflammation was recognised in late June by sharing the 2020 Tang Prize for BioPharmaceuticals.’ Stephanie Dalley has finished writing her book The City of Babylon Through Time, which will be published by CUP later this year. She has also written a paper with Luis Siddall, a colleague in Sydney, showing who murdered the Assyrian king Sennacherib, forthcoming in the journal Iraq. Thanks to lockdown, she has finished and submitted several small papers, including two for volumes in honour of colleagues in Brussels and in Changchun.

Report on Junior Research Fellowships 2019-2020 has been another busy year for the Somerville Junior Research Fellows, who have been undertaking research into a very wide range of fields. Most of our Junior Research Fellows are Fulford JRFs, selected in an annual exercise. They hold postdoctoral research positions across the University and are welcomed into the Somerville community after a competitive selection process Thomas Nicol has been exploring the role of nitric oxide in the activity of macrophages (immune system cells in our bodies that ‘eat’ invading microorganisms). Priya Subramanian is a Hooke Fellow at the Mathematics Institute. Priya develops new mathematical tools to describe and analyse soft matter and complex fluids. Joulia Smortchkova works in the Philosophy Faculty on questions relating to mind and metacognition (awareness of your own thought processes), such as ‘can we perceive social traits?’; ‘what are mental representations?’; ‘what role does metacognition play in conceptual change, especially in schoolage children who learn new scientific concepts?’. Robert Beagrie works in the Weatherill Institute for Molecular Medicine, investigating the early development of red blood cells, focusing on how they switch on the genes responsible for producing haemoglobin, which is vital for distributing oxygen around the body. Ritu Raj works in the Department of Chemistry, developing new techniques for studying how cholesterol interacts with cell membrane proteins, which will help further the understanding of cholesterol metabolism, deregulation of which causes diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Ferenc Mózes explores ways to optimise scanning techniques that will improve diagnosis and treatment of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. As a new Fulford JRF, Susan Dunning has been conducting research for her project ‘Humans As Gods in the Roman World’, working on datasets for her monograph and presenting a few papers on the subject at Somerville and to the Oxford community. Susan has so far catalogued several hundred examples of common Romans portraying themselves or others as gods in funerary monuments or in literature, a practice that extended far beyond imperial divine pretensions. She was delighted to teach tutorials as well, even though the disruptions of this year meant that they had to be conducted remotely. Susan has been grateful for the college’s warm welcome, and looks forward to a return to its fellowship and opportunities for outreach. Ana Laura Edelhoff is the Mary Somerville Junior Research Fellow, employed by the college to conduct research in Ancient Philosophy. Ana Laura has had a particularly productive year, having submitted a book manuscript, Aristotle on Ontological Priority in the Categories, to Cambridge University Press,

and currently revising another book manuscript, Aristotle on Ontological Priority in the Metaphysics, for Oxford University Press. In addition, Ana Laura worked with Karen Nielsen, our Tutorial Fellow in Ancient Philosophy, to organise events to celebrate the centenary birthdays and achievements of two of the most famous female philosophers and members of Somerville, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch. At the time of writing Ana Laura is due to give birth to twins any day now. Finally, Ana Laura has been appointed to a teaching fellowship at the University of Konstanz, which has one of Germany’s strongest Philosophy departments. Peaks Kraft works at the Oxford Internet Institute, examining the ‘materialities’ (practical implications) of software and the digital world. Peaks publishes in both social science and computer science journals. Martin Walker is the Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow, employed by the college to conduct research into Structural Engineering, specifically looking at how localised features, such as creases, form during the deformation of thin shells. Martin has recently accepted the offer of a lectureship at the University of Surrey. Justin Lau works on developing imaging techniques to study the broken heart. Going beyond standard magnetic resonance imaging, Justin works in the research group headed by our own Damian Tyler, exploring the benefits of using hyperpolarised carbon-13 to yield data on the metabolism of the heart with unprecedented accuracy. Xiaowen Dong works in the Engineering Department and the Oxford Man Institute for Quantitative Finance. His main work focuses on developing novel techniques in the fast-growing fields of graph signal processing and geometric deep learning. Recently, he has worked with our very own Renaud Lambiotte (Tutorial Fellow in Applied Mathematics) and others to launch the Oxford Covid-19 impact monitor – see https://www. oxford-covid-19.com/ for details. Gabriel Cler works in the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. His research focuses on neuroimaging in people with speech and language disorders, especially concentrating on people who stutter. Gabriel has recently accepted a tenuretrack post at the University of Washington in Seattle. Godelinde Perk is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, but her research sits at the intersection between medieval studies, literary studies and gender history. Godelinde explores how vernacular

religious writing by medieval women from the Low Countries, German-speaking lands and the British Isles engages with the liturgy by way of the medieval art of memory. She has written an article for The Conversation UK, ‘Coronavirus: Advice from the Middle Ages for How to Cope with Self-isolation’, focusing on parallels between the lives of medieval anchorites and modern lockdown. Lauren Burgeno works in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics. The overall goal of Lauren’s research is to gain a better understanding of how neurotransmitter systems work on a moment-to-moment basis to control decision making. Beth Romano holds a stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship co-funded by Somerville (through generous donations from alumni and friends) and the Maths Institute. Beth’s work is in

Pure Mathematics, focusing on Lie Algebras. In one of Beth’s projects, she is working with Dan Ciubotaru (Tutorial Fellow in Pure Mathematics), working on ‘unipotent representations of p-adic groups’. Belinda Nicholson works in the Department of Physics. Her research focuses on detecting and characterising exoplanets using ground-based and space-based telescopes. Belinda’s team follow up planet candidates found through the citizen science project, Planet Hunters TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and make follow-up observations to confirm or reject the existence of specific exoplanets. In addition, Belinda uses the MINERVA facility in Australia to make detailed observations of the planetary system around the young star DS Tucanae. DR STEVE RAYNER, Senior Tutor

JCR Report This year has been a very interesting year for the JCR with both successes and difficult challenges to overcome. In particular, the JCR has worked together with College to implement a number of positive changes that will benefit current and future Somervillians such as improved welfare resources, free membership of the college gym, making the college more accessible through a disabilities audit and in outreach schemes such as mentorship schemes for BAME students. The access work carried out by students has been incredible; Somerville is attracting students from a wide range of backgrounds, with our inclusive values shining through in the work we do. The JCR have been working hard on a number of fantastic projects. This year we hosted BAME Formal which welcomed over 200 BAME students in the first event of its kind and magnitude. It proved to be a magical night of poignant discussions and wonderful memories. We have assisted with productions through the provision of JCR arts funds with a number of our students playing lead roles and winning awards for their work in production roles. Smaller projects such as introducing free pool into our lovely Terrace and engaging in ways we can make Somerville a greener community, such as reducing our meat consumption and moving towards divestment, have kept our students busy! Our JCR has always had students with talents in sport and this year was no different. Somerville-Corpus women’s rugby achieved notable success with a Cuppers victory, with the ice hockey team doing the same. Individuals have shone in their own sports with members going on to play for the University blues teams and making us at Somerville very proud. One challenge we did not anticipate was Covid-19 but the JCR has come together in so many beautiful ways of which I have

been immensely proud. Throughout what has been a difficult period for all staff and students, the spirit of community has shone through. A number of our students have worked together on fundraisers for charities doing fundamental work during the pandemic and our JCR have done our utmost to support in every way we can. Remote term has not been easy but efforts from students, committee and non-committee, to make the time pass and bring us Somerville away from home have been invaluable. There has been much tragedy during this pandemic, and what happened to George Floyd and the resultant protests and deaths has weighed heavily on our hearts. Five First Year students set up a fundraiser in aid of a charity supporting Black Lives Matter in the US which raised over £100k, demonstrating the power of true activism. As a JCR, we have reflected on ways in which we must evaluate our policies and conduct to ensure we firmly take an anti-racist stance and make our community one where every student, no matter their race or background, can thrive. We have done so in conjunction with College and the MCR, as only together can we achieve meaningful change. This year has not been a quiet one at all; lots of noise has been made over important issues. As a college, we were founded on values of progressiveness and inclusivity, and the JCR has shown that these values are just as important today as they were when this college first opened its doors. I am confident that this work will continue and wish the incoming President Fabio Rossi, the Committee and the JCR the best of luck for the next academic year. TALISHA ARIARASA, JCR President 2019-2020

MCR Report This academic year has been – without doubt – a strange one. We began our year with an incredibly successful Freshers’ week, and throughout Michaelmas and Hilary the MCR was a truly thriving social community, featuring an incredible calendar of events: bops, karaoke, beer pong, film nights, ice-skating, paint nights (a personal favourite), as well as hugely successful intercollegiate exchange dinners and wine & cheese evenings. In Michaelmas 2019, we saw the exciting creation of a new MCR inter-collegiate football team, with the MCRs of Somerville, Pembroke and Queen’s coming together to take part in Cuppers, making the Cuppers quarter finals and holding their own in Division 2. We are looking forward to their continued success! In spite of the uncooperative weather, many MCR members also rowed, and refused to let their spirits (or their blades!) be dampened by the cancellation of all three Oxford rowing regattas. Trinity term saw lockdown and the COVID-19 pandemic physically separate many of our MCR members both from our college and from their families and friends. Our wonderful MCR committee have done an incredible job of keeping the Somerville community thriving and together virtually. Our brilliant new Social Secretaries, Karolina, Raphael and Claire, have put together an entertaining and engaging calendar of online activities such as a book club, games nights, and pub quizzes, and our new President, Ashrakat, has hosted a new academic seminar series looking at the work of our peers. The incredible diversity of brilliant events is truly a testament to the hard work of the entire MCR committee. Our members have also found other ways to support each other and the wider

MCR MATRICULATION

community during lockdown. The newly formed football team took the opportunity to collaborate with their JCR counterparts and raised over £2,000 for the charity Refuge by running the distance of Land’s End to John O’Groats. The MCR has also worked to provide support to our members in this difficult time, and our Welfare Officers, Bahar, Ondine and Gaurav, have offered virtual welfare teas, featuring notso-virtual delivery treats for our members who remained in Oxford, open hours, as well as working with MCR Peer Supporter, Martin, and the chapel. As well as the pandemic, 2020 has been a key moment for the Black Lives Matter movement, which the MCR community is proud to stand with. The MCR continues to strive to be a welcoming place for people from all backgrounds. We are working to support the protests and conversations sparked in response to widespread racial injustices and police brutality here and abroad with the support of our Minority Ethnic Groups Rep, Gabriella. In summary, whilst this year has seen unprecedented global events, it has also been characterised by the true MCR community spirit: coming together to enjoy all of what Oxford has to offer, broadening horizons and supporting each other. On behalf of the MCR we wish the best of luck to all of our leavers and we are very much looking forward to seeing everyone again when it is safe to do so. ANDREW WOOD, MCR President

The Library and Covid-19 The year started off in normal busy fashion but all was of course to change in March when the college went into lockdown. Just before that happened, we were delighted to receive a major donation from Alysoun Owen (1987) and Jonathan Glasspool in the form of our choice of books published by Bloomsbury. We were able to order a total of 96 titles for which we are extremely grateful. As ever we have been fortunate to receive many smaller gifts of publications from our supporters and a list is appended to this report. Thank you to everyone! Once the lockdown was announced in March, the library building closed and the library staff started working from

home. Although students had no access to the library books, e-resources came into their own and Matthew and Sue spent Trinity term helping users find the resources they needed (thanks to a huge upsurge in temporary resources negotiated by the Bodleian) and assisting tutors to set up online reading lists. The big question then arose – how to get all the library books back from finalists who had left in March! As I write, Michaelmas term is looming and we have been working hard to move our library inductions online and to develop new services such as Clickand-Collect for book borrowing since access to the library will be extremely restricted. 24-hour access will have to be temporarily removed and social distancing will mean that places have to be booked. All very different from our normal open access policy!

Picture by John Cairns

Library Report 2019-20

Art and artefacts In October 2019 we marked the publication of the college’s 140 Objects book celebrating 140 years since the college was founded. With contributions from the Vice-Chancellor and Baroness

Picture by Keith Barnes

SOMERVILLE'S 140TH BIRTHDAY CAKE

A PAGE FROM MRS ROLISTON'S TRAVELLING ADVENTURES BY AMELIA EDWARDS

Williams of Crosby, the launch event was a wonderful occasion, topped off with a cake of epic proportions. Some of the college’s most precious, and rarely seen, treasures were exhibited in the Hall during the event: items included Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Nobel medal, the Principal’s Ruskin Regalia and our fifteenth-century Book of Hours. We were also able to display some of the objects in our new built-in cabinet, constructed thanks to the generosity of Dr John Wells. This will be an important facility for displaying college treasures once we are all back on site.

33 in previous year). Email enquiries have continued to pour in though and thanks to an ongoing digitisation programme, Kate has been able to help a lot of researchers over the ether. Two publications that have drawn heavily on our collections and archives were published this year: The Mutual Admiration Society by Mo Moulton (London: Corsair) using the Muriel St Clare Byrne Collection, and Dressed for War by Julie Summers (London: Simon & Schuster) using the Percy Withers Collection.

We welcomed the Oxford Ceramic group to the college twice during the year for fascinating talks by Colin Wyman about our Wedgwood collection and we received very welcome gifts of artwork from two alumni: watercolour paintings by Joan Wright (1911-1991), Bea Orpen (1913-1980) and Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001) from Rosemary Fitzgibbon (1967) and a set of twelve woodcut prints of the Roman Emperors from Stratton Hibbs (2016).

Archives and Special Collections With the archives shut from March this year, visitor numbers have been very much reduced (18 as against

The major archives project for 2020 was the renovation and integration of the archives and special collections’ catalogues via a new software system called Epexio. Using Epexio, it will be possible to search all collections simultaneously, produce an online catalogue for public access, create digital exhibitions and compile research statistics. The lockdown has delayed progress in the transfer to Epexio while confirming the need to improve our researcher facilities for the digital age. Exhibitions were mounted about Mary Somerville for a university-wide campaign on 3-D science and on the theme of ‘Made in Oxford’ for Open Doors Day. We were privileged to take delivery from the Ashmolean Museum of their Emily Kemp (1860-1939) collection

which includes over 80 watercolours and five boxes of slides of her travels in the Far East. We hope to mount an exhibition in the coming year to celebrate this remarkable Somervillian. We are also excited to see our first entry onto the Digital Bodleian website with Mrs Roliston’s Travelling Adventures, a graphic novel by Amelia Edwards (1831-1892). The funds to have this digitised and hosted on the Bodleian’s platform were raised in a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2018. The other manuscript we have had digitised, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, is due to be launched on Digital Bodleian in the very near future. Finally, in a very busy special collections year, we progressed the joint Bodleian/ History Faculty/former women’s colleges project ‘Education and Activism: Women at Oxford, 18781920: commemorating the centenary of women’s formal admission to the University of Oxford’ – an online resource featuring digitised content from our archives. The website is due to be launched to mark the centenary of degrees for women in October 2020, and will be available by the time you are reading this report ANNE MANUEL College Librarian

List of Library Donors 2019-2020 Pauline Adams

Joanna Innes (via Benjamin Thompson)

Oxford Ceramics Group Ruth Philip*

Sonia Anderson* John Lefas

Jane Robinson*

Timothy Brittain-Catlin Iacovos Kareklas

Matthew Roper

Lesley Brown Naiza Khan*

Simon & Schuster

Margaret Clarke* Joep Leerssen*

Christopher Skelton-Foord

Claudine Dauphin Anne Manuel Anna Morpurgo Davies (more books from her bequest via Wolfson College Library)

Francesca Southerden Judith Marquand* Madhura Swaminathan* Lucy McCann

Will Dawes (Director of Chapel Music)

Gavin Turner Jamie McKendrick

Rachel Douglas*

John Villiers Caroline Morrell*

Hannah Field*

JS Watts* Hannah Mortimer*

Ruth Finnegan*

Stephen Weatherill* Mo Moulton*

Manuele Gragnolati*

Clare Wright* Louise Mycock*

Emma Hart*

Colin Wyman* Ann Oakley*

Barbara Harvey Alysoun Owen and Jonathan Glasspool

* Indicates donor’s own publication

The Somerville Association President’s Report 2019-20 In my report last year, I noted how much more effectively than in the past we can reach out to alumni. This year, we have had an enormous and unexpected reason to be grateful for this fact. Up to the point where Covid struck, this had been a very successful and active year. At our September meeting, we had a wonderful turnout of year reps, and a very productive discussion about how to take the Association forward and strengthen our networks among alumni and with the College. We did keep running up against the apparently immoveable barriers to communication which are created by GDPR – the ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ – but think we are making some progress. In the meantime, Liz Cooke emphasises that she is always delighted to facilitate links and connect people to the Somerville Association rep for their year. We also agreed that it made sense for the Association Committee to ensure representation across the entire alumni community by ensuring that we have a committee member – more or less – for each ten year ‘cohort’. We seem to have achieved that by serendipity and will endeavour to maintain it. Autumn 2019 saw the 1969 50th and the 1959 60th reunions, excellent lectures and events organised in Oxford and by the London group, carol concerts in Oxford and London, and the annual Medics’ Day. And March was set to be, as usual, an important month, with both the AGM and the Spring Meeting. Over a hundred alumni had registered to come to the Spring Meeting to hear our guest speaker, Xand van Tulleken (1996, Medicine). But then there was Covid. Xand kindly agreed to rearrange, and returned to active medicine on the front line. He also, as many of you will know, then had an all too close and direct encounter with Covid-19, starting with the classic symptoms but culminating in an emergency hospital admission with extreme heart palpitations. Millions wish him well! Xand’s experiences underline how unpredictable and often frightening this year has been. It has also been a year when technology made it possible for us to combine quarantine

and continued activity in ways no previous generation could have. For example, many people reading this will have taken advantage of the College’s programme of online events, which have kept so many alumni in touch in spite of Covid-related cancellations. (Details of all these events are advertised on the College website https://www.some.ox.ac. uk/alumni/events/.) And one very small ‘first’ among the millions was the Somerville Association’s first ever remote committee meeting. We are particularly sad that this year’s Commemoration Service had to be cancelled. The annual service is one of the most important events in our calendar and is always greatly appreciated by the families and friends of Somervillians who have died during the previous year. There was an abbreviated Commemoration Service online on 27 June and the College has produced an obituaries booklet electronically. Hopefully, next year’s report will be able to record a return to something closer to normality. And, at the end of a very technology-centric report, may I please, on behalf of the College, encourage anyone reading this who is not yet on the alumni email list, and would like to be, to contact Liz Cooke, elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk, or Lisa Gygax, lisa.gygax@some.ox.ac.uk Finally, we record with great pleasure the distinguished Somervillians recognised in the delayed Queen’s Birthday Honours List this year: Sonia Phippard (1978, Physics) CB for public service Neeta Patel (1980, Chemistry) CBE for services to entrepreneurship and technology Sacha Romanovitch (1986, Chemistry) OBE for service to business Our warmest congratulations to them all. ALISON WOLF (Potter, 1967)

Picture by John Cairns

THE 2020 SUPPORTERS' LUNCH

Horsman Awards The Alice Horsman Scholarship was established in 1953. Alice Horsman (1908, Classics) was a great traveller who wished to provide opportunities for former Somerville students to experience other countries and peoples, whether through travel, research or further study. The Alice Horsman Scholarship is open to all Somerville undergraduate and graduate alumni with the exception of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery students at other Oxford colleges. Applicants should be in need of financial support for a project involving travel, research or further study that is intended to enhance their career prospects. Applicants who have secured a place on the Teach First, Police Now or Step up to Social Work schemes will be looked on favourably. Priority will be given to applicants who have not received previous awards. For information about the application process please email academic.office@some.ox.ac.uk or visit www.some. ox.ac.uk/studying-here/fees-funding/studentawards. Applications are accepted each term.

The Somerville Senior Members’ Fund This Fund was established to provide small sums to help alumni with unforeseen expenses and hardship. We have also been able to use it subsidize the cost of individuals attending College events which would otherwise have been unaffordable for them. We hope that people who find themselves in need will not hesitate to call upon the Fund. We are glad to hear from third parties who think that help would be appreciated. We are always grateful for donations to this Fund. Applications for grants should be addressed to elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk or lesley.brown@some.ox.ac.uk

Life before Somerville Professor Fareda Banda is Professor of Law at SOAS. After two degrees at the University of Zimbabawe, she came to Somerville in 1989 to do a DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies (on access to justice for women) and she returned to Oxford as a post-doctoral research fellow. Fareda joined SOAS in 1996, teaching English family law, human rights for women, and Law and Society in Africa. She loves teaching and has taught in many universities across the world. Fareda sits on several academic boards. She has been commissioned to produce reports for agencies including the United Nations, the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ), the Ministry of Justice, and Minority Rights Group. Fareda believes strongly in the importance of working with civil society organisations, including Sisters for Change and Human Rights Watch. She writes on women’s rights, family law, and more recently law and literature; her latest books are Women’s Rights and Religious Law: Domestic and International Perspectives, coedited with Lisa Fishbayn Joffe (Routledge, June 2020) and African Migration, Human Rights and Literature (Bloomsbury, due December 2020). Her greatest joy is her family, including her two daughters Azera and Shamiso. Last summer, I visited Somerville to sit on the lawn to allow me to say goodbye to my former headmistress, Dorothy Twiss, who had been at Somerville during the war. I am from Zimbabwe and Mrs Twiss was our formidable headmistress at Arundel School in Harare. It was a girls’ school that I joined aged 12 from a ‘Coloured and Asian’ primary school named after Lord Louis Mountbatten. I am a child of apartheid and we were the ‘cusp’ generation – entering secondary school just as political change was underway. It was an exciting and politically fraught time which Mrs Twiss navigated with her customary calm good sense and determination to succeed. It was she who recommended that I apply to Somerville to do my DPhil after I was awarded a Beit Fellowship to undertake doctoral research (along with the current Fellow and Professor in Medicine, Matthew Wood). Coming to Somerville was like being at Arundel but without having to wear the muddy brown skirts, nurses’ Clarks shoes with fawn socks and off-turquoise blouse. I realised that Mrs Twiss had modelled some of the architecture on Somerville at Arundel (motto: ‘Grace and knowledge’ – I have not attempted the Latin for fear that Mrs Twiss, who taught me the subject and suffered greatly doing so, might be disturbed); it was painted pastel pink with archways much like the ones leading to the quad from the Lodge. Mealtimes also began and ended with grace in Latin. I went to Somerville chapel simply so that I could belt out hymns from 100 Hymns. The late Nan Dunbar must have been watching me for a few weeks after I arrived; she asked how it was that I seemed so at home at Evensong. I told her that was what six years in a girls’ boarding school run by the formidable Mrs Twiss could do for you.

