Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities

Treasurer’s Report

As we envisaged in my report for last year’s College Report, Covid has continued to dominate our collegiate lives in 2020-21.

Last year we had a loss of £2m as Covid had a dramatic impact on our rental income from our retail properties, on our conference income, and on our student rental income (we waived student rents for Trinity Term 2020 when our students were not in residence). This year much of this still pertains, although the impact on student rental income was not quite so significant, and we anticipate a further loss of £1.5m.

The strength of the college endowment (we are now exactly mid table in college endowments) and the assistance of the government furlough scheme has given us the financial heft to absorb this without recourse to redundancies, although we have had had to cut our cloth accordingly to contain its impact, as you would expect.

More positively we have just finished our £4m refurbishment of the kitchen and pantry, which you will remember had reached the end of their life shortly before the pandemic hit. We now have a state-of-the-art kitchen and our catering team are delighted. We expect great things...

During the year we also bought the long-term lease on 25-27 Little Clarendon Street (the building immediately west of the Vaughan arcade), giving us three shops at on the ground floor and a flat above each shop. We now own all the buildings in that Walton Street/Little Clarendon street corner and we own the freehold. We also completed the refurbishment of Bedford House which is now a teaching/function room. Following on from a commitment we gave as part of getting planning permission for the Catherine Hughes building, we will be making Bedford House available for local community use during September each year.

In terms of our investments, our endowment has more than recovered the losses we experienced last year. During the year, we also completed the process of divesting from all our fossil fuel extraction related investments. The proceeds raised have been re-invested sustainably.

ANDREW PARKER, COLLEGE TREASURER

Looking forward to the year ahead, next summer we are planning to put a sound absorbing material onto the dining hall ceiling in an attempt to soften the somewhat oppressive acoustics we experience in there during formal dinners. It won’t completely solve the problem but we anticipate an improvement.

ANDREW PARKER

Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities

Biology

Timothy Walker’s book, Pollination: The Enduring Relationship between Plant and Pollinator, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2020. Timothy says that unlike many books on pollination it is written from the plant’s point of view.

Engineering

Stephen Roberts is currently the Royal Academy of Engineering / Man Group Professor of Machine Learning and Director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance (the OMI) and the last year he has helped to create the Oxford ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Unit, which aims to unite machine learning researchers across multiple departments. Stephen’s interests continue to lie in the theory and methodology of intelligent algorithms for large-scale real-world problems, especially those in which noise and uncertainty abound. In collaboration with colleagues in Zoology his team has developed techniques for detecting mosquitoes using smartphones; the technology developed is in current use in a field trial in Tanzania as part of a Gates Foundation project.

Richard Stone reports : Teaching this year has been a mix of in-person and on-line, starting last summer with recording lectures for Michaelmas term. First the new material had to be prepared and then existing material reworked for recording. I used a webcam imaging a piece of paper to supplement the PowerPoint slides as this enabled key diagrams to be displayed and perhaps annotated, or perhaps for the paper to be used like a whiteboard. Making a recording gives even less feedback than in LR1, so I was grateful that I had lectured most of the material before. Tutoring in Michaelmas term was mix of in-person and on-line as not all students returned to Oxford. Hilary term was all on-line and in Trinity there has been a mix. Research has been disrupted, but initially being away from the lab meant that we did thoroughly analyse our back catalogue of data, and start to design hardware for a new experiment. The combustion and engine activity will be secure for the next 5 years as we have just started an EPSRC funded Prosperity Partnership for which the key collaboration is with Jaguar Land Rover. Conferences and vivas have been on-line, so I have recently ‘attended’ a conference in Portugal that ran to US time. In December 2019 I agreed to be external for a viva in Malta that was held in April 2022; my willingness to take this on was not entirely academic grounds, although it did align closely with something we were doing 20 years ago. Anyway, activity in the lab is now recovering and we have learned to live with the restrictions.

English

Fiona Stafford reports: The past year has been dominated by the pandemic and therefore by screens and microphones. Online classes, tutorials, research seminars, meetings, recorded lectures, remote library resources, online exams and Admissions have all been enormously time-consuming. In spite of this, it has been rewarding to see students adapting to the new challenges and embarking on mental travelling, if not physical. Academic events moved online, giving speakers the unnerving experience of delivering research from their rooms to a screen full of small faces or just initials. I gave various papers at digital events, including a celebration of the work of Somerville alumna, Claire Lamont. I also recorded videos, interviews and podcasts for the new Jerwood Centre in Grasmere, the British Academy, the John Clare Society, the Royal Forestry Society and BBC Radio. An essay on literary periodisation and another on the legacies of Irish Romantic literature were published. A new Everyman collection of Stories of Trees, Woods and the Forest, which I selected during the lockdown, and an anthology of the literary magazine Archipelago, co-edited with Nicholas Allen, will appear in September 2021.

History

Pippa Byrne spent 2020-21 adapting to virtual conferences and Teams teaching. She most recently published an article on twelfth-century ideas of authority in Historical Research, with forthcoming work in Mediterranean Studies. She is preparing a manuscript on Sicily in the medieval Mediterranean. She continues to be impressed by the excellent work done by Somerville history students in such a difficult year.

