Visiting Fellows
Visiting Fellows have always enriched academic life here at St John's. We welcome visitors at different stages in their careers from all over the world.
Our current and recent Visiting Fellows are listed below.
Michaelmas Term 2024
Prof Fara Dabhoiwala, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Fara Dabhoiwala is a Senior Research Scholar and professor of history at Princeton University, and previously taught for many years at Oxford. During his year at St John's he will be researching the first-ever biography of the 18th-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams, who in the 1690s was born in the Caribbean to African parents enslaved by the British, but later, as a young free man, came to England – and probably studied at Cambridge – before returning to the West Indies. As part of this project, he will also be investigating an extraordinary contemporary portrait of Williams that survives at the V&A museum in London, and will be exhibited at the Fitzwilliam in 2025.
His most recent book, What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea will be published by Penguin in spring 2025. He is also the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Penguin, 2012). His website is dabhoiwala.com.
Prof Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Paul Hoyningen-Huene is a philosopher of science with a PhD in theoretical physics. In 2014, he retired from his professorship for theoretical philosophy, especially philosophy of science, at the Institute of Philosophy of Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. Now he teaches philosophy of economics at the Department for Economics of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is best known for his books Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (1993), Formal Logic: A Philosophical Approach (2004), and Systematicity: The Nature of Science (2013).
During his time in Cambridge, he will mainly collaborate with Professor Alexander Bird who is the main protagonist of the naturalistic interpretation of Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy, whereas Hoyningen-Huene is the main protagonist of the Neo-Kantian interpretation. We shall attempt to understand our differences more clearly to prepare the way to a possible consensus.
Hoyningen-Huene’s webpage at the Leibniz University of Hannover is at https://www.philos.uni-hannover.de/en/hoyningen-huene
Prof Garvin Brod, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Garvin Brod is a Professor of Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt as well as at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education. His goal is to develop psychological interventions that improve children’s educational prospects. A common thread that runs through his research is that he simultaneously examines different levels of analysis to understand change processes within individuals. He does this using advanced statistical models that are applied to longitudinal data from a wide variety of sources, including experimental tasks, psychophysiology, and log files from digital learning platforms. This in-depth understanding of intra-individual change processes is then used to develop tailored interventions.
He will spend the term at St John’s working with Amy Orben to better understand why and how smartphone use can both enhance and impair children's learning and well-being.
Prof Richard Lazarus, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Richard Lazarus is the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Supreme Court Advocacy, Environmental Law, Torts, and Climate Lawyering. His primary scholarship concerns Supreme Court decision making and environmental law. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in more than 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 14 of those cases. At Harvard University where he currently teaches, and while previously serving on the faculty at Georgetown University and Washington University (St. Louis), he received “best professor” awards for his teaching. In 2020, Professor Lazarus published The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press 2020), which tells the inside story of the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s most famous environmental law case. In 2023, he published the second edition of The Making of Environmental Law (U. Chicago Press 2023), a history of U.S. environmental law. He has published more than eighty law review articles. Professor Lazarus previously worked for the Solicitor General's Office (1986-89) at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was Assistant to the Solicitor General. In 2010, he served as the Executive Director of President Obama’s Commission investigating the root causes of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and in 2020, he served on the Transition Team for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Professor Lazarus graduated from Harvard Law School and has a B.S. from the University of Illinois in Chemistry and a B.A. in Economics. At St. John’s College during the fall 2024 Michaelmas Term, Professor Lazarus’s research and writing will focus on the impact on environmental law, and climate change in particular, of the current United States Supreme Court.
Prof Ophir Munz-Manor, Bleehen Visiting Fellow
I am a full professor of Rabbinic Culture at the Open University, Jerusalem. I specialise in Jewish liturgy and liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. My research focuses on intersections with contemporary Christian poetry, as well as questions of ritual and performance in late antique Near Eastern cultures. In recent years, I have undertaken several projects that combine traditional literary and philological analysis with quantitative and computational methods from the realm of Digital Humanities and computational literary studies.