PROFESSOR FAREDA BANDA

Mrs Twiss retired soon after I left. I often visited her on my return trips to Harare and found her still doughty, looser and funnier and overrun by dogs. She lived with her loving daughter Stephanie with whom she returned to live in Lincoln in the North of England for the last few years of her life. Her death, on 1 July 2019, came as a body blow. We thought she would live for ever. Some of ‘her old girls’ were able to attend her memorial service held in Lincoln on the 3rd of August. Our instructions were to sing lustily – which we did. All our old favourites were in the order of service, "Lord of All Hopefulness" and 'Thine be the Glory" with that rousing chorus. We learned things about Mrs Twiss that none of us had known – that she had 'Bletchley' connections for example. She had mentioned the late Principal Daphne Park with warmth and friendship. I now have a better understanding of how far back they went. Although it is many, many decades since secondary school, I continue to see Mrs Twiss's influence in my life. She taught us 'feminist' thought before it was ‘a thing’. (I now teach human rights of women). She would no doubt have balked at being described as a feminist, but she was a pioneer of her time. She taught 'her girls' that we could do anything that we set our minds to; she demanded high standards and expected excellence. I wanted to honour her memory and feel sad that we never got the opportunity to revisit Somerville together. A few days after her memorial service, I came to Somerville and sat on a bench facing the quad and wept in remembrance of an extraordinary woman who changed my life. I miss her still, as I am sure, does her family. FAREDA BANDA

The Somerville College Class of 1952

The current pandemic has made many people think about the value of their education and the importance of old Somerville friendships. In this spirit of reflection Judith (Mundlak) Taylor has compiled a report on the year of 1952. Judith herself lives in San Francisco; she and her husband have two children and six grandchildren. She has had a distinguished career as a neurologist and Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. She is now a significant horticultural historian.

A recent encounter online with a charming graduate of LMH (G. Mawrey, 1960) made me think about my own classmates and wonder where they might be now. Three of us still form a tight-knit little group which has had a round robin (e-mail) over many years as well as seeing each other whenever we could. We share our joys and sorrows and mutter about the inevitable aches and pains which are upon us all. It is, after all, sixty-eight years since we all went up. At first we were five. There were Valerie (‘Wally’) (Catmur) Vesser, Cynthia (Coldham) Jones, Jane (Brown) Evans, Felicity (Chugg) Morrogh and me, but Jane and Felicity have both died. In addition I am independently in contact with another class member, Franziska (Zweig) Loening. Two of my other close friends had already died of cancer more than twenty years ago, Carole (Rosen) Marsh and Esther (Mond) Breuer. Liz Cooke very kindly offered to send out a notice to the alumnae she has on her e-mail list, asking them to get in touch with me if they wished. Five responded. Between all of us we can account for about twenty of our classmates who are most probably still active. There is doubt about one or two of them. Their only contact had been a Christmas card and at least two people did not send one this last year.

Looking at this statistically, there are three confounding factors which skew these numbers. One is of course death, getting closer and closer as we age. The second is the fact that people in their ninth decades are not always able to use e-mail. The third is the fact that some of the students had not enjoyed being at Somerville and do not wish to be in touch with any of us. I know of two in this category. We all share certain things in common. Dr Vaughan was Principal, a truly amazing woman I still revere even though she contaminated a university building with so much radioactive strontium it cannot be used for the next thousand years. She had been a medic in the Spanish Civil War and learned about the huge importance of blood banks in saving lives. As soon as World War Two was declared she immediately set to and started organising a national blood bank in Britain. Coming from that environment to the molasses pace of Oxford colleges in 1947 she shook the whole place up by being the first principal to install a telephone in her office. Up until she did that little men on bicycles carried messages back and forth. Dr Vaughan cared about us. She invited many of us to tea at her lodgings more than once. She also did yeoman service in helping to care for Elizabeth Anscombe’s seven children.

Without her stepping up like that it is possible Miss Anscombe might have ended up in jail. The child-care authorities were always popping round to see how they were. Even if you were not a philosopher Miss Anscombe was a college fixture. She was Wittgenstein’s literary executor and had converted to Catholicism some time before. When she married Peter Geach from Cambridge at the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge the usual crowd gathered around the door, hoping to get a glimpse of some famous person. There was a commotion at the back of the crowd. This young woman was pushing her way through, yelling ‘Let me through. Let me through. I’m the bloody bride.’ The college cellarer was Enid Starkie, fellow in French literature. Each year she travelled to Oporto to lay down the Senior Common Room’s supplies of port. She was distinctive in many ways but mainly because of the French sailor’s hat she always wore. Three years surrounded by these and other divine eccentrics were bound to affect you even if only subliminally, and I have not even begun to talk about my classmates. The people who responded to me were Ruth Finnegan, Anne Kirkman, Jennifer Hindell, Pippa Spring and Shirley Hermitage. I have been in the United States since 1959, as has Valerie. Shirley is also in this country, in Georgia, but likes to spend the summer in Somerset with her daughter in their joint house. We each tried to put more than sixty years of our lives into five hundred words or fewer. As can be imagined the most important parts of everyone’s life was their family. Jennifer is in West Dulwich with her husband. She taught English for many years while Keith was a freelance journalist. As she put it: ‘Someone had to provide an income.’ Anne had read French. She kept in touch with quite a few of our mutual friends such as Shirley Legge, Shirley Ashton, Laura Momigliano and Angela Downing. Pippa has given a lot of her life to helping others in need, most often in her own family, even if it meant putting her own activities and desires on hold. She has mainly been involved in editing Know Britain. She wanted me to add: ‘I didn’t have aspirations but went with whatever turned up in my life. So I hold a Blue Badge, the national tourist guiding qualification, as well as a DipFE(Lond); was a Union delegate and now a member of my PCC.’ She is also in touch with Janet Draper, now Dr Harland. Clare is very proud of her children. They all attended Oxford and did very well. Ruth read Classics but became an anthropologist specialising in Africa. She has written many books and papers and been rewarded with an OBE as well as prizes and medals. Ruth is perhaps most proud of the fact that late in her life she has discovered a great gift for fiction, writing novels and plays. They emerge from her subconscious mind without her having to cast about for themes or ideas. Valerie has been married to Dale Vesser, a Rhodes Scholar from West Point, for more than sixty years. They have a son and a daughter. She enjoyed teaching English literature to high school

JUDITH IN LOCKDOWN AFTER 3 MONTHS WITHOUT A HAIRCUT

and young college students in the United States. Dale was posted to various forts around the country and also served in two foreign wars. He ended up as a three-star general. Cynthia worked in Brazil after being graduated, as is fitting for someone who read Portuguese. She was the sole undergraduate in that school and sat the exams in solitary splendour. She married there and had her two daughters. When she returned to the UK she spent some time at the Cheltenham intelligence centre but her life now revolves around her children and grandchildren, all of whom are pretty feisty. Before the pandemic she travelled very widely. Franziska (Francesca) Zweig married the biochemist Ulrich Loening and lives in Edinburgh. She decided not to pursue medicine and stayed with chemistry. Ulrich’s work took them to the United States but eventually they settled in Edinburgh where he is still very active in environmental work. Francesca was always passionate about music and played the violin extremely well. Ulrich shared her passion and built himself a cello. For many years she taught the violin in a girls’ school in Edinburgh. They have three children and many grandchildren. I am hoping that if anyone I have omitted sees this story they will let me know so I can continue to solidify the memories. In particular it would be good to hear from someone who recalls the bath club, that tiny group of men who were able to take a bath in college without being detected. I believe Dale Vesser was one of them. He had the pioneering spirit – his grandfather had been born under a covered wagon in Idaho. The experience of being at Somerville has been indelible for me. The college was still all women at that time and it showed what can be done when women occupy positions of authority. The college had and still has a remarkable academic record but for me it was the other girls who were the best teachers. For a somewhat coddled and constrained only child, being free to make my own decisions, good or bad, was highly instructive and even liberating, but my father’s will remained heavily imprinted on my unconscious. When it came to buckling down to organic chemistry in the very first term I was the only one in our group who passed! Liberation only went so far. You can find me at: www.horthistoria.com JUDITH MUNDLAK TAYLOR

‘Sheltering in Place’ in Northern CA Rebecca Pope (1978) gives us her perspective from the early days of lockdown in California.

Last week our county government issued an order that everyone ‘shelter in place’. This term of art for lockdown first appeared in the aftermath of 9/11. I was in DC that day, and for many months after we faculty at Georgetown University regularly received emails from the administration informing us that the university ‘had enough stockpiles of bottled water and Power Bars to sustain the entire campus should we be required to shelter in place due to a dirty bomb.’ This was supposed to be reassuring. No runs on Power Bars at our local Co-op now, but people seem to have, unaccountably, stockpiled all the bottled water as well as loo paper. A local business owner reports that his parking lot has become a place for people doing toilet paper deals out of the boots of their cars. It’s California, and the edibles were swiftly swept from the shelves of the marijuana dispensaries as well. Everyone has a different notion of ‘necessities of life’. For the moment, this feels a lot like the aftermath of 9/11 – empty streets, a sky empty of airplanes, the constant casting about for the line between sensible precautions and hysteria. Eerie, edgy anxiety as this time we wait not for a bomb but a ‘tsunami’. At night I dream of the computer breaking down and the internet blowing up. My spouse, Susana, and I live in a university town, Davis, and it seemed like our undergraduates disappeared overnight. I hear the same of Oxford. People in town are re-hanging their holiday lights for cheer and one neighbourhood has planned an ‘Italian night’, each family to its own patio eating take-away food from a locally-owned restaurant, singing to follow. Both of us had paternal grandparents who came from Italy, so we watch the situation there closely. Last night, the Feast of Saint Joseph (patron saint of Sicily), we raised a glass of red in appreciation of the indomitable spirit of the Italians and in hope that their suffering ends quickly. In good health, (health-) insured, and able to pay our bills, we are among the fortunate few. Both of us are over 60, so we have fewer work and family responsibilities than we used to. But there was a shock of mild surprise to find ourselves in a new demographic, the ‘if there’s a shortage, no ventilator for you’ cohort. Our adult children, all of whom are selfemployed, now have those work and family responsibilities, so we worry about them and the stuck-at-home grandkids, one of whom, on getting a list of assignments from his teacher, asked with dismay, ‘Is there room for modification here?’ Happily, two of our children are in essential lines of work: one manages the family organic farm and the other, forced to close his recently opened brewery, is figuring out how to home deliver beer by bike.

We worry about our family and friends who have health issues, about health care workers (including a sibling), about the people in the homeless encampment a mile away. Each symbolic of countless others. Principal’s email mentioned cooking, reading, music. Yes to all three; they root us. The library closed without warning, so we are left without the usual weekly stack of crime fiction. Alas, I was very near the top of the list for the new Hilary Mantel. When the world is too much with me, I take to minor Trollope novels and there are still a few on my shelves unread. And of course there’s rereading Middlemarch, which, I have found, yields something new every decade of your life. So that we don’t spoil a good evening meal with talk of the virus or the menace in the Oval Office, Susana and I have assigned ourselves books that we can report on and discuss. She’s finishing a book about regenerative ecology and I’m making my way through a tome on neuroplasticity. More than brains will need rewiring when all this is over. As for music, I always listen to Mozart when it’s time to whistle into the abyss. For playing, nothing like Bach to require all of one’s attention, so the house is now filled with bad Bach on both the cello and the classical guitar. Weeks will probably become months, and we will then have to set some rules and tasks: no lying abed past 7:30, no wearing the same jeans for a second week, Marie-Kondo the closets. Ration the chocolate and the BBC World News. Don’t open a second bottle. Years ago, Susana and I gave up our faculty positions in the DC area and moved to California. I retrained in Chinese medicine and we both keep up our qigong, tai chi and meditation practices. I can’t see clients or teach my tai chi and qigong classes during lockdown, but I still go out onto the nearby greenbelt and practice on my own. It’s the tai chi that resonates most right now. Be rooted like a mountain. Flow like water. Take a step forward, shift back. Open in a big stretch, close in a squat. Block left, block right. Raise the arm to protect the chest. Keep safe the lungs even as the heart breaks for the world. REBECCA POPE (MPhil, 1978) March 20th 2020

Members’ News and Publications If you have a news item which you would like to appear in the next College Report please send in your contribution before 31 July 2021

1950

1953

Rosemary Filmer (Dr Moore)’s 2000 book The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain, 1646-1666 has been published in a revised edition.

Nadine Brummer writes: ‘I was lucky to have my new book Whatever It Is That Chimes: New and Selected Poems published on March 13 and luckier to have been driven down to Dorset March 22 to share our equal (not second) home with shielding friend. Experience of lockdown April/May was surreal – such a disjunction between loveliness of cottage garden and the shadow of coronavirus with bleak daily news and stats. As it went on lots of emails and kindness of Beaminster neighbour/ friends helped. Felt privileged and mindful of people in dire situations. Sad and worried by Covid-19, I’ve been profoundly shocked by events in Minneapolis; their ‘choke-hold’ seems crueller than any pandemic, involving, as it does, intentional killing cruelty. I hope I live long enough to see benign change.’

Daphne Wall writes: ‘Since I came up to Somerville in 1950 I leave it to my fellow Somervillians to estimate my age. For those of us in this group, of course, there has been no going out, much reliance on kind neighbours and friends for shopping, and a great deal of dependence on our many devices and on a good book to curl up with when we want to forget the often grim news. But we are lucky to have survived, lucky to have children and grandchildren to call us and report their achievements. Finding great joy in my own garden I often think of Somerville’s and especially its beautiful trees. Thanks for the memories – and greetings and best wishes.’

1951 Lindsey Miller (Mrs March) moved to Oxford to be near her daughter. Since then she has been involved with a lot of local and international causes, mostly environmental and to do with international justice and peace. Patricia Owtram (Mrs Pat Davies) became a Freeman of the London Borough of Hounslow on 12 November 2019 at Chiswick Town Hall. Pat has had a busy year with WW2 anniversaries and was one of three representatives from Bletchley Park at the 2019 Women of the Year luncheon. She has also been heard on Radio 4. Jenifer Weston (Mrs Wates) writes: ‘Initially, utterly dismayed by the severity of the lockdown. But then I realised that of course, I would do anything within my power to save the lives of my beloved people. So have been seeing myself as a temporary hermit: painting, reading, gardening. Missing people, but welcoming the telephone and Zoom. And feeling very privileged.’

Ann Mansfield-Robinson (Mrs Currie) writes: ‘We came to this assisted housing complex with attached nursing home in 2014 and it is a great success. Sadly Giles is now completely blind and has vascular dementia so he is now in the nursing home. He is very well looked after. They had one case of Covid and nursed her back but it has meant I cannot go into the building. I am able to take him for a walk every day in the lovely park surrounding us and I am being looked after too but retain my independence. Our daughters live within half an hour so we see them (outdoors) regularly and are altogether very privileged. I feel for those less so. Life is much more trying for our grandchildren.’

1954 Hilary Maunsell (Dr Brown) writes: ‘We continue to enjoy living in northwest Scotland. It has been a good place to be during coronavirus lockdown with plenty of room for social distancing and kind younger neighbours who fetch our shopping. Our garden has received much attention this year and rewarded us with its usual fine display of rhododendrons.

PROFESSOR DAME AVERIL CAMERON

The adjacent 14 acres where we are restoring the oak woodland (some of the most northerly in Britain) has also kept us busy. Our best trees, started from acorns, are now, after 14 years, 5 metres tall.’

1956 Sonia Jackson writes: ‘I went to Spain in December 2019 to launch an international book on the education of children and young people in care. My flight was so delayed that I missed my connection in Madrid and arrived too late for the dinner at which I was due to speak. No sign yet of the promised compensation, but Oviedo was lovely.’

1958 Warmest congratulations to Averil Sutton (Professor Dame Averil Cameron) on the award of the British Academy’s Kenyon Medal for her lifetime contribution to Byzantine Studies. The only other woman to receive this medal is also a Somervillian, Joyce Reynolds (1937). https://www. thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medals/ kenyon-medal/

1960 Margaret Deacon (Mrs Seward) reports: ‘For the last 10 years we have been associated as helpers with the Dante Summer Festival in the Tamar Valley, founded and directed by Krysia Osostowicz, until last year first violin in the Dante Quartet. Sadly, her plans for this year’s festival, which should have been held in July, could not go ahead on account of the virus, but we hope it will resume again when matters improve.’

1961 Maya Bradshaw (Dr Slater) writes: ‘My husband Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s new translation of Doctor Zhivago was published by the Folio Society last November, in a beautiful Limited Edition. As Editor and Picture Editor, I chose 68 works by Leonid Pasternak, Boris Pasternak’s father, using pictures of family members for the characters, and finding works which Pasternak alludes to in his text. Before lockdown we gave joint talks about it at the British Library, the Ashmolean, Pushkin House, and Antwerp University. Love and Youth, our translation of Turgenev stories, comes out this autumn, and we are cotranslating Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, so lockdown has been busy.’ Despite lockdown Nina Hargreaves (Mrs Maria Perry-Robinson, professionally Maria Perry) is continuing to work on her best-selling book Sisters to the King (London, 1989) – the story of Henry VIII’s sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary of France – for a film option. Mary was the most beautiful princess in all Europe. The Emperor burst into tears because his Council would not allow him to marry her. The book has been an international best-seller for 22 years. The first option in 1999 was dropped because of 9/11. Maria is now seeking English scriptwriters; she says a fierce American lady is after it. Locations are to include places where the book sells consistently: Windsor Castle, Holyrood House, Edinburgh Castle, the Tower of London. If you have contacts in the film industry, Maria would be delighted to hear from you (0207 937 2284; mariaperryrobinson@yahoo.co.uk ) Vivette Luttrell (Professor Glover) is still involved in research although retired. An interesting current project is showing how taking part in singing and dancing sessions can reduce anxiety and

depression in pregnant women in The Gambia. Her previous work suggests that this should be of benefit both to them and their future children. Warmest congratulations to Julia Stretton Downes (Professor Dame Julia Higgins) who has been given an honorary degree by Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Dame Julia has also been awarded the Sir Frank Whittle Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering, which will be ‘presented’ to her at the Academy’s AGM on 22 October, and the Sir Sam Edwards medal and prize of the Institute of Physics.

raid shelters, thanks to 10-year-old granddaughter Connie’s home learning. “Granny, Mum says you always know the answer to history questions in quizzes. Can we do some history on Zoom? I’d like to do the Home Front in World War Two.” Armed with an online map and her camera, she identified where bombs fell between her home and school in Bethnal Green during the Blitz and assembled a display of photos of buildings old and new. We “did” rationing (with my parents’ ration books) but couldn’t fit in evacuees before she went back to school.’

1962

1965

Naomi Claff (Lady Lightman) is deeply saddened by the death in March of her husband, Sir Gavin Lightman, whom she married a month after Finals in 1965. Joanna Hodgkin (Mrs Hines) writes: ‘A documentary Tell Me Who I Am was produced by Netflix late 2019. It has the same name as the book I wrote with Alex and Marcus Lewis, but approaches their story differently. It is harrowing, but they remain two of the most remarkable people it’s been my pleasure to know.’ Jane Roaf (Dr Galbraith) takes care to avoid Covid-19 but keeps busy with the local park users association and giving statistical advice to researchers at University College London. Her first granddaughter is one year old. Sheila Roxburgh (Mrs Mawby) reports being locked down in rural Worcestershire since Friday13 March. ‘The previous day I was in Oxford, finalising plans for an Oxford Society (Worcestershire) tour of the Science Area. Like the Somerville Association AGM, this has now been postponed for a year. With a peaceful garden, great views and a harvest of fruit and vegetables, this is a more pleasant place to be confined than most. I have been busy taking photographs and taking part in various Zoom and other online meetings. I have enjoyed several online “events” such as the Somerville Film Club. But I am missing Oxford, human contact and conversation!’

1964 Sue Watson (Mrs Griffin) has extended her store of knowledge during lockdown: ‘I now know the difference between Anderson and Morrison air-

Uma Das Gupta’s latest publication is Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’: Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi: An Epistolary Account, 1912-1940, Oxford University Press, India, 2019, ISBN 0-19-948121-0 Sheila Peach (Mrs Drury) writes: ‘Having returned to Neston in 2017 and (almost) completed yet another renovation, I’m freer to concentrate on family (two lively grandchildren), eclectic reading, painting and opera. I’m a Trustee of Mid Wales Opera, supporting young musicians, and I’ve also been producing digital maps of gardens from my sketches. The latest has been of Poulton Hall, Wirral home of the Lancelyn Green family with strong Oxford connections. Garden artworks commemorate Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Inklings, Lewis Carroll, whose biography he wrote, and CS Lewis who visited.’

1966 Judith Duckworth (Professor Howard) has been very busy in her beautiful garden, but if not tempted into the garden, or keeping in touch with the world, she is not short of regular work. ‘The diary seems pretty full of online meetings, but Lord knows when I shall be venturing out into Durham very much, let alone further afield. The Dept (Chemistry, Durham University) is opening slowly now and there are of course strict rules and regulations to follow in the new world. I shall continue here and online for quite some time I suspect. I have been enjoying re-discovering my bread baking skills and trying to master sourdough too. Just about there and it’s really tasty! Managed to do several of those long

ignored/forgotten chores there was never time for ... but many still await my attention. Husband John has been busy helping me catalogue my art collection, no mean task with over 300 items and loads of receipts/details/provenance lost over time.’ Emma Kirkby in her 70th year has been presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2019 for her outstanding contribution to musicmaking in her career. See more: https:// www.gramophone.co.uk/awards/2019/ lifetime-achievement Rosalind (Roz) Morris writes: ‘A remarkable year in which we are all broadcasters now and I’ve moved my Rosalindmedia training business online instead of face to face. We’ve never before seen so much of other people’s bookcases or their bedrooms as WFH has become part of the new normal – whether people are talking on TV or in meetings and there’s definitely a need for my training in how to look professional on screen. I’m (finally) completing my book on how to handle media interviews successfully, so hopefully next year I’ll tell you about that.’

