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.

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. 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.