During my time at St John's, I plan to focus on three major projects. Firstly, I intend to finalise my collaborative work with Prof. Máire Ni Mhaonaigh and Prof. Orietta Da Rold on poetic anthologies in the Middle Ages. Secondly, I will resume my collaboration with the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library. My master's and doctoral studies heavily relied on manuscripts from this collection, and in recent years, I have participated in a digital paleography project aimed at automatically detecting and dating poetic fragments. Finally, I aim to expand my ongoing research project on metaphors in medieval Hebrew poetry, supported by computational literary efforts to digitally annotate medieval poems and visualise the results to detect latent literary patterns.
https://www.openu.ac.il/en/personalsites/ofirmanor.aspx
Joshua Fitzgerald, Munby Visiting Fellow
Joshua Fitzgerald is a 2025 Munby Fellow in Bibliography with the Cambridge University Library (CUL) and a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College, specialising in Nahua (commonly “Aztec”) Visual and Material Culture and Museum Studies. His Munby project, “Recovering the Painted-Over Lessons of Colonial Mexico: Material Histories of the Enigmatic Epistolae… linguam mexicanam at Cambridge (BFBS MS 375),” identifies a truly unique sixteenth-century manuscript written in Nahuatl held at CUL. It builds upon his 2023 BA/Leverhulme Small Grant in Lectionary Studies to delve further into MS 375’s ethnohistorical context and materiality.
Josh received his PhD (History) and Museum Studies certification with the University of Oregon in 2019 and was the 2019-20 Director’s Office Graduate Fellow with the Getty Research Institute (Digital Florentine Codex). In 2020, he and his family moved to Cambridge to start the Rubinoff JRF in “Art as a Source of Knowledge” (Churchill College). As the Rubinoff JRF, he has been affiliated with the Faculty in History, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Centre for Latin American Studies, History of Art, CRASSH and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). His interests include Nahua-Colonial education and learning science, Mesoamerican zooarchaeology, ethnobotany and foodways and the use of Mexican heritage in Modern boardgames and video games. He works to spark interest in Mexico by contributing to exhibitions and public engagement activities (e.g. Being Human Festival 2023 and 2024 Cambridge Festival) and, most recently, his MAA collections research and poetry(!) were sponsored by Cambridge Creative Encounters and UCAM SHAPE Hub.
Lyndan Warner, Burghley Visiting Fellow
Lyndan Warner is a Professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Canada. She completed her PhD in Cambridge at Jesus College. Her most recent books are a co-edited volume, Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900 (2023) and Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400-1800(2018).
From her research on stepfamilies, Warner encountered Dutch and English variations on a visual riddle in which a stranger asks a ‘fair lady’ to solve a puzzle of lineage. During her Burghley Visiting fellowship, Warner will be researching printed and painted versions of these consanguinity and affinity puzzles related to the c. 1565-1571 painting known in the early modern period as ‘Lord Treasurer Burleigh’s riddle for Consanguinity’. These riddles were a form of popular entertainment with a practical purpose in an era of frequent remarriage, drawing on the consanguinity and affinity tables used in legal training or by priests or vicars to calculate the degree of kinship between a couple. https://www.smu.ca/history/history-lyndan-warner.html
Easter Term 2024
Dr Kaara Peterson, Burghley Visiting Fellow
Kaara L. Peterson is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University. Exploring the intersections of Renaissance medical history, art history, visual and material culture, and literature with an emphasis on Elizabeth I, her most current publications are Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, with Amy Kenny (Palgrave Macmillan), and The Afterlife of Ophelia, with Deanne Williams (Palgrave Macmillan), with other articles appearing in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, and Studies in Philology, among others, and in collected volumes. Previously she has held fellowships at Harvard University and the Folger and was a Plumer fellow, Oxford University (2019).
She will spend the term at St. John’s editing her manuscript A Natural History of Queen Elizabeth I: Early Modern Culture and the “Virgin Queen” and expanding research on Burghley’s papers, as well as working on court portraits in several Cambridge colleges.
Prof Helen Wilcox, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
I am Professor Emerita of English Literature at Bangor University, Wales, having previously taught at universities in England and The Netherlands. My research interests are in the literary and cultural history of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and I have spoken and published widely on devotional literature (particularly the poetry of George Herbert), women’s writing, early autobiography, Shakespearean tragicomedy, and the relationship between early modern literature and music. I have held visiting professorships in Spain, Singapore and the U.S.A., and I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Learned Society of Wales. During my term as a Beaufort Visiting Fellow, I shall be continuing the primary research for a book-length study of the literary, political and religious culture of 1633, a year which I regard as a turning-point in early modern British history and literature. This is a research project for which access to manuscripts and books from the college and university library collections will be immensely valuable. I shall also be completing my work on The Cambridge Companion to Devotional Poetry, a volume co-edited with Mark Oakley, former Dean of the college. We have brought together experts from across the globe to present a comprehensive study of the genre of devotional poetry, not only in the Christian tradition but also from the other major world faiths, addressing fundamental questions of belief, doubt, language and artistry.
Dr Francois Velde, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
I am an economist specializing in fiscal and monetary history, with interests spanning a variety of countries and centuries. During my visit I will be continuing work on Naples in the 16th and 17th c., as well as research on British debt management in the 18th century (taking advantage among other things of the Walpole papers at the CUL).