1967 Carolyn Beckingham is still a Trustee of the International Liberty Association which promotes human rights in Iran, and a member of the team of the Link For Freedom Foundation, which campaigns to urge the government to do so and to support the people of Iran in their desire to be free of oppression. Jennifer Collins (Dr Barraclough) reports: ‘Life in New Zealand has been virtually back to normal since our strict lockdown ended, except that border restrictions remain in place. There is much debate about how long we should remain cut off from the rest of the world. My planned visit to England had to be cancelled, but meanwhile I’ve carried on with my animal charity work, choral singing and writing. I published two books this year: You Yet Shall Die is a psychological mystery novel set in Kent and Sussex, and A Partly Anglicised Kiwi is my husband’s memoir about growing up in New Zealand and training as a psychiatrist in England.’ Deborah Hewitt (Mrs Bowen) writes: ‘Despite the awfulness of living under Covid for many people, in some ways

I’ve found it almost refreshing, to realise that we can, in fact, be brought to a standstill and forced to rethink how we live. I have appreciated having to look in new ways at the future of our societies, our environments and our neighbours near and far; my prayer is that we don’t squander these opportunities, so dearly bought. In my own world, I’m working with a grant to create a curated anthology of local poetry: Poetry in Place will feature the land, the water, the creatures, and the cultures of SW Ontario, and will aim to offer a hopeful reading of what the future can hold if we use our creative imaginations to their best ability.’ Michèle Roberts’s memoir Negative Capability: a Diary of Surviving (Sandstone) was published in May 2020. Margaret Sidebottom (Dr Clark) writes: ‘I have rather enjoyed the peace of lockdown in a semi-rural setting. Our church has kept in touch electronically, and I have been producing a weekly meditation which started as a Lent exercise and has continued by demand. The paper I was meant to give this weekend at a local history conference should be held over to 2021. My eldest son has turned 40 and just given me my first grandchild, so life definitely goes on! The second is changing career, thanks to Covid, and taking an MA in Law next academic year. Good comes out of anything.’

1968 Susanna Graham-Jones is currently a Trustee of the following UK charities: The Oxford Parent Infant Project (OXPIP), the Ley Community, and the Exuberant Trust. Sara Greenbury (Dr Turner) writes: ‘In 2018 I heard about a social enterprise project working with NGOs for scattered villages totalling about 20,000 tribal people in the Nilgiri hills in South India: the PLENTI project (http://www. plentiproject.org/). Volunteers spend a month there each year. I worked as a clinical psychologist based in the tribal hospital http://ashwini.org/new/ developing a strategy to reduce the very high incidence of suicide. The hospital has a well-developed community health programme using lay volunteers and nurses. I initiated some training and since returning to the UK, I have worked remotely developing a two-day training

programme which was attended by many of the health volunteers. The project has been a fantastic experience and I am still in close touch with people there.’

1969 Gill Bennett writes: ‘I planned to cut back on work with the Foreign Office Historians, but the Covid crisis and global instability has made us busier than before. After a period of ill-health, I am now working harder than ever. A welcome distraction has been that in lockdown, my son has turned my study into a recording studio, and even set me up with my own YouTube channel, called Gill’s New Groove. Do have a look at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FRkCI0oH9LY’ Charlotte Morgan has taken up a new appointment as Vice President at the Association of Corporate Treasurers. Susan Whitehouse (Mrs Markham) writes: ‘We now spend a lot of the year in France, at a flat in the Alps. In the winter we ski every day, trying to keep fit in our old age. We have just sold our boat, so we no longer spend four months a year afloat. Instead we do a lot of hiking in the mountains. Coronavirus has not really affected us, unless we catch it of course!’

1970 Helena Dunstan writes: ‘Since retiring from the University of Sydney, I have been living a full and interesting life in outer Western Sydney, where 50 degrees Celsius temperatures may well become reality this summer. As well as my volunteer role with an Aboriginalled organisation, I am at present the convenor of our “local” Greens group and the Secretary of the Board of the Women’s Justice Network, which supports women who have been incarcerated and want to make positive changes in their lives. I am also looking forward to Christmas, when I might have time to get back to my research. It is just like being an academic!’ Hilary Gigg (Professor Tompsett) writes: ‘Sadly my husband, Christopher Tompsett, died in February 2019. We had two joint research articles successfully published in 2016 and 2017, and I recently completed a chapter in a book celebrating 50 years of social work. My chapter was on social work education.’

Julie Hamilton writes: ‘After many years as a freelance archaeologist specialising in the study of animal bones, I joined the Research Lab for Archaeology to work on isotopes. In 2016 I received a DPhil for research applying carbon and nitrogen isotopes to the ecological and agricultural development of the Thames Valley landscape. Soon afterwards I retired from archaeology and am currently working part time for a local charity. I’m still happily living in Oxford, while my grown-up children have moved away to Bristol and York.’

draconian measure was the lockdown: a few days total lockdown, when we were not allowed out of our homes for any reason at all, followed by a couple of days partial lockdown, when we were allowed out to the shops to buy supplies. This went on for several weeks and was gradually eased. Thanks to these measures, we have only had four cases (the last three months ago), none serious, and no deaths. The economy here is largely dependent on tourism, but as most of our tourists come from the US, it would be far from safe to open up just yet.’

Sabina Lovibond writes: ‘Before coronavirus there were various academic travels, including a day workshop at the University of Amsterdam (October 2018) on my Essays on Ethics and Feminism; also a talk at the Sorbonne (November 2019) to a seminar on “ordinary language philosophy”. Lockdown activities: finishing Proust! (In translation.) A mixed pleasure but still a landmark. Publications: “Between Tradition and Criticism: The ‘Uncodifiability’ of the Ethical”, in Benjamin De Mesel and Oskari Kuusela (eds), Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2019); “Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical Reasoning”, in Angelaki 2020, special memorial issue for Pamela Sue Anderson.’

Lidia Sciama, of the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, has edited, introduced and contributed to a book, Humour, Comedy and Laughter (Berghahnm, 2016), and co-edited and contributed to War and Women (Berghahn, 2016).

Judith McClure writes: ‘On 1 July I became Chairman of The New Club Edinburgh, founded in 1787. I am very excited but a little nervous, as we reopen soon after lockdown. Members have been so helpful and understanding. Working with our superb Secretary during this extraordinary period has been very rewarding, even if distanced, while my beloved husband Roger writes yet another book, on Eurasia in the first millennium, and learns Arabic.’ Janet Milligan (Mrs Matcham) writes: ‘Since 2015, my husband and I have been living on the beautiful Caribbean island of Nevis. It is a small island with limited health care facilities, so when Covid-19 emerged, there was a lot of concern here about how we would cope. (We only have two intensive care beds!). So in very quick order, in mid-March, our borders were closed; hotels and bars were closed; numbers allowed to enter shops were limited; we all had to wear masks in public. The most

1971 Santha Bhattacharji writes: ‘I retired in September after 15 years as Senior Tutor of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. I moved to North Wales at the beginning of November, which proved to be extremely fortunate timing. I had several months of inserting myself into my new, very welcoming, community before the pandemic, and then a fairly painless time during lockdown. I have open countryside on my doorstep and can go on long walks where I pass only a couple of other people. Basically, during the lockdown I’ve lived more or less as I would anyway, but have actually been grateful for the slower pace and being at home more. I would have been very stressed if I’d still been in Oxford during this time!’ Patricia Davis (Mrs Pipe) comments: ‘Currently adapting to realising that Somerville days are now quite some time ago, but certainly not forgotten.’ Sue Dixson reports from Bulgaria: ‘This last year has been challenging, not just because of Covid. I spent months on and off in Britain, mainly with my parents in Cardiff, but also to attend the College Gaudy in June. My mother died in October, my father went to my brother’s for Christmas, had an “episode” and has been in bed in England (hospital then nursing home) since, so the family home will be sold and Wales will seem even more distant. I have just completed 12 years living with my expanding

family of cats and dogs in Bulgaria and am grateful that we have space and nature all around us. Thanks to the Somervillians who have made a special effort to keep in touch.’ June Raine became the interim Chief Executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Agency (MHRA) on 23 September 2019.

1972 Natasha Robinson writes: ‘We had committed to no more flying in 2020 and to try exploring Europe in an electric car during our final year as EU citizens. Instead I found myself back at work in the NHS as a Medical Examiner, completing the documentation for patients who died in hospital, and speaking to their families – mostly remotely. I was very much in the thick of the pandemic (including catching a mild dose myself), but also lucky to have a legitimate reason to leave the house and meet others. Many neighbours were self-isolating, and so instead of planning the summer street party for the neighbourhood I found myself arranging grocery and prescription deliveries.’ Elizabeth (Liz) Webster (Mrs McDougall) writes: ‘I am delighted that we have retired to Oxford. It is great fun to be able to introduce our young grandsons to the city.’

1974 Erica Budgen (Mrs Wildgoose) has been appointed Disability Officer for Bristol East Labour Party. Olwyn Hocking writes: ‘More than 40 years after Somerville studies (PPE), the seeds planted then are enjoying flowering at the Scottish Parliament, where I am an Official Reporter, creating the Scottish version of Hansard. Also, delighted that social enterprise Digital Voice for Communities’ pioneering work across the digital divide since 2007 is giving a voice to survivors of domestic abuse and looked-after children.’ Felicity (Fiz) Markham has now completed her BMus at Royal Holloway and gained a First Class Honours Degree. She intends to undertake a part-time MMus with a focus on composing. Aside from that, she reports conducting a choir, teaching music, playing and singing, and Morris dancing – all more or less on hold for the moment.

Jenna Orkin writes: ‘A guy streaking by on a bike shouted into his phone. Either he said, “Wash it off,” or “Martial law”. Whichever one it was, the other interpretation reveals something about where my unconscious is focused these days. From https://coronaviruswtf. blogspot.com, the blog I set up for people to record their Covid-19 experiences. All are welcome to contribute.’ For Louisa Parsons the last year has brought many challenges. ‘Cancer recurred and that put everything on hold for some months and then just as I returned to my end of life work the lockdown began. I have been able to offer support at a distance by phone or videolink but no visits to homes, hospice or hospital have been possible with the regulations. Many people have sought practical help with advance planning, others have been devastated by the lack of contact with the people they love and the impossibility of saying goodbye as they would have wished.’

1975 Linda Jones (Mrs Appleby) writes: ‘My poetry collection, Harvest, is to be published this year. It tells of events surrounding the nine months I spent in hospital. It was first published locally but should now be published worldwide, all being well with the current delays. During lockdown I was unable to get an online shopping order, so we enlisted the help of two volunteers, who took on the task cheerfully and reliably. Lockdown has, thankfully, taken the pressure off and given me a bit of space, going for walks with my neighbour and joining in with the church service on Zoom. I particularly enjoyed the “broadcasts” from Somerville and as ever was profoundly grateful for that connection.’ Susan Scott, Professor at the Australian National University, writes: ‘It was the summer of natural disasters. I was on the marine volcano White Island, New Zealand, the day before it erupted in December. Then Canberra was shrouded in bushfire smoke, from nearby fires, for many weeks and we wore masks and stayed inside. In January, we recorded our hottest ever day at 44°C and a terrifying hailstorm destroyed my car. Canberra almost burnt in February. And then came the pandemic and we wore masks and stayed inside. Some

good news though. I was recently awarded the Dirac Medal, which is an international award recognising a distinguished contribution to physics.’ In October Susan was one of a team of four scientists awarded the Prime Minister of Australia’s 2020 Prize for Science. The team has made a critical contribution to the first direct detection of gravitational waves on earth – a groundbreaking discovery in the world of Physics. We congratulate Susan most warmly.

1976 Robin Henry (Mrs Mednick) received in 2018, from the Governor General in Canada, the Governor General’s Meritorious Service Medal for founding Pencils for Kids and its contributions to the country of Niger. Pencils for Kids is a Canadian charity that has built schools, sponsored hundreds of scholarships for girls, started a Sewing Centre, and helped to create 18 income-generating gardens for women in the Farmers of the Future program. For Rosie Rogers (Mrs Oliver) one of 2019’s highlights was being part of a co-operative of women writers who published and edited a science fiction anthology, Distaff. ‘I was absolutely delighted when one of its stories was included in the Best of British Science Fiction 2019. It was such fun that we’re now in the process of producing a sister fantasy anthology, Femme Fae-Tales.’ Jane Schroder (Dr Gravells) writes: ‘In this strange year, and as I have been missing my scattered family, my garden has never had so much attention and is looking good. Last year, at our Somerville Gaudy, I admired a plant in the gardens which was in full flower in late June. Taking a picture would have been helpful, but I didn’t. However, Liz kindly put me in touch with the new Head Gardener, who asked one of the long-standing members of the team, who could identify it from my description! I got it for my lockdown birthday – a little bit of College Gardens in Staffordshire!’

1977 Susan Reigler has had two new books published in 2020: Which Fork Do I Use with My Bourbon: Setting the Table for Tastings, Food Pairings, Dinners, and Cocktail Parties, co-authored with

Peggy Noe Stevens, and Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide, 3rd edition. During the pandemic Susan has conducted bourbon tastings via Zoom. Last year, she was inducted into the Order of the Writ, the bourbon equivalent of Scotch whisky’s Keepers of the Quaich. Kate Taylor (Dr Lack) writes: ‘Lockdown has been an extraordinary experience. We have been much busier than normal, maintaining several community groups and services, and my deadlines have slipped twice as a result. But the publishers were wrestling with home schooling, so they are very forgiving. Husband Paul mastered Zoom quickly, and switched his teaching onto it; I am less comfortable so have mostly stuck with emails. The local population has drawn much closer together, and there is a tangible sense of people looking out for one another. Our main family news is that our son and daughter-in-law (both PPE, Oxford) have made us very proud grandparents.’

1978 Elissa Hare retired to North Bay, Ontario, to be near family. Sonia Phippard has retired from the Civil Service (Defra) and has been appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for public service in the delayed Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Sonia says “I am delighted and humbled to receive the CB, recognising that all achievements in public service are so dependent on great team work. But I am also pleased that it celebrates and recognises some significant achievements for the environment in the last five years.” We congratulate Sonia most warmly.

1979 Julia Gasper reports: ‘My latest book, Sophie De Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution, has been published and is available as an ebook, paperback or hardback. The extraordinary life of Sophie de Tott (1758-1848), an artist, writer, musician and secret agent who witnessed the French Revolution first hand: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/ shop/julia-gasper/sophie-de-tottartist-in-a-time-of-revolution/ebook/ product-196jwkne.html. My edition of The Modern Philosopher, Letters to Her Son and Verses on the Siege of Gibraltar,

by Elizabeth Craven is out in paperback from Cambridge Scholars Press: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/ the-modern-philosopher-letters-toher-son-and-verses-on-the-siege-ofgibraltar-by-elizabeth-craven. Thirdly, a book to which I contributed a chapter, The New Normal: The Transgender Agenda (Wilberforce Publications, 2018), is being translated into Spanish.’ Dona Millheim (Mrs Cady) is very pleased to be returning to Oxford in 2020 for an MSt in Literature and Arts. The Covid-19 pandemic has affected many colleges in the US, including hers. ‘We are continuing to teach online through at least the fall 2020 semester. Since I have taught online for almost 20 years, I have been less affected than some; however, the move to online learning has certainly highlighted the social and technological inequities for many students across the US, and this is an issue that must be addressed.’ Jacqueline Watts writes: ‘Writing as JS Watts, my next novel, Old Light, was published on 29 February this year, just in time for lockdown. It’s the second book in the Witchlight series (the first being Witchlight itself). I’m hoping that the third book in the series, Elderlight, will have a more auspicious debut, but whether it now comes out in 2021 as originally envisaged is a moot point.’ http://www.jswatts.co.uk/

1980 Vicky Canning (Mrs Andrew) writes: ‘I have been active in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, serving on Council (the national governing body of the profession) since June 2019. In June this year, I also took office as President of the London Society of Chartered Accountants, an organisation of 35,000 members. Providing strong and positive leadership in the current environment has been an interesting challenge!’ Neeta Patel (1980, Chemistry)was recognised for her work to support the future of British business as CEO of the Centre for Entrepreneurs with a CBE in the Queen's birthday honours. She says “I am deeply honoured to have been awarded this CBE for services to entrepreneurship and technology, both of which have been my passion throughout my working and personal lives. I am lucky to have worked with and continue to support

and be supported by some incredibly passionate and talented business people on my team and through our volunteer network. The impact we have made has been very much a group effort. I would like to thank them all.” We congratulate her most warmly. Alexia (Wai-Chun) Tye is enjoying her new role as Trustee of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), a centre for world-leading environmental science research in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. UKCEH’s research extends from molecular biology to global climate modelling and is undertaken worldwide, from the semi-arid West African Sahel to the rainforests of South East Asia. Alexia enjoys the strategic and policy aspects of UKCEH’s work in partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). With her experience as former finance director of an environmental charity, she was also co-opted on to UKCEH’s audit committee. After a long career in the world of investment banking and private equity, Alexia is now committed to the non-profit sector, especially in the postCovid rebuilding of a fairer and more sustainable society.

1981 Lucinda Coxon is writing a new adaptation of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Simon Russell Beale, scheduled for opening at the Bridge Theatre, London.

1982 Eleanor Buss (Mrs Whitehead) writes: ‘We moved a couple of summers ago to rural Nevada, at the foot of the Sierras, close to Lake Tahoe and the state capital, Carson City, where I teach special education. We are enjoying the outdoors, and the many opportunities for hiking. We used the lockdown weeks to sort out the vegetable garden, and are now waging war against various pests – squirrels, deer, and other unknown enemies.’ Humaira Khan-Kuzmiak (Dr Khan) writes: ‘For the past many years I have been working on biodiversity conservation issues in the northern Karakoram-Himalayan mountains of Pakistan. I worked with WWF-Pakistan for many years, then joined a large, Islamabad-based university where I

did similar research and also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental issues in developing countries. These days I am on an extended stay in the USA.’ Madhura Swaminathan, living in Bengaluru, writes: ‘The strangeness of living alone for four months was made bearable by work as I wrote and spoke at public webinars on policies for agriculture and food security after Covid. The manuscript of an edited volume on Women and Work in Rural India went to press in June. Every day, my husband, daughter, son, and I met on a family Zoom call where one of us gave a short seminar on a topic unrelated to the pandemic. Now numbering 75, I enjoyed learning about varied subjects, from Shakespearean tragedy, to Mexican murals in American modern art and “bullshit” jobs.’

1983 Helen Parnell (Dr Williams) is leaving teaching this year and is expecting to be ordained in June. She hopes to take up the post of Assistant Curate of Wareham in Dorset.

1985 Clare Latham writes: ‘I have stepped away from my role as Chief of Staff at an economics consultancy for a more creative life designing gardens. I was half-way through my training at the Inchbald School when we had to leave the studio and work online instead, but I’m now beginning my first tiny projects. This may prove a terrible time to start out in a new direction – or a good one if increased awareness of the benefits of outside space continues.’

1986 Sacha Romanovitch (1986, Chemistry) was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours for her work to support the affordable credit sector during the coronavirus pandemic as CEO of Fair4AllFinance, helping to protect the lifeline they provide to families and small businesses. We congratulate her most warmly.

1988 Essaka Joshua has had a mixed year in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. ‘I finished my term as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies on 1 July 2020,

which entailed a huge amount of extra planning work as we redid the teaching timetable for nearly 2,000 classes, brought the semester forward, and worked on preparing for online teaching. My third monograph, Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature, will be published by Cambridge University Press in October 2020. No launch. No book talks. I’ve been given a tenured Associate Professorship, having spent 12 years as a teaching professor here. Three conference papers were cancelled by Covid, as was my 50th birthday trip to see my twin sister in Edinburgh. Our son, Freddie, hasn’t been in school since the day he turned 7 on February 13. Working with a young child at home has been extremely difficult. I’m about to go on research leave and need to go to archives in London, but they’re all closed. I have research funding to travel and to purchase books, but we’re not allowed to use it. The financial crisis is hitting hard, and my university is forbidding travel due to safety concerns.’ Anna Poole reports: ‘On 10 January 2020 I was installed as Lady Poole, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. I was initially assigned to jury trials in Glasgow High Court, presiding over a number of rape and domestic abuse trials. After lockdown jury trials stopped, and the courts had to adapt swiftly to electronic hearings (telephone and videoconferencing) in other cases. In lockdown I have mainly decided civil cases, but jury trials modified for social distancing (using two courts for a single trial) are due to recommence in July. In practice, lockdown has meant I have been working from home, which I have loved, particularly since my two children are due to fly the nest in autumn. My appointment followed 20 happy months working as an Upper Tribunal Judge in Edinburgh in the Administrative Appeals Chamber.’ Angela Wilson (Ms Brown) writes: ‘This has been a tumultuous year for me. Upon my divorce, my small farm in Aberdeenshire was sold and I have moved to Edinburgh and am now a full-time artist. I have a new partner, Anne, and bought a wee flat right next to Edinburgh Castle. However, I was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer last summer, plus resulting blood clots in my lungs and spent much of the year dealing with all that – surgery, chemo etc. Thankfully it was caught

early so I hope to beat the odds! My chemo low immunity lockdown was immediately followed by the Covid lockdown which has been very frustrating as travel plans I had looked forward to, including a month-long art residency on Fair Isle, were cancelled. I am hoping next year will be a little easier than the last! But I am now looking ahead and it has been lovely to see more of Talya Baker (Cohen, 1988).’

1989 Thérèse Coffey was appointed Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions on 8 September 2019. Thérèse was previously Minister of State at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Vanessa Patini (Mrs Lawson) sends this report from Chepstow on the South Wales/Gloucestershire border: ’Lockdown has meant three adults (myself, my husband and my brother) and two children aged 11 and 14 have been working from home continuously. We are grateful for a big garden and space in the house, and living at the edge of the Wye Valley AONB has meant green space is close at hand and we have explored what is on our doorstep. Our garden is looking amazing and we have grown more fruit and vegetables than ever before. We haven’t ventured far though; even since rules have relaxed the furthest we have been is Monmouth 16 miles away. Of course in Wales travel has been very restricted and we are only just into England so have been cautious in our approach. We look forward to being able to go further afield from next week when the Welsh rules are relaxed – we are keen orienteers and fell runners and have really missed our hills and our competitions, but we have managed to keep the household fit and healthy by walking and cycling and also swimming in the Wye.’

1990 Caroline Derry writes: ‘My monograph Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: 300 years of regulation in England and Wales was published by Palgrave, while my article “Ethel Bright Ashford: more and less than a role model” appeared in a special edition of Women’s History Review marking the centenary of women’s entry into the legal profession. I was also promoted to Senior Lecturer at the Open University.’

