Research Fellows
Dr Virgil Andrei
Natural Sciences (Physical)
Chemistry
My interests revolve around the development of renewable energy sources, such as photoelectrocatalysis, photovoltaics and thermoelectrics . Currently, I am working on scalable "artificial leaf" devices, which can split water to produce hydrogen, or reduce carbon dioxide to value-added products under solar light illumination. This interdisciplinary approach is fundamental for the wide-scale implementation of sustainable solar fuels.
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Natural Sciences (Physical)
Chemistry
My interests revolve around the development of renewable energy sources, such as photoelectrocatalysis, photovoltaics and thermoelectrics . Currently, I am working on scalable "artificial leaf" devices, which can split water to produce hydrogen, or reduce carbon dioxide to value-added products under solar light illumination. This interdisciplinary approach is fundamental for the wide-scale implementation of sustainable solar fuels.
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Mr Rakesh Arul
Natural Sciences (Physical)
Physics and Astrophysics
Photonics is the science of how light works and how light can do work. In his research Mr Arul creates the optical sensors of tomorrow by trapping and concentrating light to atomic scales with nanoparticles that are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.
During his PhD he designed new optical sensors to detect infrared light. The colours of molecules in the infrared, invisible to the naked eye, contain rich information about their chemical structure and identity. Being able to ‘see’ this invisible IR world has enabled disease diagnosis, art conservation, greenhouse gas monitoring and the stunning images of exoplanets. Despite such promise, IR detection remains far from democratised due to the costs and limited practical utility of existing technologies. During his PhD Mr Arul invented a new technology for IR detection by trapping IR light to the nanoscale and converting it into detectable visible light.
As a Research Fellow, Mr Arul hopes to combine physics with chemistry, and use light to control chemical reactions. By forming a new state of matter that is part light and part molecule, he aims to use light as a radical new tool to control chemical transformations that create sustainable fuels, such as hydrogen. He will also investigate and create new kinds of matter displaying exotic quantum behaviour that is impossible without extremely strong interaction between light and molecules.
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Natural Sciences (Physical)
Physics and Astrophysics
Photonics is the science of how light works and how light can do work. In his research Mr Arul creates the optical sensors of tomorrow by trapping and concentrating light to atomic scales with nanoparticles that are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.
During his PhD he designed new optical sensors to detect infrared light. The colours of molecules in the infrared, invisible to the naked eye, contain rich information about their chemical structure and identity. Being able to ‘see’ this invisible IR world has enabled disease diagnosis, art conservation, greenhouse gas monitoring and the stunning images of exoplanets. Despite such promise, IR detection remains far from democratised due to the costs and limited practical utility of existing technologies. During his PhD Mr Arul invented a new technology for IR detection by trapping IR light to the nanoscale and converting it into detectable visible light.
As a Research Fellow, Mr Arul hopes to combine physics with chemistry, and use light to control chemical reactions. By forming a new state of matter that is part light and part molecule, he aims to use light as a radical new tool to control chemical transformations that create sustainable fuels, such as hydrogen. He will also investigate and create new kinds of matter displaying exotic quantum behaviour that is impossible without extremely strong interaction between light and molecules.
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Dr Marie Chabbert
Research Fellow
Modern and Medieval Languages
Marie Chabbert is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge's St John's College. Her research, which is situated at the crossroads between French and Religious Studies, focuses on the so-called 'return of religion' at the forefront of international preoccupations and interrogates how French thinkers including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bruno Latour, inaugurate new perspectives for thinking faith in the so-called ‘postsecular’ age. She is currently working on her first monograph to be entitled Faithful Deicides: Contemporary French Thought and the Eternal Return of Religion.
Prior to obtaining her PhD from the University of Oxford, Marie completed a double-BA in Political Sciences and Modern French Culture at SciencesPo Paris and La Sorbonne IV, an MPhil in Comparative European Cultures at the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
As part of a wider commitment to public engagement in the humanities, Marie works as a freelance journalist for the Religion section of the French newspaper Le Monde and has written for the French intellectual magazine Esprit. She is also an Executive Committee member of the European Interfaith Youth Network of Religions for Peace, the largest international coalition of representatives from the world’s religions dedicated to promoting multi-religious cooperation for peace. In January 2021, Marie was chosen as a Young Religious Leader-Media Maker by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and United Nations Counter-Terrorism Center for their Edin (Empowering Dialogue & Interfaith Networks) programme.
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Research Fellow
Modern and Medieval Languages
Marie Chabbert is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge's St John's College. Her research, which is situated at the crossroads between French and Religious Studies, focuses on the so-called 'return of religion' at the forefront of international preoccupations and interrogates how French thinkers including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bruno Latour, inaugurate new perspectives for thinking faith in the so-called ‘postsecular’ age. She is currently working on her first monograph to be entitled Faithful Deicides: Contemporary French Thought and the Eternal Return of Religion.
