MCR Report

Culture'. Just published: Medieval Temporalities. The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, ed. Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland, Boydell & Brewer, 2021.

Music

In February 2021, the Somerville music students took part in an online seminar designed by their music analysis tutor, Dr Esther Cavett, to create connections across college years and raise awareness of the broader context of music analysis as an academic discipline. The seminar aimed to consolidate friendships and create reciprocal learning opportunities during a period when we were living disconnected lives in a fearful and largely online world. In preparation for the seminar all students viewed a talk titled Redrawing Analytical Lines, given online by Dr Vivian Luong (University of Saskatchewan) at the international Society of Music Theory conference 2020. This talk was a development of Dr Luong’s work on music ethics and analysis. Third years then mentored first years to create a brief, formal conference-style response to her paper. The first years then sent their response to the second years who prepared their own informal responses to the first-year materials. The students worked together but largely independently of their tutor. The seminar took place fully online, chaired by Dr Cavett and Dr Luong took part in the discussions. Following the seminar, Dr Luong and Dr Cavett, with input from all the students, have written a short, “autoethnographic” article outlining their collaborative learning experiences. This is currently under consideration for an online music theory pedagogy resource based in the USA.

Senior Research Fellows

Amalia Coldea is now an Associate Professor and she has received a national prize on Superconductivity, the Brian Pippard Prize of the IOP Superconductivity Group. https://www. iop.org/physics-community/specialinterest-groups/superconductivitygroup/brian-pippard-prize#gref. Laboratories have been operational since August 2020 and she and her team were able to carry on doing research and getting new results on superconductivity under high pressures using diamond anvil cells (work in progress). They have not been able to travel and two experiments run remotely; they sent their single crystals abroad and their collaborators helped with setting up and running experiments at high magnetic field facilities in the USA and Europe. https://www.physics. ox.ac.uk/research/group/quantummatter-high-magnetic-fields. The last year has given Amalia time to publish several new papers.

Stephanie Dalley’s book The City of Babylon: a history c. 2000 BC to AD 116, CUP, was published on 8th July 2021.

Frank Prochaska published an article 'The Feminisation of the British Monarchy’, in the book The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy, eds Robert Hazell and Bob Morris (Hart, 2020).