My webpage at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago is here: https://www.chicagofed.org/people/v/velde-francois
Richard Conyngham, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Richard Conyngham is a South African writer and educator with a background in civil-society activism. He holds an MPhil in English Studies from Queens’ College, Cambridge, and he is the author of the legal graphic history All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa – 1910-1948 (Jacana Media / Catalyst Press: 2021), an anthology of stories based on little-known appellate court records, with artwork by accomplished South African illustrators.
As a Colenso Visiting Fellow, Richard will be completing a second book featuring stories of runaway slaves, San, Khoi, Xhosa, Griqua and Zulu resistance to land dispossession in colonial South Africa. In his research and writing, he will be collaborating with Dr Nick Friedman, his sponsor, on relevant points of South African law.
Dr. Lloyd Demetrius, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Lloyd Demetrius is an Associate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
He is a mathematician with a particular interest in Statistical Thermodynamics and Mathematical Biology.
As a Beaufort Visiting Fellow, he will be working primarily on his current book project: Directionality Theory – a study of the evolutionary dynamics and collective behaviour of physical, biological and economic systems.
The book is an extensive elaboration of the Review: Boltzmann, Darwin and Directionality Theory, Physics Reports 2013, vol. 530, 2013
Homepage: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/lloyddemetrius
Anastasia Stylianou, Munby Fellow
Anastasia Stylianou is Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library and a Visiting Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge. Her research project is entitled ‘The Greeks Behind The Books: Cambridge University Library’s Hellenic Collections During The Early Modern Period.’During her Munby Fellowship, Anastasia is examining at the history of collection and use of Greek manuscripts and books in early modern Cambridge, especially in the University Library. She analyses how these works served as a point of contact between East and West, and explores how their production, transmission, circulation, and usage relates to their ethno-cultural history. Her project spans the period c. 1450 to c. 1660, from the eve of the Fall of Constantinople (1453) to the close of the Interregnum (1660), encompassing two centuries of dramatic bibliographical, intellectual, educational, politico-religious and socio-economic change, in both Britain and the wider world. Prior to taking up the Munby Fellowship in October 2023, Anastasia held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of East Anglia (2020-2023), exploring early modern Anglo-Hellenic networks. Previously, she was Principal Investigator and lead author for Victoria County History’s project on the parish of Cradley in Herefordshire (2019-20). She completed her PhD in early modern history at the University of Warwick in 2018, and has a PGCE and First-Class BA (Hons) in History from the University of Oxford.
Lent Term 2024
Prof Julia Rhyder, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Julia Rhyder is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is specialist of the Hebrew Bible with a particular interest in ritual texts and the history of the Israelite cult. In her research, Rhyder combines detailed philological analysis and the methods of historical criticism with the use of anthropological and social theories to illuminate the biblical text, including ritual theory, memory studies, postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis. During her time at St John’s, Julia will be advancing her new book project, tentatively entitled Celebrating War: Festivals and War Commemoration in the Hebrew Bible. In this work, Julia presents a new history of how war shaped Israelite religion from the oldest biblical traditions to the writings of the Second Temple era. She plans to use the time at St John’s to advance two chapters of her book that evaluate the potential evidence for annual festivals in the so-called psalms of enthronement and in the stories about the ark in Samuel–Kings.
Academic profile page from home institution: https://scholar.harvard.edu/juliarhyder/home
Jeffrey Murray, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Jeffrey Murray is Senior Lecturer in Classics in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on Latin prose and the history of classical scholarship. His most recently published book was a co-edited volume, Reading by Example: Valerius Maximus and the Historiography of Exempla (Leiden, 2022).
As a Colenso Fellow at St John’s, Murray will be working on his current book project, Small Latin and less Greek: Classics in Natal, 1843-2000, a history of classical scholarship and education in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa from the establishment of the Colony of Natal until the closure of the department of Classics at the University of Durban-Westville.
https://humanities.uct.ac.za/school-languages-literatures/classics/jeff…
Dr. Lloyd Demetrius, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Lloyd Demetrius is an Associate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
He is a mathematician with a particular interest in Statistical Thermodynamics and Mathematical Biology.
As a Beaufort Visiting Fellow, he will be working primarily on his current book project: Directionality Theory – a study of the evolutionary dynamics and collective behaviour of physical, biological and economic systems.
