Research Fellows

Virgil Andrei
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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Dr Marie Chabbert
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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Anna Florin
Dr Anna Florin
Research Fellow
Archaeology
Archaeobotany, Australian archaeology, early human migration

Anna is a research fellow at St John's College and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, and an associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. Her PhD in Archaeology, recently completed at the University of Queensland, focused on the use of food plants and long-term human-environment interaction at the oldest known archaeological site in Australia, Madjedbebe, Mirarr Country, Northern Territory. Her current research focuses on the role of plant foods in early human migrations, and the complexity of long-term human-plant interactions within Indigenous communities in Australia, New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia.
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R Garcia Millan
Dr Rosalba García Millán
Research Fellow
Mathematics
Mathematical Physics
Statistical mechanics, stochastic thermodynamics, Doi-Peliti field theory, active matter, active motility, branching processes, entropy production, complex systems, non-equilibrium systems, biological physics, epidemic spreading, neuronal avalanches, chromosomal interactions.
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Dr Talitha Kearey
Dr Talitha Kearey
Praelector
Classics
Latin literature and its reception. My current book project explores concepts of authorship, biography and literary criticism in Virgil’s ancient reception; more broadly, I maintain research interests in Latin poetry and prose, the history of scholarship, reception studies to the present day, and literary and cultural theory (especially feminist and queer studies).

Recent and forthcoming publications:
• ‘(Mis)reading the Gnat: Truth and Deception in the Pseudo-Virgilian Culex’, Ramus 47.2 (2018), 174-196.
• ‘Two Acrostics in Horace’s Satires (1.9.24-8, 2.1.7-10)’, Classical Quarterly 69.2 (forthcoming in December 2019).
• ‘Secondary Metalepsis? Talking to Virgil in Fulgentius’ Expositio Continentiae Virgilianae’, in S. Matzner and G. C. Trimble (edd.),
Metalepsis: Ancient Texts, New Perspectives, Oxford University Press (forthcoming in 2020).

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Dr Benedek Kruchió
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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M Lampitt
Dr Matt Lampitt
Research Fellow
Modern and Medieval Languages

My research focuses on medieval literature in French and Occitan, particularly in multilingual, comparative perspectives (especially with literature in Welsh, Latin, and English), and from positions informed by modern critical theory and philosophy (especially queer, feminist, psychoanalytic, ecocritical, and Latourian).
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Lucy McDonald
Dr Lucy McDonald
Philosophy
I work mainly in philosophy of language, ethics, and feminist philosophy. I'm particularly interested in the nature and power of speech; what it means to be a speaker or a hearer, how power relations affect who can speak and what they can say, and the role speech plays in enforcing social norms.
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Jules O'Dwyer
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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A Plumridge
Dr Anna Plumridge
English
My primary interests are in textual scholarship and colonial and postcolonial literatures. My research so far has focused on writing produced under colonial rule in Australasia.

My first publication was a scholarly edition of the ‘Urewera Notebook’, a journal kept by Katherine Mansfield while camping in the central North Island of New Zealand in 1907. My PhD consisted of another scholarly edition, this time of Samuel Butler’s satiric novel 'Erewhon' (1872). My edition situated the novel in its colonial context, as an example of the two-way literary and cultural traffic between Cambridge and New Zealand at the height of the British Empire.

During my Fellowship, I am working on a monograph which examines the workings of empire as a ‘textual exercise’, maintained through the media of ink and paper, through a book-length case study of the official and literary papers of Alfred Domett (1811-1887), colonial premier, journalist and poet.

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Dr Kadi Saar
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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E Sbaraini
Ms 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, Ms Sbaraini is working on a new project investigating the relationship between mental health, race and class in Britain from 1770 to 1920. Using a wider variety of legal, institutional and personal sources, it will seek to historicise racism and race-making in British mental health institutions, and to examine how racialised conceptions of mental health operated in wider society.

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Christiana Scheib
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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Dr Rebecca Shercliff
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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