Catherine Goddard (Mrs Callen) writes: ‘After almost 21 years at KPMG, I took redundancy in October and enjoyed five months as a lady of leisure, albeit with my 10 and 12 year old boys there’s never too much leisure! I joined international law firm Freshfields in March as we went into lockdown. I just had time to pick up my laptop before the office shut and have been working from home ever since. Fortunately, my husband has been able to manage the boys and schoolwork, as I’m now working full time for the first time in 13 years. Thank goodness for those five months off!’

1991 Emma Hart, who is a Lecturer at St Andrews, has been appointed next Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia. Her book Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism was published by University of Chicago Press on 2 November 2019.

1992 Sophie Agrell writes: ‘Despite a horrendously muddy winter and a series of domestic tragedies including the sudden death of a beloved pet lamb, the smallholding was a good place to spend lockdown. We are half a mile from the nearest neighbour so did not have to worry about social distancing or the need to isolate. We are too far from supermarkets to get deliveries but this turned into a blessing as we discovered small local and not so local producers from whom to buy. The quality has been superb and we intend to continue to stay away from supermarkets apart from a few necessities – chiefly tinned tomatoes and sherry. I have been working hard throughout lockdown as my team was furloughed so have had no time for “lockdown projects”. However, I continue to read and write whenever I have a moment – and am very aware that I am fortunate compared to many. The one big regret I have is that the family gathering to celebrate the 80th birthday of my mother Kamini Wickremesinghe (1964) in September has had to be postponed but her scattered family still hopes to gather to celebrate one day.’

1993 Since April 2020 Lucy Powell has been shadow Minister for Business.

1994

1997

2002

Katy Darby has won the Shooter Poetry Competition with her poem ‘Duct tape, milk, shilling, towels’, about Sylvia Plath’s last night alive. https:// shooterlitmag.com/2020/01/10/darbywins-2019-poetry-competition/

Zelin Ozturk has a job change after 17 years at Kingston University. She is now SITS Technical Lead at St Mary’s University. She loves her new position and is very excited by the new challenges. She says ‘It is a real baptism of fire as I am joining at a crunch period with the system I am going to be responsible for managing/supporting/ developing going live this week (early August).’

Sophie Penny (Mrs O’Shaughnessy)’s son, Matthew, was born in October 2019. She and her husband, Peter, are really loving being parents.

Dina Gregory reports that many of her children’s stories are now instantly streamable on Audible’s Stories site: Stories.audible.com. Fairy tales, eco tales, adventure stories and more. This free online resource may be helpful for those Somerville families wishing to minimise library trips in the current pandemic.

1995 Aunj Goyal writes: ‘I have been living for the last three years in Los Angeles with my family. I have some very fond memories of my time at Somerville, and still keep in touch with some close friends from that time, including Sam Gyimah and David Hills. I would be happy to hear from, and meet up with, any alumni living in the area. At a distance …’

1996 Sharon Chan has been recognised by Forbes China in its latest list of Top 50 Women in Science and Technology: https://www.forbes.com/ sites/russellflannery/2020/07/06/ forbes-china-50-top-women-intech/#110f75044c05. Rachel Douglas’s book Making the Black Jacobins: CLR James and the Drama of History came out in September 2019 with Duke University Press. Helen Goddard (Dr Cowan) writes: ‘I continue to work as a freelance health writer and have published more than 150 pieces for Readers Digest Online. I have also written on health for the British Medical Journal, the Telegraph, the Law Society and the Nursing Times. I am a board member for the British Journal of Cardiac Nursing. I have interviewed several Oxford alumni for my work. Working also as a care home nurse, I have been able to reflect on the crisis in care homes during Covid-19, writing for the British Geriatrics Society: https://www.bgs.org.uk/blog/my-lastshift-as-a-care-home-nurse.’

1998 Clemena Antonova has published her second monograph, Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy (Routledge, 2020). Louise Radice reports: ‘I managed to land a new job during the lockdown! Previously I was a software developer at the Department for Education in Coventry. As of this month I’m a Modelling Analyst at the Energy Systems Catapult in Birmingham, hoping to do my bit to contribute to a green recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Apparently, they have quite a swanky office in the city centre, not that I’ve seen it yet. My “commute” has consisted of walking round nearby Jephson Gardens and observing the waterfowl on the River Leam. Working full-time during the lockdown has however meant that I haven’t enjoyed the massive increase in free time that other people have been raving about. So, no, I haven’t learnt a new language, played music or even watched a box set. Also living in a top floor flat with no garden I haven’t got to know my neighbours. I signed up to my local Covid-19 Mutual Aid volunteering group but all I’ve done is deliver a couple of prescriptions. Nor have I taken up cycling again, much to my regret; I have nowhere safe to store a bicycle and there are no bike hire shops in Leamington Spa.’

2000 Alistair Fair has been promoted to Reader in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. In 2019, Lund Humphries published his latest book, on recent theatre design, while his 2018 book, on theatre between 1945 and 1985, was republished in paperback by Oxford University Press in summer 2020.

2003 Kit Yates was invited to join the Independent SAGE group, providing independent scientific advice to the government and the wider public to minimise the harm caused by the pandemic and help the nation to recover.

2004 Stefano Palazzo writes: ‘In May 2019, Heather Ridley (English, 2004), Daniel Eyre (PPE, 2004), Fuchsia Watson (Daniel’s wife) and I visited Iain Cox (History, 2004) in Mongolia, where Iain was serving as the UK’s deputy ambassador. Amongst the usual activities tourists get up to (staying out in the desert, having a go at traditional archery, drinking fermented mare’s milk and the like), we five signed up to do the Ulaanbaatar half marathon on a whim. Nothing particularly special about that, other than the fact that (somewhat unexpectedly) Heather managed to come sixth overall in the women’s event… Not only did this make her the highest ranked foreigner in the race, but she also won the princely sum of £75 prize money and was interviewed on Mongolian national TV. Not bad for something we did as a bit of a laugh.’

2005 Amir Hakim reports: ‘The start of 2020 began with the joyous birth of my child, Muhammad. As an academic at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, QMUL and Imperial College (visiting academic), this period was rather busy, juggling a new-born and delivering respiratory teaching to medical students. Little did I know the emerging Covid-19 outbreak would lead to unimaginable changes to my life. In March, I developed a Covid-19 induction pack for non-respiratory physicians for NHS Nightingale and Barts Trust. Caring for a new-born, transitioning to online teaching and undertaking rapid Covid-19 research would not have been possible without the support of my dear wife, Zuhra, and my parents.’

HEATHER RIDLEY

Helen McCabe writes: ‘I was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (started January 2020) looking at the relationship between forced marriage and modern slavery (more details here: https://gtr.ukri.org/ projects?ref=AH%2FS012788%2F1). John Stuart Mill features in the philosophical analysis part of the project, linking it back to my doctoral and MPhil work at Somerville, and also to my monograph (based on that doctorate), John Stuart Mill: Socialist, which will be coming out in Spring 2021 with McGill-Queens University Press. I also have a chapter on Harriet Taylor Mill in Philosopher Queens, a book which might interest some other Somervillians and their children/grandchildren (see https:// unbound.com/books/philosopherqueens/).’ Jens Scherpe was promoted to Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Cambridge last year.

2006 Carl Gibson completed his PhD in Politics from the University of Reading, where he is now a full-time teaching fellow.

NILUKA KAVANAGH

2010 Tess Little has just published her first novel, The Octopus, a murder mystery.

2013 Shyamli Badgaiyan writes: ‘I’m just wrapping up a year at The Economist based in Singapore and Hong Kong. I’ll be heading to Harvard Business School for an MBA this August, after which I intend to pursue my passion for public sector work in India.’ Niluka Kavanagh writes: ‘What a year 2020 has been! I started a new role and team while in lockdown – Brand, Customer and Marketing Strategy at KPMG. Although it was an internal move, it was still very strange to not meet anyone in person. I have also finally taken the opportunity this year to work on a side-hustle, founding a public speaking company called HelpMePresent. Thankfully, the coaching was always intended to be virtual! More broadly speaking, lockdown has given us all, I think, a chance to reflect and reassess the big questions in life. The simple things – human connection, movement, humour – have shone through in their ability to lift us up, even during the most difficult times. I hope

everyone reading this is well and my heartfelt regards to Somerville College.’ Calam Lynch appears in new film of Black Beauty.

2015 Dr Young Chan Kim has been selected as the NDM Overall Prize Winner (the best DPhil student) at Nuffield Department of Medicine (NDM) based on publication records, impact/novelty of research and references. He was also invited to give a talk to new DPhil and MSc students at NDM at the start of Michaelmas Term. Young writes : ”It is still hard to believe that I have received this prestigious prize but I wanted to say I am very grateful to Somerville College as it definitely played major part during my DPhil life in Oxford.” Alessandro Pirzio-Biroli published a research paper in the Journal of Urban Ecology in February 2020. It investigated the bird life of twenty different University of Oxford colleges, including Somerville (originally from an undergraduate dissertation). Title: ‘Drivers of avian species richness in urban courtyard gardens’ (https:// academic.oup.com/jue/article/6/1/ juz026/5732470)

Births Campbell

Hanratty

Lexton

To Catherine (Mawby, 1988) and John Campbell on 5 November 2019 a son Jack Edward Thomas Campbell

To Holly (Brown, 2006) and Luke Hanratty (2006) on 14 January 2020 a daughter Robyn Marion Hanratty, a sister for Jonah

To Ruth (1998) and Ean Lexton on 3 April 2020 a son Asher Mark Lexton, a brother for Jesse

To Stephanie Ashmore (2002) and Alex Finlayson (2002) on 21 December 2019 a daughter Imogen Ruby Finlayson, a sister for Isla

Khan

To Akira (2013) and Ersilia Marusaki on 9 August 2019 a daughter Alice, a sister for Marie-Aliénor

Fox

Lai

To Sarah (Waller, 2001) and Adam Fox on 20 February 2019 a son Miles Fox

To Jeremy Lai (2003) and Eunice Lai on 22 October 2019 a son Daniel Lai

To Piers (1997) and Hanna Ovenden on 7 January 2020 a son George, a brother for Robbie

Anderson

Cartwright

Forrai

Sonia Primrose Anderson (1962) on 8 September 2020 Aged 76

Nina Valerie Cartwright née Bearman (1961) on 7 July 2019 Aged 81

Barbara Evelyn Forrai née Lockwood (1946) on 4 March 2020 Aged 93

Ashton

Catmur

Goulding

Crystal Heather Ashton née Champion (1947) on 15 September 2019 Aged 90

Paulla Bolingbroke Catmur née Johnson (1949) on 21 August 2019 Aged 89

Elizabeth Patricia Goulding (1960) on 29 October 2019 Aged 81

Ashworth

Charing

Goulty

Geraldine Jasmine Ashworth (1973) on 4 February 2020 Aged 75

Gabrielle (Gaby) Eve Charing (1962) on 24 May 2020 Aged 76

Leonora Helen Goulty (1944) on 26 January 2020 Aged 93

Backus

Diamand

Gransden

Irena Dorota Backus née Kostarska (1968) on 14 July 2019 Aged 69

Valerie Sylvia BC Diamand née Armstrong (1956) on 2 May 2020 Aged 82

Antonia Gransden née Morland (1947) on 18 January 2020 Aged 91

Finlayson

To Anna (Treacher, 2006) and James Khan on 16 August 2020 a daughter Lily Grace Khan

Marusaki

Ovenden

Deaths

Bearcroft

Diamond

Gray

Rosalind Irene Bearcroft née Chamberlain (1946) on 18 January 2020

Ann Cunnington Diamond née Geale (1950) on 29 August 2020 Aged 89

Judith Gray (1970) on 3 June 2020 Aged 68

Blackburn

Donnithorne

Grellier

Vivienne Blackburn (1949) on 31 March 2020 Aged 89

Audrey Gladys Donnithorne (1945) on 9 June 2020 Aged 97

Florence Helen Grellier née Brindle (1949) on 26 April 2020 Aged 89

Braithwaite

Eaglestone

Harvey

Victoria Anne Braithwaite (1985) on 30 September 2019 Aged 52

Clare Margaret Cruice Eaglestone (Goodall, 1953) on 6 August 2020 Aged 85

Rosemary Daphne Harvey née Hawke (1954) on 29 January 2020 Aged 84

Butler Audrey Butler née Clark (1946) on 12 May 2020 Aged 91

Falconer Elizabeth Lear Falconer (1948) on 25 March 2020 Aged 89

van Heyningen Ruth Eleanor van Heyningen née Treverton (1948) on 24 October 2019 Aged 101

Hooton

Krassowska

Simpson

Heather Joan Hooton née Shelley (1951) on 5 November 2019 Aged 90

Anne Marie Prom Krassowska née Olesen (1961) on 26 June 2019 Aged 80

Anne Simpson (1955) on 6 January 2020 Aged 84

Houghton-Berry

Lambert

Skidmore

Hannah Houghton-Berry née Sunderland (1980) on 24 July 2019 Aged 57

Katherine Mary Lambert (1968) on 3 September 2020 Aged 70

Jennifer Jane Skidmore née Sargent (1969) on 1 October 2019 Aged 69

How

Littlewood

Stratten

Ruth Mary Katherine How (1947) on 29 June 2020 Aged 91

Audrey Littlewood née Charnley (1950) on 29 December 2018 Aged 86

Nancy Stratten née Coward (1954) on 29 June 2020 Aged 84

Huxstep

Millard

Sutherland

Madeline Ruth Huxstep née Bishop (1939) on 22 October 2019 Aged 90

Rosemary Evelyn Millard née Troughton (1950) on 14 December 2019 Aged 89

Alison Jean Sutherland (1951) on 10 March 2020 Aged 87

Iles

Miller

Taylor

Penny Iles née Hornblower (1954) on 9 January 2020 Aged 84

Elly Miller née Horovitz (1946) on 8 August 2020 Aged 92

Jennifer Mary Taylor née Everest (1954) on 15 November 2019 Aged 84

Jones

Moore

Treloar

Gabrielle (Gay) Mary Jones née McGrath (1968) on 17 June 2020 Aged 70

Kathleen Elizabeth Moore (1946) on 1 January 2020 Aged 92

Janet Quintrell Treloar (1958) on 30 October 2019 Aged 79

Joshi

Philpott

Twiss

Angur Baba Joshi (1957) on 20 June 2020 Aged 87

Joan (Joanie) Emilie Philpott née Huckett (1943) on 11 November 2019 Aged 94

Dorothy Twiss née Casson (1940) on 1 July 2019 Aged 97

Poulter Mary Ann Poulter née Smallbone (1965) on 26 March 2020 Aged 74

Victoria Avril Jean Wotherspoon née Edwards (1946) on 25 July 2019 Aged 92

Robertson

Wright

Clare Robertson (JRF) on 19 June 2020 Aged 63

Susan Wright née Leys (1960) on 7 November 2019 Aged 78

Kenny Caroline Anne Florence Kenny née Arthur (1956) on 17 November 2019 Aged 82

King Jean Brown King née Davidson (1954) on 7 May 2019 Aged 84

Wotherspoon

Obituaries For reasons of space it is sadly not possible to print all available obituaries in the College Report. In addition to the obituaries printed below, many others of recently deceased Somervillians can be found in the College’s Commemoration booklet available on the website at www.some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/news-publications

Jane Elizabeth Kister (Bridge, 1963) Jane Bridge was known and loved by several generations of Somervillians – first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate and Research Fellow and finally as a Tutorial Fellow. But after 15 years of association with the college she met and married Jim Kister and spent the rest of her life in the United States. Jane Bridge, born 18 October 1944, came up to Somerville as a Scholar in Mathematics from St Paul’s Girls’ School in 1963. She had just been diagnosed with Lupus and she missed much of her first year through illness. She restarted her degree in 1964 and thereafter was never held back by her health, although she lived with the disease for the rest of her life. In spite of this uncertain start, Jane made many good friends in college and was socially always part of her matriculation year. Jane was a warm and empathetic listener, always interested in her friends’ lives and problems while making light of her own health concerns. The friendships she made in her first year at Somerville remained strong for the rest of her life. She made sure to get in touch whenever she and Jim came over to England and she managed to attend several gaudies as well as many social occasions with her group of friends, most recently in May 2019. It was clear from the start that Jane was a very talented mathematician and this was recognised by her tutor, Anne Cobbe, who gave her inspiration and support throughout her undergraduate career. Jane had the ability to get straight to the heart of a problem and then to explain it with utter clarity; her written work was always beautifully presented in her italic handwriting. She was particularly interested in mathematical logic and always regretted that the Mathematics and Philosophy course was not available for her generation. After obtaining a First and being awarded a Junior Mathematical Prize, Jane stayed on to work for a doctorate, completing it under the supervision of Robin Gandy in 1972. She quickly became a key member of the very lively mathematical logic group, showing particular talent in managing the notably eccentric Gandy. Dana Scott arrived in 1972 as Oxford’s first Professor in Mathematical Logic and Jane worked closely with Dana to enhance the group’s reputation as a world leader. Jane was a wonderful mentor and big sister to all the students and research fellows. Jane held the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship at Somerville from 1969 and, after Anne Cobbe’s retirement and subsequent death in 1971, she became the Fellow and Tutor in

JANE KISTER

Pure Mathematics. By this time she had already proved herself a very successful and popular tutor and she slipped easily into her new role in college as well as taking on new duties as a lecturer. After she had completed her DPhil, Dana Scott persuaded her to write the book Beginning Model Theory (OUP, 1977) as the first volume in the prestigious Oxford Logic Guides. This is a very lucidly written text, accessible to both undergraduates and beginning postgraduates with a background in either mathematics or philosophy. In 1977, Jim Kister, a topologist from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, came to spend a sabbatical year in Oxford. Jane and Jim were married in July 1978 and settled in the United States. Jane soon became an editor at Mathematical Reviews where she remained for the rest of her career, rising to be Executive Editor in 1998 and retiring in 2004. Mathematical Reviews has traditionally provided short reviews of selected research papers and was a vital tool for academic mathematicians in the pre-electronic age. Jane’s mathematical ability and supreme administrative skills were perfectly suited to this work and she was heavily involved in the launch of the electronic version MathSciNet in 1996. Jim died in 2018 after a long illness and Jane suffered a heart attack a year later, dying on 1 December 2019. HILARY OCKENDON

Anne Driver (Browne, 1942) Anne Driver was born Anne Lyster Browne in Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire. Her childhood was marked by the death of her father in a tram accident when she was two years old, an event which brought her closer to her extended family in Shropshire, especially her cousins and aunts. She was awarded an exhibition to study English at Somerville, and came up to Oxford in 1942, turning down the offer of a place at RADA. At Oxford she studied Old English and Norse literature, under tutors including JRR Tolkien. She graduated in 1945, and after working for a local newspaper in Bath she turned to teaching, first at the village school at Chipping Campden (1948-1953), then Oxford Central Girls’ School, where she was Head of English (1953-1956). In 1957 she travelled to north India with her partner John Driver, who was studying Tibetan Buddhism. They spent three years living in the small town of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling, hosting a string of Tibetan exiles who had reached India over the Himalayas. Her two daughters were born there. Following their return to England, she took up an appointment in January 1962 as an English teacher at Penrhos College, a girls’ school in North Wales, five months after giving birth to twin boys in 1961. While working full-time and caring single-handedly for her four young children in a large house in Colwyn Bay, she published three novels (under the pseudonym Anne Rider) with Bodley Head – The Learners (1963), The Bad Samaritan (1965), and A Light Affliction (1967), the last set in the Himalayas and re-published in the USA under the title Hilltop in Hazard. These drew on her experiences of life in Oxford, Rome (where she lived for six months in 1957) and India. A fourth novel, A Safe Place (1974), was published by Bobbs-Merrill in the USA.

one of the first small western groups to travel to China from Pakistan via the Khunjerab Pass – including a stint on the back of a cement lorry. Above all, she devoted herself to her many grandchildren, by whom she will be sorely missed. TABITHA DRIVER (1976)

Joan (Joanie) Emilie Philpott (Huckett, 1943)

Her writing was variously described by reviewers (including Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene) as ‘serio-comic’, ‘highly intelligent, ironic and most elegantly funny’, ‘taut, elegant and witty’, ‘surgically philosophical’, ‘totally persuasive’, ‘briskly elliptical’ and ‘deeply English’.

Joan was born on 19 July 1925; her father was a doctor. She was educated at Doncaster High School and came up to Somerville in 1943 to read English.

She moved to London and joined the English Department at Godolphin and Latymer School, Hammersmith, in 1967, staying there until her retirement in 1984. She was an inspirational teacher, taking an active part in school drama, running school plays, Shakespeare days, and drama competitions.

Joan very nearly went to Edinburgh University. She had been offered a place at LMH, but was tempted by having seen the handsome medical students from Edinburgh who would regularly stay with her father. Ultimately she came around to the thinking that Oxford might have equal attractions but by then her offer from LMH had lapsed and she was found a place at Somerville.

Retirement and the departure of her children marked a new phase in her life. She took adult education classes in art history, Italian and Finnish, and swam regularly. A deep commitment to peace and social justice led her to campaigning. She was a Greenham Common peace camper, and was arrested several times for non-violent direct action. Leading on from this she took part in Cruise Watch, a network formed to track missile convoys leaving American bases on regular road exercises, and was later arrested for sitting down in Whitehall to protest against the first Gulf War. She visited Nicaragua to learn first-hand about conditions in coffee plantations there, and attended an international women’s peace conference in Moscow, taking the Soviet hospitality with a strong pinch of salt and making a lasting friendship with the group’s official interpreter. She travelled widely, making a return trip to Kalimpong, and was a member of

ANNE DRIVER

In Oxford, Joan often visited the Moxley family, friends of her father, and through them was introduced to Peter Philpott, demobbed in 1946. They met on 9 November 1946 – it was love at first sight. They became engaged in 1947 and married in Doncaster on 23 August 1949. Initially living in Davenant Road in Oxford for the first three years of marriage, they supplemented their income with lodgers. Joan had got her Education Diploma in 1947 and between 1947 and 1952 she taught in Aylesbury and in Oxford. For many years, Joan was busy bringing up a large family of five children. At the same time, she would often look after other children, treating them as extended family. She was consistently kind, caring and non-judgemental.