Professor Natalia Nowakowska reports: The focus of this past year has clearly been to support History students, College and the Faculty during the pandemic, but Natalia has also published an article in The Journal of Global Intellectual History on the history of the concept of 'dynasty', and given an online lecture on that topic to the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

Benjamin Thompson’s tenure as Associate Head for Education in the Humanities Division continued to be dominated by Covid all year, with the ups and downs of both the virus and government policy requiring continual adjustment to our teaching- and examining-régimes. In the interstices he also completed his contribution to the latest Somerville Medievalists’ volume on Openness, assessing the vexed relationship between enclosed medieval monasteries and the world in which they were located.

Law

Professor Julia Dickson reports that she has continued with the task of completing her forthcoming book, Elucidating Law, under contract with Oxford University Press, and hopes to have the manuscript with the publishers by the end of the long vacation in 2021, following her sabbatical leave in

Trinity Term 2021. As is the case for all academics, she had a very difficult year in academic year 20/21 owing to the extra work involved in moving teaching online, and then conducting it online often across multiple time zones, and in providing the considerable extra pastoral and academic support that students have needed during the pandemic. She is so grateful for the support of her excellent law colleagues, Professor Chris Hare, and Career Development Lecturer Achas Burin, and is glad that the College is already thinking about how to continue with the Career Development Lectureship once its current term comes to an end, because without it the Law School at Somerville would simply not have been able to make it through the pandemic while offering students the enhanced support that they have needed.

Professor Stephen Weatherill, in his final year before retiring, has continued to teach European Union law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels while also supervising a terrific bunch of research students whose work covers matters such as EU competition law, state aid, consumer law, constitutional identity, procedural protection in tax investigations, and the digital economy. He has watched with dismay but no surprise as every single promise made by the Brexiters about the UK's prospects after Brexit has withered to dust, rotted on the vine or been steamrollered by reality. Throwing tantrums and incanting "sovereignty" cuts little ice in international Treaty negotiation - who knew? His main research in recent months has been devoted to the development of the UK's internal market now that the UK has quit the EU's internal market, which in particular concerns the need to reconcile the desire for unimpeded trade within the UK with the scope for divergent market regulation in areas previously regulated in common by the EU by the devolved administrations in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. Northern Ireland, by virtue of its notorious Protocol, is to general anxiety excluded from that UK internal market, whereas Scotland and Wales are to general anxiety included within it according to a statutory formula which savagely undermines their regulatory autonomy, exposing Scottish and Welsh markets to English-produced goods permitted to ignore Scottish and Welsh rules. This, he thinks, is one more factor destabilising this increasingly fragile and rough-edged United Kingdom. If you want to read more, try ‘Will the United Kingdom survive the United Kingdom Internal Market Act?’, UKICE Working Paper 03/2021, United Kingdom in a Changing Europe, https://ukandeu. ac.uk/working-paper/will-the-unitedkingdom-survive-the-uk-internalmarket-act/

Linguistics

Louise Mycock reports: In this most difficult of years, the Linguistics community at Somerville has shown great fortitude, flexibility, and perseverance. Our Linguistics undergraduates, including our thirdyear Modern Languages and Linguistics students who were studying at universities in Germany in 2020–2021, have shown great resilience in coping with teaching online and learning from home. Their continuing hard work and enthusiasm has given much reason to be optimistic.

The switch to online teaching has been a major focus throughout the past academic year. I attended numerous online training events and took the opportunity to overhaul courses that I taught by making as much material as possible available online. In addition to lecture videos and online reading lists, I developed new resources to support asynchronous learning and ran drop-in sessions. I received positive feedback from students about the resources I made available and am looking forward to integrating these online materials into my courses in the future, as well as developing others to compliment in-person teaching once it returns. For the second year running, College Open Day events were held remotely and I participated in a lively online question and answer session on Linguistics at Somerville.

With respect to my own research, I have had two further articles published on the pronoun tag construction (“It’s good, that”), examining its use in the works of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare (L Mycock & J Misson ‘Lone pronoun tags in Early Modern English: ProTag constructions in the dramas of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare’ DOI: https://doi. org/10.1017/S1360674320000209) and in colloquial present-day British English (L Mycock & C L Pang ‘Funny that isn’t it: ProTags in combination at the right periphery’ DOI: https://doi. org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.06.008). My research on this topic continues, with my current focus being on investigating the ways in which this construction has changed over the Modern English period based on a corpus of English drama. I have also had a chapter accepted for publication on the analysis of Bengali intonation, co-authored with my Somerville and Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics colleague Professor Aditi Lahiri. I have given invited talks remotely at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (on the analysis of Hungarian question formation) and the University of Oslo (on information structure and prosody), and attended remote meetings of the research network of which I am a member (Syntax Beyond the Canon: Cutting-edge Studies of Non-Canonical Syntax in English). All being well, our first network meeting of 2022 will be held at Somerville next spring.

Mathematics

Dan Ciubotaru reports : This academic year I have been on sabbatical leave from college. I had many plans for research visits and collaborations, but, of course, these plans had to be cancelled and replaced by zoom meetings. On 1 January, I have been awarded a new twoyear research grant by the EPSRC "New Horizons", supporting my research on the classification of unitary representations of reductive Lie groups. This was a competitive call, and I was happy that my project was selected. I have also collaborated with a research group in Ghent, Belgium, where my former postdoc and college lecturer, Marcelo De Martino, is now located; a paper with our findings is under journal review. In a different direction, I have worked with the Maths JRF, Beth Romano, and with a French collaborator, on a new idea in abstract harmonic analysis that we are very excited about. We have just posted a first preprint on the arXiv with this new construction, but there will be more work to come. I reported on my work in online talks, including a departmental colloquium at Cornell University, a seminar talk at