Prior to obtaining her PhD from the University of Oxford, Marie completed a double-BA in Political Sciences and Modern French Culture at SciencesPo Paris and La Sorbonne IV, an MPhil in Comparative European Cultures at the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
As part of a wider commitment to public engagement in the humanities, Marie works as a freelance journalist for the Religion section of the French newspaper Le Monde and has written for the French intellectual magazine Esprit. She is also an Executive Committee member of the European Interfaith Youth Network of Religions for Peace, the largest international coalition of representatives from the world’s religions dedicated to promoting multi-religious cooperation for peace. In January 2021, Marie was chosen as a Young Religious Leader-Media Maker by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and United Nations Counter-Terrorism Center for their Edin (Empowering Dialogue & Interfaith Networks) programme.
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Dr John Colley
English
Dr Colley works on classical reception and translation across late medieval and Renaissance English literature, with an emphasis on the print and manuscript contexts of literary production. His research contends that translation and classical reception studies offer especially insightful lenses for interrogating broader issues of intellectual history.
In his doctoral thesis on Tudor humanism and the translation of Greek, he took a new, more generically diverse approach to reception scholarship. In particular, he argued that the classical tradition in early Tudor England was as much a matter of Homer’s reception as of the reception of authors such as St John Chrysostom and Eusebius: the thesis painted a history of classical reception that was never straightforwardly classical.
At St John’s, he is developing his classical reception work with a new monograph project, ‘Comedy and the Classical Tradition: Drama in England from Frulovisi to Shakespeare’. Reading extensively between vernacular and neo-Latin texts, this project will revise the history of comedy’s evolution in England across an ambitiously broad period, from the 1430s to the 1620s. What were the distinctive features of an emergent English dramatic tradition forged in the wake of classical drama?
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English
Dr Colley works on classical reception and translation across late medieval and Renaissance English literature, with an emphasis on the print and manuscript contexts of literary production. His research contends that translation and classical reception studies offer especially insightful lenses for interrogating broader issues of intellectual history.
In his doctoral thesis on Tudor humanism and the translation of Greek, he took a new, more generically diverse approach to reception scholarship. In particular, he argued that the classical tradition in early Tudor England was as much a matter of Homer’s reception as of the reception of authors such as St John Chrysostom and Eusebius: the thesis painted a history of classical reception that was never straightforwardly classical.
At St John’s, he is developing his classical reception work with a new monograph project, ‘Comedy and the Classical Tradition: Drama in England from Frulovisi to Shakespeare’. Reading extensively between vernacular and neo-Latin texts, this project will revise the history of comedy’s evolution in England across an ambitiously broad period, from the 1430s to the 1620s. What were the distinctive features of an emergent English dramatic tradition forged in the wake of classical drama?
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Dr Leah Downey
Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS)
Political theory is the study of how people ought to live together. Political economy considers how people produce what they need to live. These endeavours are, and always have been, fundamentally and inextricably linked. It is in the shadow of this observation that Dr Downey's research employs the tools of political theory to better understand the relationship between macroeconomic policy and democracy.
Her doctoral thesis explored what it would look like to democratise monetary policy. Recognising that the creation and allocation of money are among the state’s most distinctive powers, she argued that instituting an approach to monetary policymaking that respects the integrity of domestic democracy would have radical implications for both domestic and global economic governance.
As a Fellow at St John’s, Dr Downey will extend her research into the relationship between macroeconomic policy and democracy to explore how different notions of time employed by policymakers in modern democracies shape the power and possibilities of macroeconomic policymaking. This is an urgent task for two reasons: first, because it is essential to unlocking the state’s macroeconomic policymaking powers in the face of an existential climate crisis, and secondly, because doing so is critical for achieving the full realisation of a flourishing democratic state.
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Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS)
Political theory is the study of how people ought to live together. Political economy considers how people produce what they need to live. These endeavours are, and always have been, fundamentally and inextricably linked. It is in the shadow of this observation that Dr Downey's research employs the tools of political theory to better understand the relationship between macroeconomic policy and democracy.
Her doctoral thesis explored what it would look like to democratise monetary policy. Recognising that the creation and allocation of money are among the state’s most distinctive powers, she argued that instituting an approach to monetary policymaking that respects the integrity of domestic democracy would have radical implications for both domestic and global economic governance.
As a Fellow at St John’s, Dr Downey will extend her research into the relationship between macroeconomic policy and democracy to explore how different notions of time employed by policymakers in modern democracies shape the power and possibilities of macroeconomic policymaking. This is an urgent task for two reasons: first, because it is essential to unlocking the state’s macroeconomic policymaking powers in the face of an existential climate crisis, and secondly, because doing so is critical for achieving the full realisation of a flourishing democratic state.