The book is an extensive elaboration of the Review: Boltzmann, Darwin and Directionality Theory, Physics Reports 2013, vol. 530, 2013
Homepage: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/lloyddemetrius
Professor Alberto Soares Correa, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Alberto Soares Correa is agronomist and Ph.D in Entomology. He is an associate professor at the Department of Entomology and Acarology at the University of São Paulo, campus of Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, in Brazil. Prof. Correa is a principal investigator in research projects associated with DNA barcoding, phylogeography, population genomics, and adaptation of insects (pests and natural enemies) in tropical agriculture landscapes. He also teaches entomology and insect molecular ecology classes and advises undergraduate and graduate students. During his stay at St John’s College, he will study the adaptative genomics of Helicoverpa armigera, a destructive agriculture pest that invaded Brazil ten years ago. Phenomenons associated with H. armigera's rapid dispersion, demographic expansion, resistance to pesticides and transgenic Bt crops, and hybridization with a native species, H. zea, will be explored using a genomic approach.
http://www.lea.esalq.usp.br/equipe/docente
Anastasia Stylianou, Munby Fellow
Anastasia Stylianou is Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library and a Visiting Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge. Her research project is entitled ‘The Greeks Behind The Books: Cambridge University Library’s Hellenic Collections During The Early Modern Period.’During her Munby Fellowship, Anastasia is examining at the history of collection and use of Greek manuscripts and books in early modern Cambridge, especially in the University Library. She analyses how these works served as a point of contact between East and West, and explores how their production, transmission, circulation, and usage relates to their ethno-cultural history. Her project spans the period c. 1450 to c. 1660, from the eve of the Fall of Constantinople (1453) to the close of the Interregnum (1660), encompassing two centuries of dramatic bibliographical, intellectual, educational, politico-religious and socio-economic change, in both Britain and the wider world. Prior to taking up the Munby Fellowship in October 2023, Anastasia held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of East Anglia (2020-2023), exploring early modern Anglo-Hellenic networks. Previously, she was Principal Investigator and lead author for Victoria County History’s project on the parish of Cradley in Herefordshire (2019-20). She completed her PhD in early modern history at the University of Warwick in 2018, and has a PGCE and First-Class BA (Hons) in History from the University of Oxford.
Michaelmas Term 2023
Professor Clare Rothschild, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Clare K. Rothschild is Professor of Scripture Studies at Lewis University (USA) and Professor Extraordinary, Department Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). She holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from the University of Chicago. Her main research interests are Luke-Acts, the Muratorian Fragment, and the Apostolic Fathers. Clare spent a year as Humboldt Fellow in Munich researching her book, Hebrews as Pseudepigraphon, on the Pauline attribution of this early Christian text. Having just completed a volume on the Muratorian Fragment, her current research focuses on the Epistle of Barnabas, on which she is preparing a commentary for the Hermeneia series. She serves as General Editor of Early Christianity as well as the SBL series, Writings of the Graeco-Roman World. In her spare time, she enjoys yoga and playing the cello in various small orchestras and ensembles. www.clarekrothschild.com
Professor Olga Klopp, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Olga Klopp is Full Professor of Statistics of the Department of Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics at ESSEC Business School. Her field of research is in high--dimensional statistics, and especially, in matrix completion and network models. She is a member of the ESSEC risk research centre CREAR and of CREST, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris. She has published her work in, inter alia, Journal of the American Statistical Association, NeurIPS, Annals of Statistics and Bernoulli Journal. She has been a visiting scholar at, inter alia, University of California- Berkeley, Cambridge University, Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), Research Triangle Park (NC) USA.
During her Fellowship at St John's she will be working with Prof.R.Samworth and his group on the topic of change point detection with missing links. Detecting possible changes in a temporal sequence of high-dimensional data is an important task in applications: it has attracted considerable attention in the past few years. This collaboration will focus on the challenging case when the data is only partially observed as missing values are a very common problem in the real life data.
André Vitória, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
André Vitória is a researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Medievais of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is a comparative historian of law and politics in the later Middle Ages, with a particular interest in the influence of juristic and publicist thought on legal and political practice. His current research project explores the role of civil litigation at the Paris Parlement in conceptualising, shaping and deploying ideas of public authority and political organisation in fifteenth-century France. He has previously worked on the impact of the Romano-canonical ius commune on the administration of justice, litigation and the relationship between different jurisdictions and political powers in Portugal (c. 1150 to 1350); and on the ways in which royal governments in England, France and Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries dealt with the problem of corruption. He is the author of several articles published in international journals and collective volumes and the editor (along with Ronald Kroeze and G. Geltner) of Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) which has been translated into Chinese and Arabic. For further details, please visit https://novaresearch.unl.pt/en/persons/andré-miguel-da-cunha-vitória and https://fcsh-pt.academia.edu/AndreVitoria.
Norman Jones, Burghley Fellow
Norman Jones is Prof. of History, Emeritus, Utah State University.