Audrey Faber (Thompson, 1944) Audrey Faber (née Thompson) died peacefully at home in Oxford on 2 July 2019, aged 93. She was born in Keswick, Cumbria in 1925, the only child of Eleanor (née Telford) and William Thompson, and educated at Keswick School before going up to Somerville in 1944 to read History. The college and her Oxford experience were profoundly important to her, especially after the death of her beloved mother from TB in 1945. In college she was taught by May McKisack, though preferred Oliver Cromwell to her tutor’s medieval home territory. Wider university life was at its most exciting in those years when many undergraduates returned from the war, and Audrey’s theatrical adventures included stage-managing Love’s Labour’s Lost (directed by Anthony Besch, with Kenneth Tynan in the cast) for the OUDS in her Finals term. A stern rebuke for making a noise late at night was all she recalled of her studious contemporary Margaret Hilda Roberts.

JOAN PHILPOTT

Once the family were old enough, Joan started receptionist work at the newly opened Geriatric Day Care Centre at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Welwyn Garden City, where she worked for many years. She thoroughly enjoyed caring for the elderly, regularly organising carol concerts and many other activities. She joined the casualty team as receptionist and, according to various GPs with whom she worked over the years, she had quite a hand in their initial placement training. Joan had simple tastes. She has never been abroad, although she consistently maintained throughout her life that her visits to the Isle of Wight were undoubtedly abroad. She enjoyed annual holidays around the UK with her family, but would always say how nice it was to be home again. Joan was a highly accomplished musician and pianist. She gained Grade 8 Piano and won many St Albans Music Festival categories over some years. At Somerville, she sang in the Somerville-Balliol Choir. Gardening was another pastime she thoroughly enjoyed. She and Peter shared a love of dancing, especially Old Time Sequence dancing, and for many years danced at various clubs. The last time they danced together was on Joanie’s 80th birthday. Joanie died very peacefully in her sleep on 11 November 2019, at home and looking out onto her roof garden, as she wished. It was amazing good fortune to have had 70 years of very happy marriage, having known each other for 73 years and 2 days. PETER PHILPOTT

After university she trained as a teacher and taught history at Downe House School, near Newbury, before taking an opportunity to travel to Hong Kong in 1951 for a six-month working holiday. There she met Jack Faber, a structural engineer, and they married in 1953; they had two sons and a daughter, and for the next 30 years their house in Jardine’s Lookout was a constant refuge for visitors from all over the world. Audrey continued to teach history, at St Paul’s College and elsewhere. Her strong Christian faith led to active membership of the congregation at St John’s Cathedral, running the Sunday School and then the Flower Guild, as well as helping to make mountains of fudge to sell at the annual Michaelmas Fair. Audrey always looked to help people, and importantly to find the ways in which they wanted to be helped. She was heavily involved in the setting up and running of Hong Chi Association (formerly the Hong Kong Association for the Mentally Handicapped, founded in 1965 by her great friend, Lady Bremridge); for several years she ran the library at The Helena May (the central women’s club in Hong Kong), and, with Jack, staunchly supported St James’ Settlement (a youth and community centre). They retired from Hong Kong in 1983 (though kept a base there until 1997) and settled in England near Chichester, where they continued to welcome visitors from near and far. Audrey quickly became an active member of their village church, serving as secretary of the PCC and a lay member of the local deanery synod. In 2006 they moved to Oxford, and to a new church congregation at St Margaret’s. She treasured her connections with Somerville all her life; having helped mark Daphne Park’s card for Hong Kong fundraising, she became a member of the College Appeal and the Somerville Association (alumni relations) Committees. Audrey was immensely proud of her Cumbrian roots, and of her family, and her love of history shone through her reading and her conversation. She is survived by their three children, William, Robert and Peglyn (Pearson), and three grandsons. PEGLYN PEARSON

AUDREY FABER

LEONORA GOULTY

Leonora Helen Goulty (1944) Leonora Goulty passed away in hospital on 26 January 2020, aged 93. She was born in Didsbury in 1926 and attended Withington Girls’ School before following her mother (Hilda, née Broadbent) to Somerville in 1944 to read medicine. At Somerville she made many lifelong friends, amongst them her first cousin Mary Ede (née Turner) and Ruth Lister. She travelled widely and often with the latter. Both survive her. In 1946 Leonora won her cricket blue. After Oxford she returned to Manchester to complete her medical training where she was for five years Senior Medical Student, House Surgeon at the Manchester Royal Infirmary and House Physician at Crumpsall Hospital. Her first job reference in 1952 records: ‘I have the highest regard both for her practical ability and for her theoretical knowledge of medicine. Before coming to Manchester she graduated in Physiology at Oxford and this training has resulted in an intelligent and logical approach to medical problems. Dr Goulty has a pleasant personality and gets on well with patients and her medical colleagues. I have no hesitation in recommending her for any medical situation suitable for her seniority and experience.’ Leonora held posts at Westminster Children’s Hospital and Montreal Children’s Hospital before joining the Lowestoft general practice in 1958 where she remained until retirement in 1991. Her contract of employment contained a ‘no marriage’ clause but sadly she was destined never to test its enforceability. She was the GP of choice for Marks and

Spencer and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1997. A well-known and popular figure in Lowestoft, she enjoyed being approached in later years by patients and thanked for delivering them and/or their relatives. Leonora’s home in Lowestoft for over 60 years was a magnet for her many nephews, nieces, cousins, goddaughters and friends. To them all she was loyal, loving and generous with an encyclopaedic memory for all their activities which she expected everyone else to share. She was thrilled when her great-niece, Michelle Goulty, followed her down the welltrodden path from Withington GS to Somerville. But no record of her life would be complete without reference to her frequent bouts of depression. Her former GP partner summed it up when he wrote: ‘I too have seen her many times thrown into the most dreadful despair, but to bounce back to excellent caring work in good cheer.’ Leonora’s wide interests included music, sport and travel. She rented a beach hut for decades and continued to swim in the sea well into her 80s even after new hips and knee operations. Her declining physical abilities eventually necessitated the support of a care home for her final years where she presented a challenge but the number of carers who attended her funeral bore witness to her being a challenge they relished. One said: ‘When she smiled she lit up the whole room’, and that is how she deserves to be remembered. IAN GOULTY, nephew

Audrey Gladys Donnithorne, 1945 At the end of Audrey Donnithorne’s requiem mass in Hong Kong on June 26, the congregation filed out to the strains of ‘Amazing Grace’ sung in Chinese, neatly encapsulating the two dominant themes of her life: deep attachment to China and its people, expressed throughout her career as a political economist, and her Catholic faith. The only child of Protestant missionaries, she was born on 27 November 1922 in Anxian, a country town in Sichuan, China in 1922, where her parents had been sent by the Church Missionary Society. There she recalled being carried in a little sedan chair to go shopping with her mother and feeding mulberry leaves to silkworms that she kept in a drawer. Like other mission children she was sent to school in England (1927-40), first in Norfolk and then St Michael’s, Limpsfield in Surrey; holidays were spent with guardians or relatives unless her parents were on furlough. After School Certificate she rejoined them in Sichuan, relearning Mandarin and taking courses in Chinese history and anthropology at the West China Union University, a Protestant foundation in Chengdu. Spiritually, her dissatisfaction with the modernist direction of Protestant thinking was growing and she attended her first Catholic mass. She was eventually received into the Catholic Church in 1944. In July 1943, following a perilous journey that took six months, including some weeks hospitalised in Agra with hepatitis, she landed in Liverpool and was conscripted into military intelligence in the War Office. By the time she went up to Somerville on a scholarship in October 1945, she was already 23 and, like returning servicemen, found it hard to adjust to the rarefied atmosphere of academia. In her autobiography, China in Life’s Foreground (2018), she comments on the psychological division between the post-war intake and those straight from school, for whom the undergraduate system was designed. She settled down to read PPE despite being irked by aspects of the curriculum, especially economic theory, and suffering from the cold as electric fires were allowed only for two hours a day. The parts of university life she most enjoyed were the lasting friendships she made and the activities of the Catholic chaplaincy, though her lack of ballroom dancing skills put her at a disadvantage at its Saturday evening socials. She also joined the university Conservative Association, succeeding Margaret Roberts as college secretary. Her degree proved to be her ‘rice bowl’ for life. On graduating she took a research assistant post in the department of political economy at University College London as a stop-gap, but stayed for twenty years, was made Reader in Chinese economic studies, co-wrote books on Western enterprise in the Far East with Professor GC Allen, and published her major work, China’s Economic System (1967). The latter entailed arduous field trips to China, where, besides researching agriculture, industry and finance, she sought out Chinese Catholics; she found Beijing’s policy towards religion at any one time was a useful measure of the general political atmosphere.

AUDREY DONNITHORNE

The second half of her career, 1969-85, was spent at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra as a Professorial Fellow and first head of the Contemporary China Centre. The Cultural Revolution had just begun and put a stop to field trips for a number of years, during which time she converted part of her house to shelter Vietnamese refugees from communism. When her visits to China resumed in the 1980s, she planned a sequel to her earlier book, but had to abandon the project because the fast-changing economic system was ‘like an unset jelly’. Culture wars were not confined to China: on the ANU campus she found herself at odds with radical feminists, especially over abortion, and a vocal critic of naive Maoist euphoria. Her decision to retire early to Hong Kong was inspired. From here she could visit the mainland regularly (until denied a visa) and work discreetly to aid surviving Catholics, for which the Holy See awarded her the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice medal in 1993. Unmarried, she kept in touch assiduously with friends from all over the world, and her numerous relatives and godchildren. PHILIPPA INGRAM, cousin

Rosalind Irene Bearcroft (Chamberlain, 1946) Rosalind was born in Cardiff on 16 May 1926 and spent her formative years in the city. Although she had a lifelong love of animals, she decided at a young age that she wanted to be a doctor rather than a vet and so, after a successful school career, she studied Physiology, Anthropology and Anatomy at University College, Cardiff in 1943. In 1946 she came up to read Physiology at Somerville. She met her future husband,

ROSALIND BEARCROFT

AUDREY BUTLER

Peter, who was at Balliol. Never one to pass up a challenge, Rosalind hitch-hiked to Rome on a college bursary, returning with more money than she set off with through the astute sale of black market coffee. After two years at Somerville, she continued her medical training at University College, London, gaining her MBBS in 1951. She and Peter were married in 1952.

only the tip of the iceberg. Her dedication to family, faith and work was truly impressive. She will be greatly missed.

Rosalind soon entered the rapidly developing field of psychiatry, becoming a consultant in 1966 and moving to Barming in Kent. When a local primary school was threatened with closure, Rosalind and Peter bought Barming Place, intending it to become both their family home and the new school site. Life at Barming Place was extraordinary. There were animals: dogs, cats, horses, goats, polecats, a tortoise, stick insects. There were concerts, weddings, and even a Plymouth Brethren church, which was given a temporary home by these two devout Catholics. Over the years Rosalind kept in contact with a number of her friends from Somerville, most notably Audrey Donnithorne. Rosalind was an active member of a large number of groups, including the Catholic Union, the Association of Catholic Women, the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, the Friends of the Holy Father, the Council of Christians and Jews, the St Augustine Society, the Catholic Medical Association, and many more besides. If anything, her contribution to these groups only increased as she grew older, as did the attention she gave to her many pet projects, including her longstanding attempts to obtain a dog for Pope Benedict XVI! Rosalind’s energy was legendary, as was her generosity and kindness. She continued working into her late eighties and was awarded Catholic Woman of the Year in 2018. She always went the extra mile: taking on a primary school while also raising a family and being a consultant child psychiatrist was

Roy Peachey, son-in-law

Audrey Butler (Clark, 1946) Born in York in 1928, the elder sister of Gerald, Audrey spent most of her first five years in Düsseldorf, Weimar Germany, where her father worked for Price Waterhouse, and where she attended the local Kindergarten. When Hitler assumed power, the family returned to England (though this did not, apparently, prevent Audrey’s parents being added to the Nazis’ infamous ‘hanging list’, hastily compiled by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt prior to the planned 1940 invasion). Back in England, Audrey’s schooling was peripatetic, following her father’s work to Bromley, Blundellsands (near Liverpool), Sutton Coalfield and Leeds, where she attended Allerton High between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. These moves, which inevitably broke up childhood friendships and entailed repeated new starts in established school classes, were emotionally disruptive. Always strong academically, Audrey excelled at Allerton, though initially she was often shunned by her classmates as an outsider with a soft, southern accent. Rather than moping, she channelled her spare-time energies into writing a young adult novel, The Vedor Sampler, which was accepted for publication in 1942, when she was fourteen. She had a short story read out on the BBC Children’s Hour and won several prizes in national poetry competitions. By the time she left Allerton, the initial turbulence was forgotten; in her final school exams she won two scholarships and left to read History at Somerville in October 1946.

Audrey loved her time at Oxford: the curriculum, the social life, the unique mix of demobbed servicemen taking war degrees and the ‘standard intake’. One of those ex-servicemen was Captain Arnold Butler whom she met at a medieval church history lecture. Shortly before that encounter, Audrey met Barbara Lockwood, another undergraduate, who had joined the same queue. (For what, is lost to history.) The two remained friends for more than seventy years and died within a few weeks of one another. As Barbara’s daughter, Liz, puts it: ‘Perhaps they are in the same heaven-bound queue, now!’ When Audrey made friendships (of which there were many), they lasted a lifetime. Audrey and Arnold married in 1950. By now, she was working for Dents, a major publisher, where she became the editor of successive editions of Everyman’s Dictionary of Dates, edited the politics and history segments of a new encyclopaedia, translated for publication in English The Swiss Family Robinson and Noel and the Eagles from the original French, edited an anthology of English Prose and Poetry and wrote numerous forewords for classic works. While bringing up a family of five children, Audrey had two further novels published. In retirement she enjoyed keeping local councillors on their toes as a part-time correspondent for the Lowestoft Journal. Together with Arnold she wrote a history of Somerleyton Brickfields and a guide to Suffolk’s historic churches, with the proceeds going to charity. Audrey died on 12 May 2020. She is survived by her husband, Arnold, and three of her children, Francesca, Sophie and Patrick. Sadly, Mark and Guy pre-deceased her. PATRICK BUTLER

Barbara Evelyn Forrai (Lockwood, 1946) A multi-generational household including ex-teacher ‘aunts’ enhanced Barbara’s education, continuing through Blackheath High School GPDST (evacuated to Tunbridge Wells) and one-to-one lessons with an Oxford Mathematician who encouraged Barbara to go to Oxford, which she did assisted by a Ministry of Education means-tested grant and a Somerville Bursary, topped-up by paper rounds and holiday factory jobs. Rightly, ex-Service personnel had preference, so she felt extra-honoured to gain a place and cherished every moment and opportunity which Oxford gave her, never mind rationing and studying wrapped in a blanket. Throughout her life she endeavoured to put these achievements to good use. Barbara’s mathematics teaching career in wide-ranging schools included: Argentina and Brazil where she married her beloved husband (died 1980), setting up a first computer department, coaching and telephone-tutoring until her death. Barbara spoke five languages, beginning Russian only when preparing for retirement, achieving in her seventies a degree which facilitated teaching Russian. A superb family member and friend, Barbara had many interests – knitting, sewing, piano, singing, writing, reading,

BARBARA FORRAI

family history research, hosting foreign visitors, tennis into her nineties, skiing started in her fifties while accompanying school trips, and more. World War Two restrictions and her father’s dockland walks instilled ‘wanderlust’ and she became an intrepid traveller, visiting the Arctic, Antarctica, Asia, Americas, Australia and far areas of Russia, often including adventurous activities, most recently, aged 91, a hot air balloon. Barbara’s life was one of service and long-term commitment to helping others – in particular, volunteering for the Oxford Society and the British Heart Foundation, serving as Chairman, Events Organiser and In Memoriam Secretary (continuing the last until her death), dealing with over £400,000 of donations with expertise in Gift Aid, also a month assisting a streetchildren charity in Chita, Siberia, which she was still supporting through Powerpoint presentations about her travels. Amongst other awards of appreciation, in 2017 she received the British Empire Medal (Civil Division), in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for services to charity in the UK and Russia. We are thankful she led a full life until the end. Attitudes learnt in childhood meant she was always keen to learn, diligent about her studies and exercises, ready to participate, have a go or give help, while still thinking from others’ points of view and caring for those around her, all of which brought her cherished friends across the world. There was no funeral as it was her wish that her body be used for medical science, so even in death she continues her life-long passion for education, at the Cardiff School of Biosciences. We have every confidence that she will be remembered far and wide, for generations, but should anyone wish to commemorate her, she requested donations to the British Heart Foundation in her memory. Please include details for Gift Aid if you are eligible. LIZ FORRAI, daughter

President of the Rugby Football Union, the Wotherspoons happily attended many international rugby matches and parties. Avril was ahead of her time. She smoked a mean cigar, never went to the hill without a flask of whisky and wasn’t shy to stalk or shoot with the best of them. She swam in the lochs and fished her way up and down the country. She knew the names of all the wild flowers; and then it was time to put on the ballgown, the heels, the lipstick and join in the dancing. Her golf was impressive. She had a single figure handicap and represented the north of Scotland for many years. She also threw herself into sharing the other love of Iain’s life, a 45ft wooden Buckie-built fishing boat, which every year the family took down the Great Glen through the Caledonian Canal to cruise the west coast. Having a strong sense of public duty she immersed herself in the Children’s Hearing Panel after her own children were grown up. She served on the Panel for fourteen years, many of them as Chairman for the Highland Region.

VICTORIA WOTHERSPOON

Victoria Avril Jean Wotherspoon (Edwards, 1946) Avril Edwards was the elder of two girls, born to a couple utterly devoted to each other. They grew up in Gosforth, and by all accounts Avril was a bit of a tomboy and keen on sport. At the start of World War Two the family moved to Corbridge in Northumberland. Avril’s father joined the Admiralty in London to co-ordinate merchant shipping and she was sent away to school at Downe House. She hardly saw her father between the ages of 13 and 18, but at Downe she thrived academically, on the stage and on the sports field, ultimately becoming Head Girl and captain of tennis. Avril went up to Somerville in 1946 to read English and she absolutely loved it. She achieved a half-blue at tennis and won her matches against Cambridge in successive years. One of her fellow students at Somerville was Barbara Harvey (subsequently Medieval History Tutor at Somerville) and the two became life-long friends. Another good friend was Elizabeth Graham (Lady Kirk), who remembers the three of them in a somewhat unholy alliance, all getting together round Barbara’s coal fire in Maitland when the 1947 power cuts switched off the central heating elsewhere. After Oxford, Avril embarked on a teaching career and took up a post at St George’s, Ascot as an English teacher. Her love-life was undoubtedly complicated, but at her sister Diana’s wedding she met the best man, Iain Wotherspoon, and they never looked back, marrying in 1952 and setting up home in the Highlands. They were blessed with 55 very happy years together and four children. When Avril’s father became

Avril was a devoted wife and mother to whom family meant everything, but she was no cook – she was not interested. Her family were possibly lucky to have survived some of her efforts. She was able to spend her final days at home. Her sense of humour never dimmed. Throughout her life she had a marvellous time. JONNY WOTHERSPOON, son

Chrystal Heather Ashton (Champion, 1947) When Heather Champion first arrived at Somerville at the start of Michaelmas term 1947 she had recently returned from six years as a child evacuee in Pennsylvania. The transition from land of plenty to post-war austerity cannot have been easy. In Oxford, food, fuel, books and clothes were all in short supply. But in those years of renewal, anything must have seemed possible. She wanted to be a doctor, and she had come to the right place. Oxford was already her new home. Her father, Sir Harry Champion, was Professor of Forestry, her elder brother Jimmy an undergraduate at New College, and the family lived on Boars Hill. She excelled at her studies. She played squash for the university. She fell in love, with John Ashton, lately a naval airman and now reading agricultural economics at Brasenose. Soon after she graduated in 1951 with first class honours in physiology, they married at Sunningwell. Heather was born on 11 July 1929 in Dehradun, India (where her father was then Silviculturist at the Forest Research Institute). Thanks to her Indian ayah, she spoke Hindi before English. If the sun shone over her first six years, the next five, boarding far from home at Oldfield School in Swanage, left mixed memories. She just survived the evacuation convoy to New York in 1940, watching as a U-boat torpedo narrowly missed her ship, and looked back on her American adolescence

as golden years. Her hosts the Marshalls became her second family. After Oxford she and John moved to London. She finished clinical training at the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1954. She stayed at the Middlesex as a junior doctor. Drawn increasingly towards research, she published early papers on cardiology and blood circulation. In 1965 she moved to Newcastle, on John’s recruitment to set up a new Department of Agricultural Economics. Here, as researcher, clinician and teacher for over half a century, she made a home, raised a family of four and established herself among the leading clinical pharmacologists of her generation. Working from the Department of Pharmacology and at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, initially with her friend and mentor John Thompson, she did significant work on pain management, nicotine, and cannabis. She was among the first to use electroencephalography to investigate changes in neural activity. She saw teaching as a privilege not a chore, and became a popular lecturer in the Medical School. Her later work, on benzodiazepine tranquilizers, touched countless lives. She was among the first to reveal the dangers of dependency on these potent drugs. In 1982 she established the world’s only dedicated clinic for benzodiazepine withdrawal. There she showed that most people could withdraw safely, and devised the only reliable protocol for doing so. She could have profited from it, but made her method freely available online. For patients and clinicians alike, the ‘Ashton Manual’ soon became an indispensable resource (now in eleven languages: www.benzo.org).

CHRYSTAL ASHTON

She died peacefully at home after a long illness, aged 90, on 15 September 2019. She is herself missed by her children John, Caroline, Jim and Andrew; six grandchildren; numerous friends from all walks of life especially in the north-east; and generations of patients, colleagues, and students. JOHN ASHTON, son

She left her mark with her character as much as her accomplishments. She treated her patients as people not symptoms; saw no contradiction between compassion and objectivity; and turned nobody away who sought her help. She was guided by curiosity and rigour, not convention or the approval of peers. She was passionate about the integrity of her calling, never accepted industry funding, and was proud to be among the founding generation of NHS clinicians. She saw the career ladder as a distraction; but was gratified in 1975 when elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and by the later award of a personal Chair in Clinical Psychopharmacology. In 1994 she made her final move, to the Department of Psychiatry. Long beyond her formal retirement and well into her eighties she continued, mostly unremunerated, to teach, publish, advise patients and contribute to dependency support activities, including for twenty years as Vice-Chair of the North East Council on Addictions (NECA). She was always grateful to Oxford and Somerville, especially to Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin for their wise tutelage. She cherished her many Somerville friends, including Ros Maskell (Rewcastle), and Jean Hunter (Hopkins). John died in 1986. Heather threw herself into her work, but missed him constantly, as she did the beloved family dog, Rex.