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Dr Brigid Ehrmantraut
Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC)
The languages and literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland.
Ms Ehrmantraut is a philologist and intellectual historian specialising in the languages and literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland. My interests include Celtic studies, Latin literature, Classical reception and textual transmission, translation and landscape studies.
Her PhD thesis explored the reception of Classical mythology in medieval Ireland between the 10th and 12th centuries, and the ways in which Greek and Roman narratives became situated within a medieval Christian worldview. She examined a corpus of vernacular Irish adaptations of Classical Latin epic, as well as the influence of Classical mythology on medieval Irish authors’ conceptions of their own pre-Christian past. Ms Ehrmantraut has also worked on medieval perceptions of prehistoric monuments in Irish, Welsh and Latin literature.
During her Fellowship, Ms Ehrmantraut will continue her study of medieval Irish Classical reception into the 13th and 14th centuries, examining the development of the cath ‘battle’ genre of tales. These compositions drew heavily on Classical literature as well as on the earlier vernacular Irish adaptations of Classical epic produced during the 10th through 12th centuries, which she investigated in her PhD thesis.
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Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC)
The languages and literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland.
Ms Ehrmantraut is a philologist and intellectual historian specialising in the languages and literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland. My interests include Celtic studies, Latin literature, Classical reception and textual transmission, translation and landscape studies.
Her PhD thesis explored the reception of Classical mythology in medieval Ireland between the 10th and 12th centuries, and the ways in which Greek and Roman narratives became situated within a medieval Christian worldview. She examined a corpus of vernacular Irish adaptations of Classical Latin epic, as well as the influence of Classical mythology on medieval Irish authors’ conceptions of their own pre-Christian past. Ms Ehrmantraut has also worked on medieval perceptions of prehistoric monuments in Irish, Welsh and Latin literature.
During her Fellowship, Ms Ehrmantraut will continue her study of medieval Irish Classical reception into the 13th and 14th centuries, examining the development of the cath ‘battle’ genre of tales. These compositions drew heavily on Classical literature as well as on the earlier vernacular Irish adaptations of Classical epic produced during the 10th through 12th centuries, which she investigated in her PhD thesis.
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Dr Benedek Kruchió
Research Fellow
Classics
Imperial Greek and late antique literature and culture.
BA Vienna, MA Berlin, PhD Cambridge.
Specialising in Greek literature from late antiquity and the interpretative traditions of this period, I am currently finishing a book on Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, a virtuosic novel from the fourth century C.E. Telling the adventures of an Ethiopian princess, this text testifies to the cultural complexities of its time: it is a story about race, unstable identities, sexual and religious purity. Bridging the gap between formal analysis and discursive approaches to literature, my study seeks to understand the Aethiopica’s responsivity to contrasting interpretative strategies in relation to the methods of contemporary reading communities such as Platonists, ‘sophists,’ and Christians.
In my new project I am investigating how the literary production of late antiquity responds to the increasing popularity of allegorical interpretation in this transformative era. In addition, I am currently preparing a conference on the visual, religious, and literary cultures of the imperial period – with a focus on allegory – and a collaborative commentary on the forgotten Christian sequel to a ‘pagan’ Greek novel.
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Research Fellow
Classics
Imperial Greek and late antique literature and culture.
BA Vienna, MA Berlin, PhD Cambridge.
Specialising in Greek literature from late antiquity and the interpretative traditions of this period, I am currently finishing a book on Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, a virtuosic novel from the fourth century C.E. Telling the adventures of an Ethiopian princess, this text testifies to the cultural complexities of its time: it is a story about race, unstable identities, sexual and religious purity. Bridging the gap between formal analysis and discursive approaches to literature, my study seeks to understand the Aethiopica’s responsivity to contrasting interpretative strategies in relation to the methods of contemporary reading communities such as Platonists, ‘sophists,’ and Christians.
In my new project I am investigating how the literary production of late antiquity responds to the increasing popularity of allegorical interpretation in this transformative era. In addition, I am currently preparing a conference on the visual, religious, and literary cultures of the imperial period – with a focus on allegory – and a collaborative commentary on the forgotten Christian sequel to a ‘pagan’ Greek novel.
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Dr Jef Laga
Mathematics
Number theory
Mr Laga is a pure mathematician working in number theory, a field that goes back to the ancient Greeks and Babylonians and aims to understand properties of the whole numbers, the basic building blocks of mathematics. More specifically, he works in arithmetic statistics, which studies number-theoretic objects (like prime numbers or polynomial equations) in families.
He completed an undergraduate degree at Ghent University (with an exchange semester in Paris) and a Master's degree (Part III) at Cambridge. In his PhD thesis at Cambridge, he showed how Lie theory (which is also used in theoretical physics) can be fruitfully applied to study the arithmetic statistics of Diophantine equations.