An Historian of Tudor England, his most recent books are Governing by Virtue. Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England and Being Elizabethan. Understanding Shakespeare’s Neighbors.
As a Lord Burghley Fellow, Jones’ research focuses on the role of William Cecil, Lord Burghley as Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1559 until 1598. A Johannine, he studied Greek under Sir John Cheke before becoming a Principal Secretary for Edward VI. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in November 1558, he became the most important man in her government for the next forty years. As Chancellor Burghley oversaw the conversion of the University to a collegiate system, so it could be better controlled. Burghley played an active role in Cambridge's governance his entire career. Jones will be using the archives of the University and the colleges to understand how Burghley interacted with them, refereeing disputes between colleges and fellows, battles between town and gown, and fights over ideological conformity. Jones will especially be exploring the archives of St. John’s, since Burghley and his wife Mildred were major donors of money and books to the College. This research is part of a larger study on how Burghley led Elizabethan state formation developing formal solutions to problems such as recurring plagues, religious tensions, and fiscal crises.
Easter Term 2023
Dr Majid Daneshgar, Munby Fellow in Bibliography, Cambridge University Library
Dr Daneshgar is an alumnus of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), Germany. He was also the Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union and a Drewes Fellow of the Leiden University Library, the Netherlands. He was the George Grey Scholar of the Auckland Libraries in 2017, through which he catalogued all known Islamic manuscripts throughout New Zealand. His expertise lies in Muslim intellectual thought, Islamic manuscripts, orientalism, Malay-Indonesian Islam, and method and theory in the study of religion. His monograph, Studying the Quran in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press 2020), was nominated for the best publication prize in 2022. He also published his thesis on science in modern Egyptian Quranic commentaries with Routledge in 2018. His main edited volumes are Malay-Indonesian Islamic Studies (Brill 2022), Deconstructing Islamic Studies (ILEX-Harvard University Press, 2020), Islamic Studies Today (Brill 2017) and The Quran in the Malay-Indonesian World (Routledge 2016). As a guest editor, he produced a thematic special issue “On the Future of Islam and Science: Philosophical Grounds” with Zygon Journal of Religion and Science in 2020. His works pertaining to Islamic manuscript studies are found in Der Islam (2021), Dabir (2020; 2021), Archipel (2018), Indonesia and the Malay World (2015, 2020, 2022), among others.
As a Munby Fellow, Majid focuses on some very old, unknown, and rare Malay-Indonesian manuscripts. He examines their philological and intellectual connections with further materials in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani (and Dakhni), Ottoman Turkish, Punjabi, etc.
Professor Ron Hendel, University of California, Berkeley, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Ronald Hendel is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, in the field of Hebrew Bible. He is the author of many works on the religion, literature, and language of the Hebrew Bible, including The Book of Genesis: A Biography; Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary; Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible; and How Old is the Hebrew Bible? He is general editor of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, and lives in California with his wife, Ann, his mountain bike, and several guitars.
During his Fellowship at St John's he will be working on a critical (eclectic) edition of Genesis with text-critical commentary.
Dr Dalia Marx, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Taube Family Campus, Jerusalem, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD, is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at HUC-JIR’s Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem, and teaches in various academic institutions in Israel and Europe.
Dalia, a tenth generation in Jerusalem, earned her doctorate at the Hebrew University and her rabbinic ordination at HUC-JIR in Jerusalem and Cincinnati in 2002. She is involved in various research projects and is active in promoting liberal Judaism in Israel. Marx writes for academic and popular journals and publications.
She is the author of When I Sleep and When I Wake: On Prayers between Dusk and Dawn (Yediot Sfarim, 2010, in Hebrew), A Feminist Commentary of the Babylonian Talmud (Mohr Siebeck, 2013, in English), About Time: Journeys in the Jewish-Israeli Calendar (Yediot Sfarim, 2018, in Hebrew) and the co-editor of a few books.
Dalia lives in Jerusalem with her husband Roly Zyblersztein, PhD. They have three children.
During her stay in St John’s College, she mainly plans to work on, and hopefully complete, the draft of her book, Introduction to Jewish Prayer (working title). Her intention is to provide a volume that contains three parts, the first deals with the structure of the prayers, the second with the development of Jewish liturgy from the Bible to our days, and the third, with liturgical, theological, ideological matters in liturgy.
One of the features that are unique to this publication is that it deals with contemporary issues such as the influence of the existence of the State of Israel on the liturgy and gender-related issues.