Antonia Gransden (Morland, 1947) Antonia Gransden died on 18 January 2020 in Keinton Mandeville, Somerset, aged 91. As historian James Clark wrote in the obituary that appeared in the Guardian on 16 February 2020, she ‘was among the foremost medievalists of her generation. Her substantial and sustained scholarship spanned seven decades and continues to guide today’s students and researchers.’ A further obituary appeared in the Readers’ Lives section of the Times on 14 March 2020. Antonia was born in 1928 in Compton Dundon, Somerset, as the second daughter of Stephen Coleby Morland, Quaker manufacturer, local politician and historian, and Hilda Street. She was educated at Dartington Hall, Devon, and Badminton School, Bristol, before winning a scholarship to Somerville, where her mother had been before her. Antonia gained First Class Honours in Modern History in 1951. She subsequently gained a PhD, and was awarded a DLitt (Oxon.) for outstanding academic achievements in 1984. Her most substantial publications were the two-volume Historical Writing in England (1974, 1982), which covers the period from circa 550 to the early sixteenth century, and the two-volume History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, covering the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Her work

connoisseur and collector, especially of early modern European paintings, which she studied with forensic attention to detail, and provenance. She enjoyed cultural tours to Europe and to far-flung destinations, often accompanied by one or more of her grandchildren. A prolific writer, Antonia was never at ease with a keyboard. All her work was written by hand, with bibliographical references on index cards, and footnotes on little slips of paper. Resistance to electronic information retrieval was perhaps the key to astonishing feats of memory. Even in the last months of her life she was able to indicate the location of items she required from dense sheaves of paper on the various surfaces around her room. She resisted the onset of osteoporosis with a regime of cold baths, exercise and healthy eating. But a series of grave falls and fractures led to periods of hospitalisation, and, when she could no longer walk, to residential care, where her family continued to support her. She preferred being read to, rather than learning to press the right buttons on her audiobook player.

ANTONIA GRANSDEN

on Bury St Edmunds had begun during her years as Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum (1952–1962) and she completed it at the age of 86. She also wrote many articles and reviews. In 1965 she was appointed to a lectureship at Nottingham University, retiring as reader in 1989. In retirement she moved first to Cambridge, then to Oxford, and finally to her home county of Somerset. Even in retirement, Antonia continued to work to a strict schedule, and did not care to be disturbed. Morning disturbances were particularly unwelcome. Over lunch she often read nineteenth-century novels; Walter Scott and Wilkie Collins were favourites. On Sundays she walked, and these walks were sometimes connected with her work. During the Cambridge years she spent many hours walking along East Anglian towpaths, investigating sites and remains of monastic mills. Single-minded as she was about her work, she also enjoyed social contacts and dinner parties, often with fellow historians. In Cambridge she appreciated the scholarly conviviality of Clare Hall, and during her latter years in Oxford she was glad to re-establish contacts with Somerville. She liked to hitch up her skirts and cycle across the Parks to college guest nights. Although not given to conventional domesticity, Antonia was deeply attached to her immediate family. She took an active interest in the personal and working lives of her children and grandchildren, and participated fully in family celebrations, and in everyday household and culinary life, whenever the opportunity arose. Having shown an early gift for painting, and created a collection of nature diaries illustrated with watercolours of wildlife, she was able to pass on a wealth of traditional lore. Her interest in art led her to become a

Antonia married three times. Her second husband, the literary scholar, poet and critic KW (Ken) Gransden, whom she married in 1956, died in 1998. She is survived by their two children, Katherine and Deborah, seven grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren. CHARITY SCOTT STOKES (1957)

Vivienne Blackburn (1952) For Vivienne, Somerville was the start of a life-long adventure. It opened doors to a world of study, culture, and travel of which she could only have dreamed in her early years, living in the narrow confines of a small mining town in the north-east of England. Her work for three months as an au pair for a cultured and forward-looking French family in Bordeaux began a passionate relationship with France which saw her developing an extensive knowledge of its people, its country and its language, and which also gave her a taste for travel. From Somerville, she gained a love of academic study, research and discourse which underpinned her whole life. She would always pay tribute to the support, guidance and ongoing encouragement provided by her college tutor, Mrs Olive Sayce, with whom she maintained contact until her death in 2013. Her interest in the arts also dates from this time. She became a keen amateur cellist and listener, a regular visitor to art galleries at home and abroad, an avid theatre-goer and a prolific reader of classical and contemporary novels in both English and French. Following a PGCE at Newcastle University and nine years as a teacher, she moved to Stockwell College, Bromley. This placed her at the forefront of the development of teacher training, initially to a three-year diploma and ultimately to BEd degree level. Always academically engaged, she completed a London MPhil in French Literature on Paul Eluard and was appointed a

VIVIENNE BLACKBURN

lecturer of the University. When the College closed, she joined the ranks of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, a move which necessitated her relocation to Yorkshire. HMI colleagues paint a generous picture of Vivienne – highly professional, quietly efficient, courteous and kind, perceptive and sound in judgement, and at the same time with a lively sense of humour, a quick wit, and an eye for the ridiculous. In 1985 she was seconded to the European Community in Brussels, charged with preparing a report with a French colleague, drawing on practice in the twelve countries they visited, and suggesting common objectives for professional teacher training. Retirement in 1990 brought with it the opportunity for Vivienne to return to the academic life. She enrolled at Leeds University, not in modern languages but in theology. Following an MA she went on to take a PhD on the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil, and to write a book – Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil: A Study in Christian Responsiveness – whilst also becoming a regular contributor to theological journals and to the local Café Humanité. Family ties were always important for Vivienne. When her mother died during her last year at Oxford, she took on the care of her thirteen-year-old sister forming a lifetime bond between them. She was a devoted aunt to her nephews and they and their families gladly supported her in recent years when physical and mental difficulties began to restrict her lifestyle. She is survived by her sister Marjorie and her nephews, David and Jonathan. MARJORIE AYLING, sister

LADY HOWARD

Lady Jane Mary Howard (Waldegrave, 1952) In 1934 Jinny Waldegrave had the good fortune to be born into an aristocratic family that most unusually valued education for daughters as highly as for sons. Her mother, Mary Waldegrave (née Grenfell) went up to Somerville as a scholar in the 1920s, Jinny went up as an exhibitioner in the 1950s and was followed by a daughter in the 1970s. As her mother had done, however, she left after only one year to get married and the next twenty-three years of her life was dominated by rearing her six children and life as a chatelaine, entertaining on a large scale, running the Bath Festival for six years with her husband and supporting his nascent political career in the 1970s. Then the marriage broke down, she remarried a Scottish airline pilot and for three years lived an entirely different life. This marriage also failed and she found herself in her mid-forties with very little money and no qualifications for earning a living. Nothing daunted, she trained as Blue Badge Guide in London, escorting tourists around the sights of London, and gradually established herself as a tour guide with her own business, specialising in taking small parties of American tourists on exclusive visits to Great British houses and gardens, many of whom returned to tour with her year after year and became personal friends. Aged 70, she retired to live in Cambridge, where various of her seventeen grandchildren appeared at the university over the years. Once more she reinvented herself and made new friends, rejoicing particularly in the rich offerings of classical and ecclesiastical music that Cambridge afforded. Her last decade was one of increasing ill health and debility, born without complaint.

She was a woman of extraordinary energy and charm and almost boundless self-confidence. Her most remarkable achievement was probably her rescue, almost single-handed, of the teenage son of an old friend who had ended up in a Turkish prison after becoming involved with drugs. Then in her midthirties, knowing no-one in Turkey and armed only with crates of whisky for bribes (supplied by a sympathetic brother-in-law, John Dewar), she set off for Istanbul and duly returned with the young man a month or so later. Not usually given to modesty, she never spoke much about how she had accomplished this, but she undoubtedly risked her own life and liberty. If she had been born fifty years earlier, she might have been a great political hostess; fifty years later, she would likely have completed her education and combined her domestic responsibilities – in which she was never much interested – with a high-flying professional career. As it was, she never quite found equilibrium in her life, but never gave up trying. JANE MORRIS-JONES (1973), daughter

Clare Eaglestone (Goodall, 1953) Clare was born in Liverpool in 1934. Educated at St LeonardsMayfield School, where she was Head Girl, she was delighted to come up to Somerville in 1953. She often told the story of how she met Gina Alexander (Pirani) by chance at Oxford Station and shared a taxi with her to Somerville, where she was terribly impressed with Gina’s inquiry about whether any post had arrived for her. She frequently talked about her tutors, especially Agatha Ramm, and described the feeling of her ‘head expanding’ in tutorials: Clare maintained an interest in history all her life. After leaving Oxford, she worked for Time and Tide magazine. In 1959, she married Alex Eaglestone, a graduate of Magdalen and then a Naval Officer. At the end of his commission, they moved to the Middle East: Alex worked for the British Council and Clare as an English teacher. They had two daughters, Catherine (1960; Somerville, 1978) and Elizabeth (1962). They then moved to Brazil, returning to the UK in 1966; Alex had taken a post at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Clare taught at St Theresa’s, a Catholic Secondary Comprehensive in Lewisham. Three more children followed: Robert (1968), Margaret (1971) and William (1972). In 1979, Clare had a Teacher’s Sabbatical at Somerville, during which she deepened her knowledge of the Romans’ settlement of Britain, and in 1981 the family moved back to Oxford. Clare worked at Balliol College as the Secretary of the College Society, a job she greatly enjoyed. Retiring by parts over the 1990s, Clare was a founder and regular volunteer at the Gatehouse, a charity providing food and shelter for the homeless in Oxford. A devout Catholic all her life, Clare was also continuously involved with a number of Church activities. The house in Oxford was always full of people, often priests and religious who had recently moved to the city for sabbaticals or work, to whom Alex and Clare offered generous and animated hospitality. Alex died in 2007. At around the same time, Clare began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and moved to Vale House, a specialised home in Littlemore. She had fourteen grandchildren. She died peacefully 6 August 2020.

CLARE EAGLESTONE

Going up to Oxford after a rather frightening and difficult wartime childhood in Liverpool was a great moment in her life, and she was always grateful for the opportunities Somerville gave her and even more for the friendships she made there. ROBERT EAGLESTONE and GINA ALEXANDER Robert adds: My mother absolutely loved Somerville: it had a huge impact on her life and she was really proud of the college. When I was a little boy, because of the way she talked about it, it seemed to me like a fairy-tale place, like Camelot, and has never really lost that kind of sheen for me!

Ann Penelope (Penny) Iles (Hornblower, 1954) Penny was born on 20 December 1935 and educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She came up to Somerville in 1954 to read Physics and was forever fondly committed to the college. Soon after graduation she was offered a happy position working on carbon-dating finds for the University Museum. From there she moved to work at Oxford Instruments and then Harwell. Here she met and married Dr. Raymond Douglas Lowde, a theoretical physicist. From this marriage she had three children, Felicity, Justin and Corydon. Being a mother took precedence and she left her career, although when the children were older she took a job teaching Mathematics at Cokethorpe School.

PENNY ILES

CAROLINE KENNY

After a divorce in 1982, Penny met Dudley Iles. Both Dudley and Penny retired from teaching at the end of the 1980s and two decades of adventure and service followed, with special highlights being sixteen tours on various cruise ships around the world, mostly with Dudley lecturing on birds (about which he was a world expert) with Penny providing invaluable administrative support.

Penny was progressively afflicted with severe hearing loss from the 1980s onwards and bore the inevitable frustrations associated with deafness with stoicism and courage. Just days before she passed away, she discovered the brilliant book Sound by Bella Bathurst and she described it as the only account that had ever been able to capture the many varied feelings of isolation that accompany hearing loss.

Driven to have a greater impact for the good of those less fortunate, Penny and Dudley undertook a two year service in Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania with VSO, an organisation for which they had a great affection. It is of some note that Penny was the first and only grandmother VSO had ever had on their motorbike training course and she adored speeding about the island. Both she and Dudley were grateful to the African mindset for their respect of education in general and the way that they respected also the experience of their elders.

Penny was devoted to her family, and will be greatly missed by her three children, two step children, four siblings, and beloved

Penny’s service included her dedication to the Citizens Advice Bureau, where she worked for two decades regularly as a volunteer, using her significant abilities at research and investigation (in the days long before the internet) to champion the plight of those at the mercy of the system. Penny was committed to the local community. She was heavily involved in local campaigns, and numerous societies. More broadly, she was a member of several arts societies and countryside charities, and often would take delight in visiting Kew Gardens, Wisley and many glorious National Trust properties. Gardening was a passion and she continued to maintain a beautiful garden at home. She also had a passion for Bridge and played to a good standard for many years at various clubs and events.

grandchildren.

CORYDON LOWDE, son

Caroline Anne Florence Kenny (Arthur, 1956) When Caroline looked back at her Somerville years, she recalled much music, the pleasure of delving into the past and learning how to construct an argument, Port Meadow and the Oxford countryside. But her sharpest memory was of Sputnik going over in 1957 – evidence of her wide horizons. Descended from Colonial Office Arthurs on her father’s side and Foreign Office Spring-Rices on her mother’s, she was certainly well-travelled by the time she reached Oxford. Born in London in 1937, she had spent her infancy in Cyprus, escaped to South Africa in the war with her beloved Spring-Rice grandmother and younger brother Tom, and then made a highly dangerous journey back

to Britain. After the war, she returned to Cyprus for an idyllic childhood, roaming freely and skiing down Mount Olympus. While she was at Somerville her father was appointed Governor of the Bahamas. She spent her summers there with her parents, reappearing with amusing stories and Fats Waller records. Her family base in London was the roomy house known as the Ricery (from the Spring-Rice family), with open door for her friends. After graduating, Caroline spent a memorable year in the Bahamas and then five years at Glyndebourne, working front of house. There she met the musician Courtney Kenny, who was on the music staff, and they married in 1972. Their house in London was a busy centre of music teaching and performance – keyboard and voice. After training at Goldsmiths Caroline taught music with great enjoyment and success at Michael Faraday School in South London. As an imaginative, kind, and yet formidable person she knew how to bring out the best in the children, putting on shows, taking them to concerts, and even on camping trips. The birth of her son Francis transformed her life, and from then on her special qualities were needed at home. After a year in Ireland looking after Courtney’s mother, the Kennys moved to Sussex, to the top floor of the family house at Burwash occupied by Caroline’s brother. After thirteen years there Caroline, Courtney and Francis (always a trio) bought their own house, further along the beautiful sunny valley. They finally had central heating, and a sweep of fruit, vegetables and flowers – Caroline, like her father, was a dedicated gardener. Caroline and Courtney filled their house with books and music. They had an unusually wide circle of cousins and friends, and all were welcome for delicious meals, conviviality, and laughter. They were also, with Francis, key figures in local Sussex life, at Etchingham church, at Christmas plays, at village suppers, at concerts and choir rehearsals in their house. Caroline was often on the move – to visit family in Scotland and Ireland, to the Mediterranean, and North America. Even after Courtney became dependent on a wheelchair the indomitable trio managed to travel as energetically as ever, up and down to London by train, to Ohio and Wexford for opera festivals (anything but Wagner for Caroline) and always to Glyndebourne. There was one last trip for Caroline, when she was invited to Ottawa to give the address at the opening of the memorial to her very distinguished grandfather Cecil Spring-Rice, ambassador and poet. He is now best known as the author of ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, and Caroline had been kept very busy correcting fanciful theories about its meaning. Caroline, asthmatic from childhood, eventually developed emphysema. It took her in and out of hospital for the last couple of years before she died, lucid to the end. Her funeral was held in the fascinatingly historic Etchingham church: ancient, freezing cold, and bright with December sunshine. Just as she would have wished, it was crammed with family and friends. FRANCES WALSH (1956)

JANET TRELOAR

Janet Quintrell Treloar (1958) Somerville played a very large part in the life of Janet Treloar, starting with Dame Janet Vaughan and concluding with another Janet, Baroness Royall. Janet came up in 1958. She was naturally gifted with abilities to see and describe geopolitical situations and was awarded a place on the strength of her essay about the Eighth Army in the Rhineland. Arriving in Oxford she reignited a relationship, begun in Cornwall, with a geology undergraduate at Corpus Christi college, Richard Hardman. Early in 1960, mid-way through her second year reading geography, she became pregnant. This meant being sent down for breaching the rules. Janet plucked up her courage to see Dame Janet Vaughan (Principal 1945–1967). This was a lifechanging moment; she could keep the child on condition no one must know. Tamsyn was born in October and two weeks later Janet commenced her final year at Oxford. Janet was an artist and was blessed with being a brilliant draughtswoman and colourist. It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a day that went by that she hadn’t drawn or painted at least once. Her favourite medium became watercolours and she pushed that medium as far as she could. Many years after leaving Oxford she was invited to Russia to visit the site of the battle for Stalingrad in 1944. She was hugely moved by the sacrifices that Russian people had made to resist the Nazi threat. When she got to Stalingrad (now Volgograd) she went down on her knees and dropped her entire watercolour pad into the River Volga. She grabbed soil from the

bank and rubbed it over the surface of the sheet of paper. This was in freezing temperatures and very soon the water turned to ice. After Oxford, Janet’s expatriate married life took her to Libya, Kuwait, and Colombia in the 1960s and Norway (1970s). She immersed herself into these countries’ cultures, something that had a profound and lasting effect. After four children and happy years raising her family, Janet returned to her academic roots. Remembering a trip to France from her early twenties, she started a series of paintings based on the Romanesque arch. This project took some fifteen years, taking her across Europe from Croatia to Spain and Provence to Norway. Her project title ‘A common language for Europe’ carried the wish for an understanding that the political ties of Europe were already underpinned by our common European heritage through the Romanesque arch. Her next theme was suggested by a former US journalist who had been based in Moscow: Russia’s ‘Hero Cities’. This started a series of paintings around the Russian sacrifice during what Russians call the ‘Great Patriotic War’, in which 26 million Russian people died. Her geopolitical antennae still at work, she was received by the Russian Ambassador with open arms and with an invitation to exhibit at the Russian Embassy in London. The evening was a great success for Anglo-Russian friendship and for remembering the great solidarity between Britain and Russia at the time of crisis in the Second World War. Further exhibitions followed and culminated in an award from President Putin of the Russian Honorary Silver Order for services to Anglo-Russia relations. Her Russian work developed into an interest in Anna Akhmatova, widely regarded as the heart of Russia’s poetic soul. Janet was invited to be artist-in-residence at the Anna Akhmatova Memorial Museum, St Petersburg, followed by an exhibition at Pushkin House, London. Through this interest she made the connexion to Isaiah Berlin. He and Akhmatova met and established a mutual respect and admiration. In 1965 Akhmatova paid a visit to Oxford and met Berlin for the final time. Akhmatova’s remark, ‘I see my bird lives in a gilded cage’ made apropos Berlin’s life at All Souls, is what Janet interpreted as the pivotal spur for Berlin becoming the founding President of Wolfson College in 1966, with all the risk that that entailed. And so our circle is nearly complete, because alongside Berlin as one of the three inaugural trustees of Wolfson College was Dame Janet Vaughan. When the opportunity came for Janet to meet Baroness Royall there was an instant meeting of minds, and for Janet, at what turned out to be the end of her life, a wonderful recognition from the Principal, and college, that her life, which had begun in such difficult circumstances but with kindness and tolerance, had received the recognition that she had always hoped for. On 10 June 2018 Janet exhibited at Wolfson College with ‘An Exhibition of Paintings of Fountain House, St Petersburg – where Anna Akhmatova was living when she met Isiah Berlin in 1945’. The exhibition was opened by Baroness Royall. Janet donated a sum of money to Somerville to create the Janet Treloar Anna Akhmatova Travel Grant for undergraduates. One of Janet’s pictures is featured in Somerville’s anniversary book Somerville 140.

A PAINTING BY JANET TRELOAR

Janet was elected a Fellow of the Royal Watercolour Society and served as Vice-President. She is survived by her husband John Hale-White and her four children, Tamsyn, Paul, Alice and Arthur. PAUL HARDMAN, son Reproductions of Janet’s watercolours can be found in the online Commemoration booklet on the College website.

Elizabeth Patricia Goulding (1960) Elizabeth loved poetry and literature. She believed that language provides the liaison of minds across time. She was born in New Zealand in 1938. Her mother Nona was a hospital almoner. Her father Arthur, a magistrate, had won a Military Cross in World War I. Elizabeth was Head Girl at Chilton Saint James School, from which she won a prestigious National Scholarship enabling her to study for an arts degree at Victoria University. There she won scholarships to study at Oxford. Air travel being a rarity in 1960, Elizabeth enjoyed the monthlong voyage from New Zealand via the Panama Canal to the UK on the ship Rangitane with other postgraduate students travelling to universities in Europe. In London her godmother Amy Kane introduced her to the joys of live theatre. Oxford was a bit of a shock. At first Elizabeth was lonely, feeling overwhelmed by the mix of talented students with different ideas, aspirations and educational backgrounds. However, she lived in college and as she settled down to

ELIZABETH GOULDING

NINA CARTWRIGHT

study hard she made many lifelong friends. She enjoyed theatre, debates at the Oxford Union and riding at the Oxford Horsemanship Club. She learned to punt. At Somerville Dame Janet Vaughan and Dr Enid Starkie, who tutored her in French studies, proved inspirational. Elizabeth was thrilled to spend time in Paris staying with the de Praingy family, contacts she maintained for life. Her parents and sister came to the UK and the family travelled together extensively.

playing happily in the garden only two hours earlier. Although Elizabeth never knew of this, it seems fitting such close companions were linked in death. As Jacques Body recently suggested, Giraudoux would surely have turned this into a short story in La France Sentimentale.

She worked in London as a translator at Shell but was recruited to teach at Otago University where she became Head of the Department of French Language and Literature. Her achievements there were recognised by the French Government which made her a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1992.

