Johnians elected to the British Academy

Four Johnians, including one Honorary Fellow of the College, have been elected to Fellowships of the British Academy.

Four members of St John’s College, including Honorary Fellow Professor Jane Stapleton, have been elected to the British Academy.

A world-renowned academic lawyer, Professor Stapleton has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and other leading institutions across the globe. She originally trained as a scientist and achieved a Doctorate in the field of organic chemistry at the University of Adelaide, later re-training as a lawyer with the Australian National University, where she won the Supreme Court Judges’ Prize for academic excellence. She then studied for a second Doctorate, in Law, at Oxford, where she taught for more than a decade as a Fellow of Balliol College.

Professor Stapleton is a Research Professor at the Australian National University, Professor of Law at the University of Texas and Statutory Visiting Professor at Oxford as well as a former Fellow and Honorary Fellow of St John’s College. She is also an honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn and the only non-US member of the Council of the American Law Institute. She has published widely, with research interests ranging from comparative and private law to the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of law itself.

Professor Stapleton was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Other Johnians to have been elected to Fellowships of the Academy this year are:

Professor Robert Gordon, who studied for a PhD at St John’s from 1988-1993 and is currently Senena Professor of Italian at Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College;

Professor Michael Heffernan, who came to St John’s in 1981 to study for a PhD in Geography. Professor Heffernan is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham;

Professor James Hurford, who studied as an undergraduate at St John’s from 1960-1963, reading Modern and Medieval Languages specialising in French and German. Professor Hurford taught at the University of California and the University of Lancaster and is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.

The British Academy is the UK’s most prestigious organisation for the Arts and Humanities. Established in 1902, the Academy has a Fellowship of over 1,000 leading scholars spanning all disciplines across all subjects that make up the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. It funds research across the UK and worldwide and seeks to increase public understanding of how these subjects contribute to social, economic, cultural and individual well-being.