Professor Carmel Mothersill, McMaster University, Ontario, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Carmel Mothersill trained as a zoologist in University College Dublin in Ireland and obtained her PhD in 1976 in muscle biochemistry before joining the Physics Department at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), now the Technological University of Dublin, as a radiobiologist. She worked as a post-doctoral Fellow in St Luke’s Hospital in Dublin, then the only radiotherapy centre in Ireland under a joint agreement with DIT. Later she developed and ran the Radiation and Environmental Science Centre at DIT until moving to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 2003 to take up a Canada Research Chair in Radiobiology.
Her research interests include the non-targeted effects of radiation and in particular, how bystander effect and genomic instability modify the low dose radiation response curve. She is also interested in the mechanisms underlying non-targeted effects of radiation, which might be exploitable in the treatment of cancer. More recently she has become interested in the contribution of non-targeted effects to persistent environmental radiation damage and is trying to develop new approaches to radiation protection of humans and the environment. Professor Mothersill has more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and is a contributor to many books concerning cancer therapy, radiation protection and radiobiology. She has trained more than 60 students to PhD level. In addition she has successfully run Irish, European Union and Canadian research programmes, and has organised major European and International conferences and workshops. Carmel is married to fellow radiobiologist Dr Colin Seymour and has three daughters, and a dog called Beanie!
While at St John’s College, Professor Mothersill will be working with Dr David Williams on mechanisms involved in low dose radiation cataractogenesis. Together they will develop models for monitoring low dose radiation impacts on animals in contaminated areas.
Dr Dennis Sandgathe, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Dennis Sandgathe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, where he teaches courses on human evolution, prehistory of the Old World, and stone tool technology. His broad research interest is in hominin evolution and the Palaeolithic/Stone Age period and publishes primarily on Neandertals and Palaeolithic adaptations in Western Europe. Over the last 20 years he has been excavating cave sites in South-West France investigating Palaeolithic use of fire and Neandertal mortuary behaviour: this latter research involves examining the evidence that hominins intentionally buried their dead during the Middle Palaeolithic period.
He will be using his time at St Johns to compile palaeontological data from across Europe on the taphonomy and patterns of skeletal preservation observed among other large predator species that shared the Pleistocene landscape with Neandertals.
Simon Fraser University Department of Archaeology profile page
'Old Stone Age' projects website
Professor Arthid Sheravanichkul, Chulalongkorn University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Arthid Sheravanichkul is Assistant Professor of the Department of Thai (Thai Programme) and the Thai Studies Centre (International Programme), Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. He has taught Thai Literature since 2004 and Thai Buddhism since 2010. Arthid’s research interests include Thai Buddhist narratives and Thai Buddhist culture. His recent publication, published in June 2022, is a book on the relation between Jātakas, the Buddhaʼs birth stories, and Thai literary culture.
During Arthid’s short stay at St John’s College as a Beaufort Visiting Fellow, sponsored by Dr Tomas Larsson, he plans to finish two research papers on the concept of gift-giving as appeared in the Thai Royal Question and Answer Text (the Pucchā-Visajjanā) and on the Thai Buddhist chanting tradition as nurtured by Thai monarchs.
Professor Sameh Tawfick, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Sam is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sam studies advanced materials and manufacturing processes, including self-organization, artificial muscles, and additive manufacturing. He is the recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Program, the Chao and Trigger Young Manufacturing Engineer from ASME, the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer by SME, The Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence and the Two-year Alumni Teaching Award from the University of Illinois.
Lent Term 2023
Dr Ann Benson, Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
After a long academic career in science education at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, and the Open University and as a consultant on assessment for the U.K.’s Cabinet Office and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), Ann decided to focus on her love of historical research and took an archaeological, garden and architectural history MA at Bristol University (Distinction, 2012). Ann is now a writer and lecturer on Garden and Architectural History specializing in the Tudor and Stuart periods within the United Kingdom. She has published three research-based books and many papers in these fields and was awarded FSA in 2015 and FRHistS in 2019. Ann’s current research is on the designed landscape history of the medieval and Tudor colleges of the University of Cambridge, and for which she was awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship funding (2018-19). St John’s Beaufort Visiting Fellowship in 2020 supports the writing of her research for publication in journals, a book proposal for Yale University Press and the preparation of college exhibitions.
Professor Laura Mondiello, Conservatoire of Bolzano, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Laura Mondiello is Professor of guitar at the Monteverdi Conservatoire in Bolzano (Italy). Her multiple activities range from recording and giving recitals, to teaching and organising international events (masterclasses, study days, exhibitions). Among her CDs are two solo albums – La Guitare et l’organiste, with her own transcriptions of organ music by César Franck (Stradivarius, 2013), and Laura Plays Laura (Stradivarius 2022) – and a number of recordings in various ensemble formations, including two CDs in duo with Stefano Grondona (Homenaje and Humoresque).