While at St John’s Mr Laga will continue investigating number theory through the lens of Lie theory, as well as exploring interactions with neighbouring fields such as algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry and singularity theory.
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Mathematics
Number theory
Mr Laga is a pure mathematician working in number theory, a field that goes back to the ancient Greeks and Babylonians and aims to understand properties of the whole numbers, the basic building blocks of mathematics. More specifically, he works in arithmetic statistics, which studies number-theoretic objects (like prime numbers or polynomial equations) in families.
He completed an undergraduate degree at Ghent University (with an exchange semester in Paris) and a Master's degree (Part III) at Cambridge. In his PhD thesis at Cambridge, he showed how Lie theory (which is also used in theoretical physics) can be fruitfully applied to study the arithmetic statistics of Diophantine equations.
While at St John’s Mr Laga will continue investigating number theory through the lens of Lie theory, as well as exploring interactions with neighbouring fields such as algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry and singularity theory.
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Dr Jules O'Dwyer
Modern and Medieval Languages
Jules O’Dwyer works primarily on contemporary French film and thought. His doctoral work addresses interrelated questions of spatiality and sexuality, with a focus on the work of Jacques Nolot, Vincent Dieutre and Alain Guiraudie. His publications have looked at a range of theoretical paradigms—including object-oriented thought, apparatus theory, and questions of intertextuality and stardom—through the lens of French film, ranging from 1950s ethnographic film to recent queer cinema.
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Modern and Medieval Languages
Jules O’Dwyer works primarily on contemporary French film and thought. His doctoral work addresses interrelated questions of spatiality and sexuality, with a focus on the work of Jacques Nolot, Vincent Dieutre and Alain Guiraudie. His publications have looked at a range of theoretical paradigms—including object-oriented thought, apparatus theory, and questions of intertextuality and stardom—through the lens of French film, ranging from 1950s ethnographic film to recent queer cinema.
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Dr Kadi Saar
Natural Sciences (Physical)
Biophysical Chemistry
My research focusses on developing new experimental and predictive computational methods for understanding the behaviour of proteins in their native state in solution.
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Natural Sciences (Physical)
Biophysical Chemistry
My research focusses on developing new experimental and predictive computational methods for understanding the behaviour of proteins in their native state in solution.
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Dr Ella M Sbaraini
History
18th and 19th century British history
Ella Sbaraini is a historian with a particular interest in histories of mental health, death, the emotions, race and sexuality. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of Britain from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, and it seeks to examine the construction, and experience, of mental ill-health during this period.
Her PhD explored the experience of feeling suicidal in England and Wales between 1700 and 1850. It considered what it was like to feel suicidal at a time when suicide was illegal, the emotions that people expressed, and how these changed over time. It challenged the idea that suicide was ‘secularised’ over this period, instead proposing that suicide had profound religious significance for those who considered it.
During her Fellowship, Dr Sbaraini is working on a new project investigating the treatment and experiences of international patients in British 'lunatic' asylums between 1800 and 1920. Using a wider variety of legal, institutional and personal sources, it will - among other things - examine how patients born outside of Britain were perceived and treated by asylum staff, investigating issues of linguistic and religious provision, and the impact of migration on mental health'.
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History
18th and 19th century British history
Ella Sbaraini is a historian with a particular interest in histories of mental health, death, the emotions, race and sexuality. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of Britain from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, and it seeks to examine the construction, and experience, of mental ill-health during this period.
Her PhD explored the experience of feeling suicidal in England and Wales between 1700 and 1850. It considered what it was like to feel suicidal at a time when suicide was illegal, the emotions that people expressed, and how these changed over time. It challenged the idea that suicide was ‘secularised’ over this period, instead proposing that suicide had profound religious significance for those who considered it.
During her Fellowship, Dr Sbaraini is working on a new project investigating the treatment and experiences of international patients in British 'lunatic' asylums between 1800 and 1920. Using a wider variety of legal, institutional and personal sources, it will - among other things - examine how patients born outside of Britain were perceived and treated by asylum staff, investigating issues of linguistic and religious provision, and the impact of migration on mental health'.
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Dr Christiana Scheib
Archaeology
Ancient DNA
The intersection in human health between diet, genes and disease. Population genetics, ancient DNA, ancient proteins, pathogens.
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Archaeology
Ancient DNA
The intersection in human health between diet, genes and disease. Population genetics, ancient DNA, ancient proteins, pathogens.
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Dr Rebecca Shercliff
Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC)
My research centres on medieval texts and their development in the context of their social, historical and literary background, with a particular focus on producing new editions and translations of previously neglected works. My main research interests are medieval Irish literature and early Arthurian literature.
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Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC)
My research centres on medieval texts and their development in the context of their social, historical and literary background, with a particular focus on producing new editions and translations of previously neglected works. My main research interests are medieval Irish literature and early Arthurian literature.
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