Report on Junior Research Fellowships

the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and a lecture at the American Institute of Mathematics.

At the Maths Institute, I continued the supervision of my three DPhil students, two of whom will likely defend their theses next year, and the mentorship of postdoctoral fellows (Beth, Marcelo, and a new Titchmarsh fellow, Lucas MasonBrown). I organised the departmental Algebra (now online) seminar and I am looking forward to better times when we'll be able to also welcome speakers in person. As Chair of Prelims Examiners for Mathematics, I had a busy and, at times, stressful year given all of the disruption in learning and examinations, but in the end, the online exams worked better than I had feared.

Renaud Lambiotte reports : As for many academics, this was a very unusual year. School closures and home working led to new challenges and pressures on (systemically) very busy schedules but I have been impressed by the agility of the whole system. Our students have been wonderful, motivated and hard working despite the circumstances. At the research level, I managed to finish writing a book, “Modularity and Dynamics on Complex Networks", which I started writing 3 years ago. It will be published in the next few months by Cambridge University Press. The book covers most of the important lines of my research from the last 15 years. I wrote it in the evenings, or when I found a minute, but it could actually be that the crisis was also instrumental in shaping the book, by making me take a step back, find the threads connecting my research projects.

Medicine

Simon Kyle, Programme Director of the online MSc in Sleep Medicine, reports that since the course has been online since 2016 it has been relatively pandemic-proof and its experience has been invaluable in offering advice to other courses moving online as a result of the pandemic. Many MSc students, being frontline health care workers, were most definitely affected in the workplace but most were able to continue with their studies. Twenty-six students have so far completed the MSc Sleep Medicine beginning with 4 students joining the programme in 2016 to 14 due to complete in October 2021. Three students achieved Distinction in the programme (one in each completed cohort).

Nisha Singh, who is Senior Programme Manager , Oxford Vaccine Group, reports: I was based in the Department of Psychiatry at the beginning of the lockdown and had hoped to be back soon conducting my research on a drug for treatment resistant depression. That optimism was short-lived. End July, I received a call from a colleague who worked in the Oxford Vaccine Group. They needed someone to come in and hit the ground running with the two ongoing clinical trials of the OxfordAstra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine. So, I nervously stepped in to help with the coordination between the 18 UK trial sites and Oxford, as the sponsor of the trial. Since then, I have been involved in the delivery of several trials involving the vaccine. So, for me, this has been an incredibly busy year, but also a very rewarding one. It is a rare privilege to be part of a team that implements such rapid translation of research into clinical application, which also addresses an unprecedented urgent, global health need. I think there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.

Modern Languages

Simon Kemp reports: French studies at Somerville have come through a difficult year stronger than ever. Our marvellously resilient students have weathered a year of pandemic-related disruption to their studies, for most of which we have been restricted to online teaching. Thankfully, we managed to return to in-person teaching by the end of the academic year, which was a pleasure after months of interaction via screens. Our students on their year abroad have also had a difficult time of it, of course, although I’m pleased to say that the year abroad was designated ‘essential travel’, meaning that all our students in modern languages have managed to spend time in an immersive target-language environment. Earlier this year we were also the recipients of an immensely generous donation to support the teaching of French literature at Somerville, for which we’re hugely grateful, and which will ensure the future of the discipline in the college for many years to come. Personally, this year I have published articles on contemporary French author Marie Darrieussecq and overview chapters on modern French literature for the Cambridge History of the Novel in French and Contemporary Fiction in French (also with Cambridge University Press). I’ve also been working to increase and foreground diversity in our literary studies, both in my own course plans and reading lists at Somerville, and in the faculty more widely. I’m about to embark on three terms of research leave, at the end of which I aim to have a new monograph in press, Reading the Mind: Theories of Consciousness and Literary Criticism.

Francesca Southerden has spent the year working on a variety of projects, including a special issue on the topic of Medieval Barthes, co-edited with Jennifer Rushworth (UCL), and articles on both Dante and Petrarch. In March 2021, The Oxford Handbook of Dante, which she co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati (Senior Research Fellow, Somerville; Sorbonne; ICI Berlin) and Elena Lombardi (Oxford), was published by Oxford University Press. Francesca has also participated in several online events during the academic year, including two colloquia on lyric poetry which were an opportunity to discuss the volume, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy, co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020).

The last year has been very full for Professor Almut Suerbaum, as chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, supporting students whose course involves a year of travelling and living abroad - not easy for individual students or the faculty during a pandemic with so many rapid changes of course. But it has also been wonderful to see how resilient students and colleagues are. The highlight of the Somerville Medievalist Research Group has been the publication of our volume on 'Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe', shortly to be followed by the volume arising from our Berlin conference in summer 2019 on 'Openness in Medieval