In collaboration with choreographer-dancers Emanuela Mondiello and Luca Russo she devised the Nocturnal Dance Project, a production based on Benjamin Britten’s solo guitar composition Nocturnal after John Dowland, op. 70. Laura’s interest in historical lutherie is also reflected in her working relationship with numerous period instruments – guitars built in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by Antonio de Torres, Manuel Ramírez, Santos Hernández, Enrique García, Francisco Simplicio, Domingo Esteso and Vicente Arias.
During her stay at St John’s College, she will focus on a project that will examine the intersection of aspects of guitar-making with aspects of the theory and practice of transcription for guitar, with an especial focus on Bach’s compositions originally written for keyboard, violin or cello. The project is also aimed at having repercussions on her didactic work, bringing it in line with recent developments in performance practice.
Professor Mondiello is sponsored by Dr Stefano Castelvecchi.
Dr Paul Murray, Diocesan College, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Dr Paul L. Murray is a retired teacher of History at Diocesan College, Rondebosch, Cape Town who currently works as the school Historian and Archivist. He has served as National Examiner and Moderator for History. He was the Head of Department of History at Bishops for 25 years (1993 – 2018). Before coming to Bishops in 1991, he taught at St. John’s College, Johannesburg where he began his teaching career in the early eighties. For his BA degree he majored in Latin & Italian at Stellenbosch University and furthered his studies in Italian Language and Literature at the University of Florence, Italy in 1978/9.
He pursued further studies in the fields of Literature and History. For this, he obtained his MA cum laude from the University of Stellenbosch in 2002 with his thesis entitled ‘The historiographic metafiction of Etienne van Heerden’ (University of Stellenbosch, 2002). He subsequently pursued studies in the Historical Sciences for which he was awarded the DPhil degree for his thesis entitled ‘C Louis Leipoldt’s The Valley: constructing an alternative past?’ (University of Pretoria, 2012). Subsequently, he conducted studies in the field of South African political biography for which his thesis was accepted at the University of South Africa in June 2022, entitled ‘The political life of Jacob Daniel Du Plessis Basson, 1937 – 1989’ for which he was awarded a PhD (in absentia) in November 2022.
His area of interest now moves into the life, work and times of Bishop John W. Colenso, a Second Wrangler and Smith’s Prizeman at St John’s after which he became a fellow in 1837. Dr Murray’s specific area of research whilst at Cambridge will be the Correspondence of Bishop Colenso, curated in the African Studies section of the Cambridge Library Collection with the view to a publication of a monograph for the Historical Publications Southern Africa (HISPA, established in 1918).
Professor Sameh Tawfick, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Sam is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sam studies advanced materials and manufacturing processes, including self-organization, artificial muscles, and additive manufacturing. He is the recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Program, the Chao and Trigger Young Manufacturing Engineer from ASME, the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer by SME, The Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence and the Two-year Alumni Teaching Award from the University of Illinois.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign profile page
Professor Georgia Gotsi, University of Patras, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Georgia Gotsi (PhD King’s College London) is Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Patras, Greece, and Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow. Georgia has taught Comparative Literature at Brown University (1996-2003) and held visiting fellowships at the Remarque Institute of New York University, and at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplio.
Her research focuses on the reception and translation of European and North American literatures in Greece, the cultural biography of antiquities, the Jewish as well as the immigrant presence in contemporary Greek fiction, the formation of cultural networks between Greece and Great Britain. She is the author of numerous articles and of three books: Life in the Capital: Topics in Late Nineteenth Century Prose Fiction (Athens 2004, in Greek), “The Internationalization of Imagination”: Relations of Greek and Foreign Literatures in the Nineteenth Century (Athens 2010, in Greek; for this book she was co-awarded the National Book Prize), and Elizabeth M. Edmonds: The Victorian Biographer of Rigas. Introduction-Text-Notes (Athens 2020). Georgia’s recently published book, Languages, Identities and Cultural Transfers. Modern Greeks in the European Press (Amsterdam 2021), is a co-edited (with D. Provata) volume that examines the reception of medieval and modern Greece in the European press of the later nineteenth century, analysing journals and newspapers published in England, France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands.
During her stay at St. John’s College, Georgia will work primarily on a project that explores the reception of modern Greek literature, mainly poetry, in Britain in the period extending from the Greek War of Independence (1821) to the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on issues of translation, gender as well as on the politics of cultural mediation.
Some of her publications are available here.