Nina Valerie Cartwright (Bearman, 1961)

Elizabeth studied for her French doctorate under the direction of the eminent scholar Professor Jacques Body, Président de l’université de Tours. Jean-Pierre Giraudoux, the son of Jean Giraudoux, attended Elizabeth’s successful defence of her thesis on ‘Le “Motif” de la Communication dans les premiers ouvrages et dans les romans de Jean Giraudoux’. Elizabeth was an editor of the Gallimard Pléiade edition of Combat avec l’ange. She was a member of the Société Internationale des Études Giralduciennes (SIEG), publishing papers from conferences in Tours, Bursa, Cusset, Montreal, Aleppo, ParisSorbonne, Fez and Madrid. In retirement she contributed to the Dictionnaire Jean Giraudoux, followed tennis and was a keen fan of Roger Federer. In August 2019 Elizabeth was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A strange thing happened the day before she died. Her beautiful Yorkshire Terrier Dexa died unexpectedly. Her sister was shocked to find him dead on the doorstep having left him

AILSA GOULDING, sister, and SONIA SPURDLE (1961)

Nina was born in Lambeth on 7 August 1937 to Lilian, a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, and Edward Bearman, a boat-builder. During the Second World War Nina was evacuated from Chelsea to Oxford and the West Country, and then, after thriving at boarding school and the Lycée de Londres, Nina completed her Advanced level GCSEs at the then Westminster College of Commerce. A powerful influence on her childhood was her ‘Uncle E’ (Ernest Kenton), who took Nina on an eventful tour of France. As a child Nina developed a love of the French language, foreign travel and sunny climes that never left her. Nina was an energetic and vibrant woman who threw herself into whatever she did with commitment. She took up ice skating as a child in London and became a professional ice dancer, touring India and Japan in 1958-59 with Holiday on Ice. It was while on tour in New Delhi that she met her husband Michael, whom she married in 1962. They moved to Park Town, Oxford and then six months after the birth of their first

child Christopher to 1 Winchester Road, which remains their family home. Never one to rest, Nina simultaneously completed her medical studies and her family with sons Giles and Nick. Nina studied for her first degree in medicine at UCL from 1961, completing her MBBS in 1966 at Somerville. After working as a house officer at the then Cowley Road Hospital, she went on to become a GP at the Wolvercote surgery, where she was the local doctor for thirty years until her retirement in 2002, and where she is still remembered fondly. Nina was a prolific and enthusiastic gardener and won several ‘Oxford in Bloom’ prizes at her surgery. In spite of a busy family and demanding professional life, she still found time to pursue her interests in languages and in sport, playing club badminton and tennis competitively, as well as ice dancing, a life-long passion; she was a stalwart member of the Oxford Ice Dance Club and won a steady stream of medals. For a few weeks each summer in the early 1970s Nina even found time for It’s a Knockout, initially representing Bicester locally and then Great Britain in Italy in 1973. At home Nina was a loving wife and mother and a generous and welcoming host. She lived her whole life with unrelenting enthusiasm and joie de vivre and is greatly missed by all her friends and family.

GABY CHARING

CHRISTOPHER CARTWRIGHT

Gaby Charing (1962) Gaby was born on 6 May 1944 and went to King Alfred’s School in North London. Her parents wanted an educational environment for their bright, independent daughter that would give her a better experience than her father had as a Jewish boy in a grammar school. Gaby went up to Somerville to read PPE. She was awarded an exhibition but felt that she had missed out on a scholarship because she made a joke at her interview which was met with disapproval. Being gay in the 1960s was hard; there was little pastoral support and Gaby suffered. She always remembered Philippa Foot with great affection and spoke at her Somerville memorial. Gaby went to SOAS to study Linguistics and worked in publishing and at NCCL as a caseworker. She trained as a solicitor and went on to specialise in childcare, employment and discrimination law. Her final job was as a policy advisor at the Law Society. Gaby was a woman not just of passionately held and articulately expressed views, but of action, in a myriad of contexts, for the communal good. A member of the Gay Liberation Front in the UK in the 1970s, her support of a variety of LGBTQ causes was a constant through her life. She met and inspired many people along the way, and her work championing the pursuit of a more fair and equal society has played a large part in the progress that our community has made to date. Gaby’s activism did not stop on her retirement. She went on to work within the NHS in patient representation, continuing to

speak out for inclusion and against discrimination and prejudice. Gaby joked that she would like to be remembered as someone ‘noted for the sweetness of her disposition’, but described herself, probably more accurately, in her Twitter profile as ‘opinionated, funny, kind and grumpy’. Gaby was always interested in people and sought out that personal connection. In the long hours of the night when she was an inpatient, Gaby would ask staff about their training and their families. She always remembered their names and the names of their children. It was part of her fascination with what drives and motivates people. And people remembered her and often commented on the strength of our relationship. We have two adoptive daughters – women who have invited us into a parental role in their lives: Gracey Morgan and Claire Berlinski, and Gaby was immensely proud of both of them. Claire remembers Gaby as ‘a lion. Her mind remained razorsharp until the end. She never succumbed to self-pity. She faced death with an extraordinary dignity. She wished, I know, to be remembered for that, and I will never forget it. She was truly strong. Just plain courageous.’ Gaby always described her mother as someone with great strength and fortitude, but it wasn’t until her own illness that Gaby came to understand how strong and resilient she herself was, and it was a surprise and a comfort to her. Gaby loved to talk. She had an insatiable interest in so many things and read all the time. At St Christopher’s Hospice they ask patients to fill in a short profile so staff can see what is important to them; Gaby’s comments: ‘What people appreciate about me: opinionated, funny, kind, ethical without being a prig, quite wise.

‘What is important to me: doing the right thing, not being a prig, behaving with dignity. ‘How to support me: shut me up! listen to me! I know the combination is hard!’ … and the world will be a quieter and less vibrant place now she is gone. Gaby died aged 76 at St Christopher’s, after living for seven years with rectal cancer. We prepared for this day by writing a paper together: Day, Elizabeth and Charing, Gaby (2018) ‘Living with Dying and Bereavement’, Murmurations 1(2), 2739 https://doi.org/10.28963/1.2.4 LIZ DAY, partner

Mary Ann Poulter (Smallbone, 1965) Ann was born on 2 February 1946 in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. The only child of a widowed mother, her friends at the time felt that she had a rather solitary childhood but nevertheless had a loving and supportive extended family. Ann had her schooling at St Albans High School and later at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. From there she won an exhibition to Somerville to read Modern Languages and came up to read Italian in 1965. She had been a musician throughout her school days and would like to have read music but was persuaded that Modern Languages offered better career prospects. After a brief stint in Perugia in Italy and in Switzerland with relatives, she came up to Oxford where she made many life-long friends. Until recently, Ann would meet for lunch once a year with her contemporary Modern Languages students from Somerville. On going down from Oxford, Ann signed up for a graduate traineeship with the National Coal Board. There she acquired varied experience, including going down a mine. While at the Coal Board, she developed an interest in housing law, and after a few years decided to follow a career in the law. She then decided to qualify as a solicitor at her own expense and joined a City firm as a trainee where she met her future husband Alan. Having decided to get married, Ann and Alan looked for posts outside London and decided on Oxford when Alan was offered a job there. Ann subsequently took a job in another local firm and they moved to Oxford in 1974. Ann and Alan had five children who all grew up in their home in South Oxford. The demands of motherhood meant that Ann had to give up her job in the law but she later joined the University Disability Office as a Disability Adviser and found real satisfaction in that role until her retirement. Despite her other responsibilities, Ann was a tireless charityworker and gave much time and effort to the Gatehouse, a charity for homeless people in Oxford, and was instrumental in getting the Oxford Food Bank (of which she later served as a trustee) off the ground. She also made a huge contribution to the South Oxford Adventure Playground, a highly successful play-scheme enjoyed by children from all over the city. Other charities which she supported by active participation in their work were Christians Against Poverty and Asylum Welcome.

MARY ANN POULTER

Always active in the community, Ann helped to form the first parent-teacher association at her children’s school and for many years took part in the organisation of the Oxford Music Festival. Throughout her time in South Oxford, Ann was a devoted member of St Matthew’s church. In the final weeks of her life, Ann suffered from secondary breast cancer and she died of a heart attack on 26 March 2020. She led a full and active life and will be greatly missed by her family and many friends. ALAN POULTER

Judith Gray (1970) Judith Gray sadly died on 3 June 2020 in France. Tragically a fire broke out in her kitchen, and despite being rescued by two brave young French men, she died from the effects of smoke inhalation, having had COPD for many years. Judith was born on 7 May 1952 in Manchester, the youngest of five children. As a young child she was very sociable, loved visiting friends, and having them round to tea. Her family moved to Woking, but sadly her father, a GP, was killed in a road accident when she was ten years old. He eldest sister Rosemary became her mother figure to whom she was very close. Despite this trauma, she focused on her schooling, being bright and intelligent, passing her 11-plus to attend Woking Grammar School. She was encouraged to apply for Oxford and achieved a place to read History at Somerville in 1970.

She was unsure what to expect but soon developed a longlasting friendship and links with those in her tutorials, Christabel Shawcross, Elizabeth Black and Elizabeth Clough. All moved out to share a flat in their second year. Life was lived to the full; even more so with the arrival of Judith’s guitar-playing brother Nick, for a few days which turned into a year. She studied and played hard, but did find the discipline of an Agatha Ramm tutorial somewhat challenging to her free spirit, always losing debates over unmoveable deadlines! She achieved a second class degree in Modern History. She then trained to be a social worker in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, gaining a certificate of Social Work from London University. Three years later, she moved to Leeds, where she married. She much enjoyed social work, working with families and adolescents, but found the increasing bureaucratisation of social services too stifling; with the breakdown of her marriage she decided on a life change, moving to France in the early1980s. There she trained to teach English as a Foreign Language to business students. She bought a small cottage in the Rambouillet countryside and successfully bred Cairn Terrier dogs. Unfortunately, she had always smoked heavily and this led to her contracting COPD, leaving her dependent on oxygen for the rest of her life. As a result, she became increasingly isolated, unable to make annual trips back to England. Her life was made more difficult with the recent death of her beloved sister Rosemary, but fortunately her sister Cheryl took on the weekly contact. She continued giving free English lessons, some pupils remaining until the end of her life. She was very anxious about the impact of Brexit and the prospect of no deal, uncertain about the bureaucracy enabling her to remain living as a French citizen. She had loved living in the French countryside, attending dog shows, meeting friends, enjoying good French cuisine and listening to music. She will be sorely missed by her sister Cheryl and friends in England. CHRISTABEL SHAWCROSS (1970)

Susan Deborah (Debbie) Sander (1970) Debbie was born in Taunton, Somerset, in 1952 and grew up in West Sussex. At eight years old, family tragedy meant that she had to step up and care for herself and her younger sister, Ruth. Despite this challenge, Debbie made her way to grammar school where she dreamed of studying at Oxford. She achieved this dream, going up to Somerville College to read Physiological Sciences. On leaving Oxford, Debbie quickly established the two themes that would be central to her life: education and helping the most vulnerable. First, she went to London to train to be a teacher. Then she moved to rural Nigeria, to work with children growing up in extremely challenging conditions. At university she had campaigned passionately against Apartheid laws in South Africa. The years she spent in Nigeria, and the work she did more recently in Tanzania, were part of a lifelong desire to

JUDITH GRAY

see equality between Africa and the rest of the world, and to fight racism at home in Britain. Moving back to Britain, Debbie spent much of her twenties working in London and around the world for the Commonwealth Institute, now part of the British Council. Part of her job was to seek out brilliant young artists, musicians and writers from around the Commonwealth and take them into state schools across the UK. Among the artists she discovered was the writer John Agard, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Debbie wasn’t prepared to accept injustice in any form. When she was fired as a teacher for taking ‘too much’ sick leave for her cancer treatments, not only did she take the school to court and win, but she also helped to change the law. It is now illegal to sack somebody with a long-term illness. Alongside her job, and raising daughters Hannah and Naomi, she was on the board of hospitals in Reading and Somerset. She stood for parliament several times, giving up huge time and energy to take on Liam Fox in his entirely safe Somerset seat, motivated by her belief in the importance of giving a voice to the underrepresented. She chaired the local Fabian Society, hosted a large Christmas Eve party every year, and still found time to listen to The Archers every day. Debbie would later retrain as an Educational Psychologist and specialise in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, working with children and teenagers. A fitting career change, as Debbie was always there to listen and help friends and family. She was generous with her time. Neighbours came to her for advice. Past students called her up to thank her for helping them get to university against the odds. Friends spent hours on the

DEBBIE SANDER

VICTORIA BRAITHWAITE

telephone with her, discussing new partners, new jobs, new political chaos.

citations to her work being to five key articles on pain in fish. Other keywords that highlight her scholarly contributions are consciousness, cognition stress and navigation.

Debbie died of breast cancer on 16 May 2019 aged 67. She will be greatly missed. HANNAH SANDER, daughter

Victoria Anne Braithwaite (1985) Born in 1967 in Bradford Royal Infirmary, Victoria was the sixth of seven children of June and Alan Braithwaite. Having older brothers, an older sister and a younger brother she was an astute observer of behaviour. Her formal learning began in earnest at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School, strongly guided by the school motto ‘Do this’ (Hoc age) … and she did. She came to Somerville in 1985, graduating in Zoology in 1989. She embarked straight away on a DPhil project about pigeon navigation and she defended her thesis in 1993. Victoria’s attention moved from pigeons to salmon for postdoctoral work at the University of Glasgow between 1993 and 1995, while the nature of her enquiries continued on the theme of spatial learning and navigation. Sensory information processing in animals was to be a strong thread in her subsequent studies and fish were never far away. In 1995 Victoria took up a lectureship in Edinburgh where the learned behaviours of more fish, initially sticklebacks and later trout, and other vertebrates were the focus of her attention. By 2003 she had begun questioning the generally accepted view that fish did not have the capacity to feel pain. This was to become a defining topic of her scientific legacy with 90% of

After twelve years in Edinburgh Victoria moved to Penn State, taking her young sons with their soft Scottish accents to be reformed with North Atlantic vowels. Here she taught courses on animal behaviour and welfare alongside more enquiries into environmental influences on cognition in fish raised in fisheries. In 2010 she addressed the question ‘Do fish feel pain?’ in an OUP book with that title, presenting the arguments so that readers might arrive at their own conclusions. In the preface she records her international network of collaborators – a web of scholarship where her pioneering work will be long remembered. It was just as Victoria was preparing to return to Berlin to become the Director of the IGB Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries that her plans were interrupted by a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She kept it at bay while she came to terms with the knowledge that she would be denied the opportunity to take up that prestigious role. She died on 30 September 2019. Victoria has been honoured with a visiting professorship at Bergen, fellowships of the Royal Institute of Navigation, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Linnean Society, and a Fisheries Society of the British Isles medal, which along with her published works provide a lasting testimony to her professional life. NICHOLAS BRAITHWAITE

Academic Report 2019-20 This list is accurate at the time of print and some exam results may be released after this date. Graduates with an * after their names completed in 2018/19, but their results were released after going to print, and are therefore included here.

Examination Results

Class II.I

UNDERGRADUATE RESULTS Ancient and Modern History Class II.I Class I

Class II.I

Class I

Class II.I

Class I

Haowei Elvis Zhang

Class II.I

Beatrice Kang Jemima Mary Kearney Angela Trajkovska

Max Gwilliam Joseph Heidrich

Class II.II

Alexandra Drewe Edwin Silverthorne

English Language and Literature Georgia Edgley Jessamy Gather Sophie Kilminster Hannah Patient Rosalind Perrett Oliver Quinn Rosie Sourbut James Tytko

Experimental Psychology Elena Eliseeva

History Class I

Edward Kandel Henry Raikes

Katie Bastiman Joseph Rattue

Class II.I

Eve Althaus Alice Hadley Patrick Middleton Ella Shaw

Harry Goaman Barnaby Harrison Charles Keen Alexandre Nash

Molecular and Cellular Biology (MBioChem) Class I

Mark Chin Alyssa Crabb

Class II.I

Penny Sherlock

Music Class I

Max Neale

Class II.I

Nadia Buckingham

Philosophy, Politics and Economics Class I

Yinni Hu

Class II.I

Viktor Birkfeldt Samuel Carson Christopher Ciraolo Hugo Lees Agatha Lim Daniel Park Alexander Watson Eilidh Wilson Junseo Yoon

Stratton Hibbs

Mathematics (MMath) Class II.I

Grant Cox-sehmi

Class II.I

Class I

Literae Humaniores Class II.I

Benjamin Barclay Jun Liu Alistair Wakelin

Olivia Creber

Jurisprudence

Hannah Asiki Jessica Crompton Lily Latimer Smith Tommy Pitcher

Class I

Class II.I

History and Modern Languages

Tsz Chiu Wanda Criswell Olivia Shovlin

Engineering Science (MEng)

Class I

Rohan Radia Cameron Seymour

Class I

Computer Science (MCompSci) Class I

Class II.I

Anna Gee Celia Hanna Cecilia Jay Phoebe Thornhill

Chemistry (MChem)

Modern Languages

History and Economics

Harry Bollands

Biological Sciences

Leonardo Ackerman Katie Inch Anna Jones Finley Willits

Richard Lo Yash Dhimant Shah

Mathematics and Computer Science Class I

Ivo Maffei Frederik Robinson

Mathematics and Philosophy (MMathPhil) Class I

Marie Ducroizet-boitaud

Mathematics and Statistics Class II.I

Louis De mendonca

Medical Sciences Class I

Class II.I

Physics (MPhys) Class I

Ishraq Irteza Thomas Sandnes

Class II.I

Kyungmin Kim

Class II.II

Yuchen Guo

Psychology and Philosophy (MPhysPhil) Class I

Jonathan Stark

Isheeta Arora Jessica Mendall Gerda Mickute Joseph Salf

Class II.I

Meryen Arik

Charles Sneddon

Class II.I

Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics (PPL) Nonoka Sugawara

Medicine – Clinical Pass

Stavros Dimitriadis Miranda Rogers

Medicine – Graduate Entry Pass

Ellie Chen Jonathan Phillips Aaron Simpson

All students are offered the choice, at the start of their course, of opting out of any public list that the University or College may produce. There are therefore the following results to announce, without reference to subject or name: Class I = 5, Class II.I = 15, Class III = 1 Distinction = 1, Pass = 1

POSTGRADUATE RESULTS Bachelor of Civil Law Distinction

Ping kan Kwan

Merit

Madhavi Singh

Pass

Priya Garg

Diploma in Legal Studies Distinction

Cagla Dede

Master of Business Administration (MBA) Pass

Brendon Ferreira* Miha Grzina* Katharina Ottmann* Isadora Santos De Oliveira* Jing Xun Tan*

Modern South Asian Studies Merit

Pharmacology Merit

Christopher Whiteman*

Pass

Yue Zhang*

Pass

Madison Eisler*

Environmental Change and Management Distinction

Madeleine Millington- Drake*

Merit

Jillian Leigh Neuberger*

History of Science, Medicine and Technology Pass

Dianne McMullin*

Integrated Immunology Pass

David Ahern* Malak Alshaikhali*

Law and Finance Merit

Yu Xing

Learning and Teaching Pass

Jin Ying*

Psychological Research Distinction

Madison Milne-Ives*

Merit

Sam Webb*

Sleep Medicine Pass

Distinction

Leo Smith*

Pass

Khai Beng Chong* Olga Runcie*

Statistical Science Distinction

Pass

Yu-Xian Huang

Pass

Kamila Akhmedjanova

Law (by Research) Aradhana Cherupara Vadekkethil Amy Gregg

Eleanor Newman

Doctor of Philosophy: Auto Intelligent Machines and Systems (EPSRC CDT) Kevin Judd

Biomedical Imaging (EPSRC & MRC CDT) Vaanathi Sundaresan

Chemistry Xuejian Zhang

Clinical Neuroscience James Varley*

Experimental Psychology Alexander Fraser

History Frances Eileen O’Morchoe

Mathematics Yixuan Wang Xuejian Wang

Medieval and Modern Languages Rebecca Bowen

Creative Writing Distinction

Katherine Meeham*

Pass

Anna Stover*

Diplomatic Studies Merit

Nader Abbasi*

Pass

Amal Afifi*

English

Distinction

Yiwen Hao

Pass

Chenxu You

Pass

Ningyuan Chen* Anna Maria Riera Escandell*

Amina Bouchafaa*

Master of Studies: Classical Archaeology

Pass

Julie Alexander-Cooper* Chi Hung Au* Aditya Bhargava* Emma Gale* Hong Juan Han* Angela O'Donovan- Coholan* Mohammed Vellam Vettintavida*

Sleep Medicine (PGDip conversion)

Mathematical and Computational Finance

Mathematical Modelling & Scientific Computing

Merit

Sara Nahon

Ming Zhe Choong* Sarah Mourney*

Master of Science Clinical Embryology

General Linguistics and Comparative Philology

Psychiatry (by Research)

Master of Public Policy Distinction

Neha Chaudhary* Aastha Tyagi*

Imogen Thomas

Joanna Raisbeck

Music Alice Barron

Physics Zahra Gomes Sabrina Sterzl

Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics Daria Svistunova

Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics Joel Greenbaum

Master of Philosophy Economics Pass

Sonan Memon

Awards to Undergraduate, Graduate and Postgraduate Students All students are asked to give their consent to their awards being listed in this publication. A number of scholarships and exhibitions have been awarded for which this consent has not been obtained, these have been listed without reference to subject or name.

Barraclough Scholarship Ivo Maffei (Mathematics and Computer Science), 1 Barraclough Scholarship

De Zouche Scholarship

Scourse Scholarship

Anna Gee (Biological Sciences), Celia Hanna (Biological Sciences), Cecilia Jay (Biological Sciences), 1 De Zouche Scholarship

Anurag Choksey (Medicine - Preclinical)

Dukinfield Darbishire Scholarship Tom Ashton-Key (Physics), Matt Jennings (Physics), Chuqiao Lin (Physics), Joseph Lord (Physics), Kieran Moore (Physics), Vuk Radovic (Physics), Dorcas Chua (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics), 1 Dukinfield Darbishire Scholarship

Dukinfield Darbishire Exhibition Beilby Scholarship Josh Stott (Biochemistry), Will Norton (Biological Sciences), Ajay Patel (Biological Sciences), Natalie Said (Biological Sciences), Albert Tremlett (Biological Sciences), Hannah Asiki (Chemistry), Jess Crompton (Chemistry), Dan Cubbin (Chemistry), Will Hadley (Chemistry), Lily Latimer Smith (Chemistry), Dorian Gabriel Muntean (Chemistry), Tommy Pitcher (Chemistry), Michal Pychtin (Chemistry)

Beilby Exhibition Ephraem Tan (Chemistry)

Bryant Exhibition 1 Bryant Exhibition

Bull and Bull Scholarship Rebekah Cohen (English Language and Literature)

Bull and Bull Exhibition Lucy Bannatyne (Classics), Matthew Pugh (Classics)

Cooper Exhibition Phoebe Hyun (Ancient and Modern History)

2 Dukinfield Darbishire Exhibitions

Scourse Exhibition Maya Mellor (Medicine - Preclinical), Gerda Mickute (Medicine - Preclinical)

Shaw Lefevre Scholarship Alastair Flynn (Computer Science), Alex Drewe (Engineering Science), Sophie Kuang (Engineering Science), Jun Liu (Engineering Science), Ming Ow (Engineering Science), Devang Sehgal (Engineering Science), Eleanor Thompson (Engineering Science), Christopher Wheeler (Engineering Science), Sam Warburton (Law), Joel Summerfield (Mathematics), Ramona Deaconu (Mathematics and Statistics), 4 Shaw Lefevre Scholarships

Endowment Fund Scholarship Shah Moore (Experimental Psychology), Ewan Connell (History), Selina Schoelles (History)

Endowment Fund Exhibition Ned Ashcroft (History), Arthur Eastwood (History), Hazel Ferguson (History), Katie Inch (History), Rebecca Keddie (History), Emily Louise (History), Grace Taylor-West (History and Modern Languages), 1 Endowment Fund Exhibition

Ginsburg Scholarship Jessica Mendall (Medicine - Preclinical), 1 Ginsburg Scholarship

Haynes Scholarship Ellie Cooper (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Telemi Emmanuel-Aina (Philosophy, Politics and Economics)

Haynes Exhibition Martha Davies (English and Modern Languages), Zoe Bray (Modern Languages), Jack Mullis (Modern Languages), Asher Sandbach (Modern Languages and Linguistics), 1 Haynes Exhibition

Shaw Lefevre Exhibition Mia Rothwell (History), Lore Sturmy (History), Morgan Border (History and Economics), Benjamin Kotlov (Mathematics), Richard Lo (Mathematics), Benedek Pap (Mathematics)

Exam Prizes to Undergraduates and Graduates Accurate at the time of print. * indicates Awarded in 2018-19 after going to print, and therefore included here.

Archibald Jackson Prize (for Graduates who achieve a Distinction in examinations) Ping Kan Kwan (Civil Law), Maddie Millington-Drake (Environmental Change and Management), Pat Snidvongs (General Linguistics and Comparative Philology), Yiwen Hao (Mathematical and Computational Finance), Madison Milne-Ives (Psychological Research), Ming Zhe Choong (Public Policy), Sarah Mourney (Public Policy), Charlotte Finegold (Refugee and Forced Migration Studies), Leo Smith (Sleep Medicine), Amina Bouchafaa (Statistical Science), 2 Archibald Jackson Prizes

Mary Somerville Prizes (for Undergraduates who achieve a First or Distinction in the Final Honour School examinations) Anna Gee (Biological Sciences), Celia Hanna (Biological Sciences), Cecilia Jay, (Biological Sciences), Jamie Lucas (Biological Sciences), Hannah Asiki (Chemistry), Jess Crompton (Chemistry), Lily Latimer Smith (Chemistry), Tommy Pitcher (Chemistry), Grant Cox-Sehmi (Computer Science), Jun Liu (Engineering Science), Elena Eliseeva (Experimental Psychology), Hazel Ferguson (History), Emily Louise (History), Olivia Creber (History and Modern Languages) Elvis Zhang (Law), Cagla Dede (Legal Studies), Ivo Maffei (Mathematics and Computer Science), Jessica Mendall (Medicine Preclinical), Gerda Mickute (Medicine - Preclinical) Joseph Salf (Medicine Preclinical), Katie Bastiman (Modern Languages), Joe Rattue (Modern Languages), Alyssa Crabb (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry), Yinni Hu (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Ishraq Irteza (Physics), 15 Mary Somerville Prizes

Margaret Irene Seymour Music Award Brigitte Wear (Biological Sciences), Harmony Ouyang (Classics), Edward Ashcroft (History), Lauren Keane (Modern Languages and Linguistics), Trina Banerjee (Music), Chloe Green (Music), 1 Margaret Irene Seymour Music Award

Travel Awards The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on students' travel plans for the spring and summer of 2020. A full list of travel awards will therefore be included in the 2020-21 College Report.

Other Somerville Awards Alyson Bailes Prize Selina Schoelles (History)

Cerrie Hughes Prize College Prizes (for Undergraduates who achieve a First, Distinction or average of at least 70% in all examinations other than the Final Honour School) Althea Sovani (Classics with Oriental Studies), Alastair Flynn (Computer Science), Sophie Kuang (Engineering Science), Ming Ow (Engineering Science), Eleanor Thompson (Engineering Science), David Jung (Mathematics), Benjamin Kotlov (Mathematics), Joel Summerfield (Mathematics), Ramona Deaconu, (Mathematics and Statistics), Johannes Keil (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics), Migara Kumarasinghe (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics), Lucy Psaila (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics), 1 College Prize

Postgraduate Awards

Rebekah Cohen (English Language and Literature)

Daphne Robinson Award Alice Horsman Scholarship Maria Adebisi (English Language and Literature 2014), William Andrews (History and Modern Languages 2015), Isobel Bandurek (Biological Sciences 2006), Stefano Domingues de Castro Pachi (Creative Writing 2014), Rowan Lyster (Modern Languages and Linguistics 2011), Maia Perraudeau (Law with Law Studies in Europe 2013), 1 Alice Horsman Scholarship

Music Awards

Joseph Heidrich (Chemistry), Ryuki Nishikawa (Chemistry), Nadia Awad (History)

Margaret Kohl Prize Jack Mullis (Modern Languages)

Medical Fund Scholarship Aaron Henry (Medicine - Clinical), Huiyuan Xiao (Medicine - Graduate Entry)

Pat Harris Award

Chloe and Helen Morton Choral Scholarships

Natasha Oughton (Philosophy), Ellie Cooper (Philosophy, Politics and Economics)

Hannah Andrusier (Modern Languages), 1 Chloe and Helen Morton Choral Scholarship

Somerville Lawyers Group Prize Elvis Zhang (Law)

Sports and Wellbeing Student Award

Picture by John Cairns

Harry Goaman (Classics), Alastair Flynn (Computer Science), Kharthik Chakravarthy (Engineering Science), Eleanor Thompson (Engineering Science), Karen Wendt (Engineering Science), Leo Ackerman (History), Elizabeth McGowan (History and Modern Languages), Raphael Reinbold (Interdisciplinary Bioscience), Dimitar Lyubenov (Mathematics and Statistics), Aaron Henry (Medicine - Clinical), Lara Reed (Medicine - Clinical), Duncan Marsden (Medicine - Preclinical), Jessica Mendall (Medicine - Preclinical), Oliver Greaves, (Modern Languages), Alexander Brindle (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Vishal Aurora (Physics)

University and External awards Barbara Harriss-White Thesis Prize Modern South Asian Studies*, Chancellor’s Latin Prose Prize Classics, Department Prize Mathematical and Theoretical Physics*, Herbert Prize History*, Kolkhorst and Arteaga Exhibition in Spanish Modern Languages, Law Faculty Prize in International Law and Armed Conflict Civil Law*, Stephen Parkinson Prize in Linguistics Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics, Winter Williams Prize in International Economic Law (shared) Civil Law*

Miles Keat, King's College London Mathematics School

Ancient and Modern History

Anahy Mercado Zambrana, St Thomas More Catholic School

Sophia Maisashvili, Caterham School

Samuel Morley, Winchester College

Samuel McLoughlin, Lancaster Royal Grammar School

Jiale Wang, Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore

Biology

English and Modern Languages

Eloise Hedgecott, Prince Henrys High School

Zuleika Frost, Stroud High School

James Hubbard, Westminster School

English Language and Literature

Alice Penrose, Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Jay Brown, Roundhay School

Bethany Smith, Woking College

Joshua Lilley, Borden Grammar School

Emma Burberry, The King's School (the Cathedral School), Peterborough

James Walker, Radley College

Rosalyn Durham, King Edward VII School, Sheffield

Chemistry

Frederick Gordon Lennox, Eton College

Thomas Drayton, Dulwich College

Orla Lavery, Rathmore Grammar School, Belfast

Emily Haasz, Caterham School Jiaxi He, ULink College Guangzhou, China Weiyu Kan, Shanghai Guanghua College Fudan Campus, China Jiahan Zhao, Ulink College of Shanghai, China

Classical Archaeology and Ancient History

Cara Moran, Holy Family Catholic School and Sixth Form Elizabeth Perceval, St Philip Howard Catholic High School and Sixth Form Anna Roberts, Chesham Grammar School Lucy Thynne, Lady Margaret School

Emma Schutze, Berlin Brandenburg International School Victor Vallely, Manchester Grammar School Luca Webb, John Hampden Grammar School Sonia Zisman, Wycombe Abbey School, High Wycombe

History and Economics Nolan Whitcomb, Newington College

History and Modern Languages Katherine Dorkins, Oxford High School GDST

Jurisprudence Gill Berlad, Burnham Grammar School Tia Dabare, Hemel Hempstead School Jessica Dann, Winstanley College Wesley Ding, The SMIC Private School Geraint Hoggan, The Sixth Form College Farnborough Jaime Teo, Anglo-Chinese School (Independent)

Jurisprudence (with Law in Europe ) Finley Davis, Dr Challoner's Grammar School

Literae Humaniores

European and Middle Eastern Languages

Giuseppe Maurino, The London Oratory School

Lucas Jones, Royal Russell School

Giulia Mereghetti, Elizabeth Rickards Education Consultancy

Flora Smith, Oundle School

Experimental Psychology

Eileen Zoratti, Sir William Perkins's School

Classics and Oriental Studies

Ines Andrade Castro, European School, Brussels

Sophia Majzub, St Edward's School, Oxford

Mathematics

Lauren Kernan, Magdalen College School, Oxford

Caecilie Lotz, International School of Amsterdam

Classics and Modern Languages

Computer Science Charlie Buckley, Stretford Grammar School Alex Pay, Kings School, Grantham Kai Pischke, Tiffin School

Dip Legal Studies Cagla Dede, University of Leiden, Netherlands Carlo Poschke, Rheinische FriedrichWilhelms-Universitat Bonn, Germany

Engineering Science

Undergraduate Students Entering College

Luke Baynham, Wombourne High School

Tae Young Yun, Seoul International School

Adam Broomhead, Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood

History

Phoebe Daly-Jones, St Benedicts School Ealing

Nadia Awad, Heston Community School

Reuben Frost, Charters School

Devanshika Bajpai, Oakridge International School

Alexander Grey, The King's School (the Cathedral School), Peterborough

Reuben Cook, Canon Slade C of E School

Charles Kidd, Stamford Endowed Schools

Magdalena Kosciolek, Zespol Szkol Akademickich w Nowym Saczu, Poland

Andra Mircea, Unirea National College, Romania

Anna Lundqvist, Apply Online Overseas

Kitty Towler, Sharnbrook Academy

Daisy Murphy, Hills Road Sixth Form College

Mathematics and Computer Science

Romy Patrick, Bishop Thomas Grant School, London

River Newbury, Simon Langton School for Boys

Medicine - Graduate Entry

Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Oskar Schmidt-Hansen, The University of Oxford

Susannah Ames, Ranelagh School

William Thornton, The University of Oxford

Hannah Andrews, Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College

Huiyuan Xiao, The University of Oxford

Samuel Cowell, Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Medicine - Preclinical

Adeola Egunnike, Brampton Manor Academy

Kristin Hindmarch, City of Sunderland College

Hisham El Edrissi Reyahi, Jesmond Park Academy

Duncan Marsden, Ermysted's Grammar, Skipton

Ethan Meller, Watford Grammar School for Boys

Abigail Punt, Alleyn's School, Dulwich

Juin Khai Ong, Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore

Bilal Qureshi, Manchester Grammar School Robin Von Bonsdorff, Mattlidens Gymnasium, Finland

Modern Languages Emily Barber, Royal Latin School Sofia Justham Bello, Wimbledon High School Isobel McDonach, The Coopers' Company and Coborn School, Upminster Rosanna Suvini, St Marys School, Ascot Maya Szaniecki, Dame Alice Owen's School

Amy Roberts, Aylesbury High School Emer Shell, Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School

Music Trina Banerjee, Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) Chloe Green, Apply Online UK Franco Lopez, Queen Elizabeth High School, Carmarthen

Devaang Savla, Symbiosis International University, India

Physics

Lara Reed, The University of Oxford Nandana Syam, The University of Oxford

Calum Holker, St Paul's School, London Elizabeth Lloyd-Wilson, The Burgate School and Sixth Form John Pearce, Haileybury Turnford Joseph Spruce, Harvey Grammar School Tongyu Sun, Pennon Education Group Jacob Zohar, The Latymer School

Johannes Keil, Sächsisches Landesgymnasium Sankt Afra zu Meißen

Dulcie Havers, Truro and Penwith College

Ping Kan Kwan, University of Hong Kong

Corinne Barker, Brooksbank School

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry

Priya Garg, West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), India

Anushka Shah, Nottingham High School

Oliver Greaves, Bournemouth School

Lauren Keane, Redborne Upper School and Community College

Bachelor of Civil Law

Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery

Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics

Abigail Charlton, The Crypt School

Graduate Students Entering College

Kumaravidanalage Don Migara Kumarasinghe, Hampton School Lucy Psaila, Notting Hill & Ealing High School

Sarah Peters, The University of Oxford

DPhil Astrophysics Annabella Meech, The University of Warwick

DPhil Biochemistry Miguel Berbeira Santana, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain Suleyman Selim Cinaroglu, Not Listed

DPhil Condensed Matter Physics Siobhan Tobin, Australian National University

DPhil Engineering Science Yifeng Chen, The University of Oxford Jiayu Wang, The University of Nottingham Karen Wendt, Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine

DPhil English Katherine Mennis, The University of Cambridge

DPhil Experimental Psychology Mohen Zhang, Tsinghua University, China

DPhil Geography and the Environment Gaurav Dubey, School of Planning & Architecture, India Trisha Gopalakrishna, Not Listed

DPhil History Saman Malik, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

DPhil Law

DPhil Statistics

MSc Economics for Development

Aradhana Cherupara Vadekkethil, National Law University, Delhi, India

Sheheryar Zaidi, The University of Cambridge

Sajeda Sajjad Ali Khwaja, American University of Sharjah, UAE

June Sang Lee, University College London

DPhil Women's and Reproductive Health

MSc Environmental Change and Management

Hak Min Mun, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

DPhil Mathematics

Brook Dambacher, University of Tasmania Hobart, Australia

DPhil Zoology

Vanshaj Jain, The University of Oxford

DPhil Materials

Federico Trinca, Universita degli Studi di Milano (Universitas Studiorum Mediolanensis) Italy

DPhil Medical Sciences Katherine English, University of Queensland, Australia

DPhil Molecular and Cellular Medicine Helen Tyrrell, The University of Oxford

Interdisciplinary Bioscience (BBSRC DTP) Andrew Wood, The University of Oxford

MSc Financial Economics Wenjie Cai, University of British Columbia, Canada Nikolaj Thallmayer, Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Austria Nghia Vu, Lehigh University, USA

Master of Philosophy in History Early Modern History 1500-1700

Sitong Ye, Nankai University, China

Grace Denton-Spalding, Wesleyan University, USA

MSc Law and Finance Yu Xing, Not Listed

Jianqing Zheng, The University of Liverpool

Master of Public Policy

DPhil Molecular Cell Biology in Health and Disease Vincent Luscombe, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Jinrui Liu, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Yiwen Hao, Tongji University, China China Chenxu You, Shandong University, China Zhen Yong Alexander Mok, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore MSc Mathematical Modelling and

DPhil Pharmacology

MPhil Economics

Caroline Weglinski, The University of Oxford

DPhil Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Edward Brewer, The University of Birmingham Chak Kui Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong Yifei Zhang, Dalian University of Technology (DUT) China

DPhil Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics Stephanie Anderson, Apply Online UK

DPhil Politics Ashrakat Elshehawy, Universitat Mannheim, Germany

DPhil Primary Health Care Elizabeth Morris, The University of Oxford

DPhil Public Policy Gauri Chandra, London School of Economics and Political Science

Aavika Dhanda, University of Delhi, India

Byron Fay, Australian National University

MSc Mathematical and Computational Finance

Scientific Computing

Chenyuan Wang, University College Emmet Hall-Hoffarth, University of British London Columbia, Canada

MPhil International Relations Pak Hei Hao, The University of Oxford

MPhil Law Gayathree Devi Kalliyat Thazhathuveetil, Gujarat National Law University, India

MPhil Modern South Asian Studies

MSc Mathematical Sciences Raphael Pellegrin, Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine Samuel Pothier, The University of Oxford

MSc Modern Middle Eastern Studies Mathew Madain, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Varun Mallik, Ashoka University, India

MSc Modern South Asian Studies

MPhil Politics: Comparative Government

Gurmehar Kaur, The University of Oxford

Gabriella Cook Francis, CUNY - Hunter College, USA

MSc Clinical Embryology Kate Stanley, Columbia University, USA

MSc Computer Science Charles Blake, The University of St Andrews Hong Kei Christopher Fok, Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine Florentina Uitzetter, Twente University of Technology, Netherlands

MSc Pharmacology Phuong Nhat Bao Pham, Macalester College MN, USA

MSc Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Koto Akiyoshi, King's College London Charlotte Finegold, Yale University, USA

MSc Sleep Medicine

MSt Creative Writing

William Bara-Jimenez, Not Listed

James Hutcheon, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Christopher Barnes, Michigan State University, USA Sarah Booth, Not listed Velda Chen, Murdoch University, Australia Matthew Davies, University of Wales, Swansea Massimiliano Di Giosia, Universita degli studi'G.D'Annunzio' Chiete Scalo, Italy Iain Duncan, The University of Dundee Marija Krstic, Not Listed Shi Hui Poon, Not Listed Nicolas Stefenatto, University of Liege Belgium Jonathan Sunkersing, The University of Southampton Jessica Wright, The University of Portsmouth

MSt Diplomatic Studies Kamiliya Akkouche, University of Ottawa, Canada

MSt History - British and European History 1700-1850 James Cleaver, The University of Bristol

MSt History - US History Kaelyn Apple, Canada College, USA

MSt Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics Joel Greenbaum, University College London

MSc Sleep Medicine (PGDip Conversion)

MSt Modern Languages

Chutiratn Pramuksun, Srinakharinwirot University, Thailand

Carolin Jürs, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany

Barbara Robinson, Aston University

Paul Manuel Pass, Otto-FriedrichUniversitat Bamberg Germany

MSc Statistical Science Mohammed Nadjib Benlaldj, Ecole Polytechnique, France

MSc Water Science, Policy and Management Harnoor Kaur, O. P. Jindal Global University, India Ellen Kujawa, University of Wisconsin Madison, USA Zineb Mimouni, DE Technische Universitat Munchen Sayan Roy, Not Listed

MSc(Res) Engineering Science Nick Schwartz, Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine Tianxiong Wang, Beijing Institute of Technology, China

MSt Classical Archaeology Eleanor Newman, The University of Oxford

Mina Malik-Hussain, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

MSt Music (Musicology) Francesca Millar, The University of Oxford

Somerville Association Officers and Committee

Somerville Development Board Members

as of March 2020 (Owing to cancellation of the AGM no elections to the Committee took place in March 2020)

as of March 2020 Co-Chair Sybella Stanley (1979)

President Baroness Alison Wolf (Potter, 1967) Joint Secretaries Liz Cooke (Greenwood, 1964) Lisa Gygax (1987)

Ayla Busch (1989) Basma Alireza (1991) Judith Buttigieg (1988) Sophie Forsyth (Wallis,1989) Clara Freeman (Jones, 1971)

Committee Members

Lynn Haight (Schofield, 1966)

Tim Aldrich (1994)

Niels Kröner (1996)

Joanne Magan (1984)

Vicky Maltby (Elton, 1974)

Pia Pasternack (1982)

Nicola Ralston (Thomas, 1974)

Natasha Robinson (1972)

Sian Thomas Marshall (Thomas, 1989)

Virginia Ross (MCR, 1966) Joe Smith (2013)

Honorary Development Board Members

Lorna Sutton (2010)

Tom Bolt

Fellows Appointed by the College

Paddy Crossley (Earnshaw, 1956)

Benjamin Thompson (Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History)

Sam Gyimah (1995)

Fiona Stafford (Fellow and Tutor in English)

Margaret Kenyon (Parry, 1959)

Luke Pitcher (Fellow and Tutor in Classics)

Nadine Majaro (1975)

For full details see the college website at www.some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/networks Year Reps To help alumni stay in touch with each other and with the College, we are building up a system of year reps. To see who is your year rep, please follow the link https://www. some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/year-reps/. Ideally there will be more than one rep per year and some years have as yet no rep at all. If you would like to act as a year rep, or to hear more about it, please contact Lisa (lisa.gygax@some.ox.ac.uk) or Liz (Elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk).

Co-Chair

Doreen Boyce (Vaughan, 1953)

Harriet Maunsell (1962) Hilary Newiss (1974) Roger Pilgrim For full details see the college website at www.some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/the-development-board

Legacies

Caroline Kenny (née Arthur), 1956, Modern History

Legacies are a vital source of support for the College’s activities and a deeply meaningful way to help ensure its continued success. Here we record our thanks to all of those who have left legacies to support Somerville, and we honour three of the Somervillians whose recent legacies have made a lasting and significant difference.

Madeline Huxstep (née Bishop), 1939, Modern History

Joan Richards, 1951, French and German

Dates for the Diary While we are sadly unable to host you in person during the coronavirus pandemic, we are carrying on with our programme of alumni events online, which join our expanded online offering during the pandemic. If you would like to join us for any of our upcoming events, details will be shared in due course at https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/alumni/events/.

2020 Sunday December 6th

Carol Service

2021 February (date to be confirmed)

Supporters’ Celebration

March (date to be confirmed)

Spring Meeting and Somerville Association AGM

Somerville College Oxford OX2 6HD Telephone 01865 270600 www.some.ox.ac.uk Exempt charity number 1139440

College Report 2019-20

Articles inside

Obituaries

Prizes

Members’ News and Publications

A Letter from California: Sheltering in Place

Judith (Mundlak) Taylor reports on the Year of 1952

Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities

Report on Junior Research Fellowships

MCR Report

Life Before Somerville: Professor Fareda Banda, 1989

President’s Report

Principal’s Report

JCR Report

Treasurer’s Report