Professor Paul Russell, Lund University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Paul Russell is Professor of Philosophy at Lund University, where he also serves as Director of the Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP). His research interests cover the areas of free will and moral responsibility along with various topics in early modern philosophy. Within the area of free will and moral responsibility he is particularly interested in the challenge of scepticism and theories of responsibility that appeal to reactive attitudes or moral sentiments. On the subject of early modern philosophy he is especially concerned with the philosophy of David Hume and how his philosophy relates to problems of religion and atheism. During his stay at St John's he plans to write A Very Short Introduction to Moral Responsibility for Oxford University Press.
For more information please visit Paul Russell's website.
Professor Maren Niehoff, Hebrew University, Bleehen Visiting Fellow
Maren Niehoff is Max Cooper Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her research focuses on ancient Judaism in its encounters with Greco-Roman Culture. She specializes on Philo of Alexandria, Paul and Rabbinic Literature. Among her recent publications are Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (Yale University Press 2018, winner of the Polonsky Prize 2019) and Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge University Press 2011, winner of the Polonsky Prize 2011). At St John’s she plans to work on a new monograph, a commentary on Philo’s treatise On the Freedom of Every Righteous, which places Philo in the context of broader cultural discourses of the first century CE.
Michaelmas Term 2022
Dr Ann Benson, Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
After a long academic career in science education at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, and the Open University and as a consultant on assessment for the U.K.’s Cabinet Office and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), Ann decided to focus on her love of historical research and took an archaeological, garden and architectural history MA at Bristol University (Distinction, 2012). Ann is now a writer and lecturer on Garden and Architectural History specializing in the Tudor and Stuart periods within the United Kingdom. She has published three research-based books and many papers in these fields and was awarded FSA in 2015 and FRHistS in 2019. Ann’s current research is on the designed landscape history of the medieval and Tudor colleges of the University of Cambridge, and for which she was awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship funding (2018-19). St John’s Beaufort Visiting Fellowship in 2020 supports the writing of her research for publication in journals, a book proposal for Yale University Press and the preparation of college exhibitions.
Professor Laura Mondiello, Conservatoire of Bolzano, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Laura Mondiello is Professor of guitar at the Monteverdi Conservatoire in Bolzano (Italy). Her multiple activities range from recording and giving recitals, to teaching and organising international events (masterclasses, study days, exhibitions). Among her CDs are two solo albums – La Guitare et l’organiste, with her own transcriptions of organ music by César Franck (Stradivarius, 2013), and Laura Plays Laura (Stradivarius 2022) – and a number of recordings in various ensemble formations, including two CDs in duo with Stefano Grondona (Homenaje and Humoresque).
In collaboration with choreographer-dancers Emanuela Mondiello and Luca Russo she devised the Nocturnal Dance Project, a production based on Benjamin Britten’s solo guitar composition Nocturnal after John Dowland, op. 70. Laura’s interest in historical lutherie is also reflected in her working relationship with numerous period instruments – guitars built in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by Antonio de Torres, Manuel Ramírez, Santos Hernández, Enrique García, Francisco Simplicio, Domingo Esteso and Vicente Arias.
During her stay at St John’s College, she will focus on a project that will examine the intersection of aspects of guitar-making with aspects of the theory and practice of transcription for guitar, with an especial focus on Bach’s compositions originally written for keyboard, violin or cello. The project is also aimed at having repercussions on her didactic work, bringing it in line with recent developments in performance practice.
Professor Mondiello is sponsored by Dr Stefano Castelvecchi.
Dr Paul Murray, Diocesan College, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Dr Paul L. Murray is a retired teacher of History at Diocesan College, Rondebosch, Cape Town who currently works as the school Historian and Archivist. He has served as National Examiner and Moderator for History. He was the Head of Department of History at Bishops for 25 years (1993 – 2018). Before coming to Bishops in 1991, he taught at St. John’s College, Johannesburg where he began his teaching career in the early eighties. For his BA degree he majored in Latin & Italian at Stellenbosch University and furthered his studies in Italian Language and Literature at the University of Florence, Italy in 1978/9.
He pursued further studies in the fields of Literature and History. For this, he obtained his MA cum laude from the University of Stellenbosch in 2002 with his thesis entitled ‘The historiographic metafiction of Etienne van Heerden’ (University of Stellenbosch, 2002). He subsequently pursued studies in the Historical Sciences for which he was awarded the DPhil degree for his thesis entitled ‘C Louis Leipoldt’s The Valley: constructing an alternative past?’ (University of Pretoria, 2012). Subsequently, he conducted studies in the field of South African political biography for which his thesis was accepted at the University of South Africa in June 2022, entitled ‘The political life of Jacob Daniel Du Plessis Basson, 1937 – 1989’.
His area of interest now moves into the life, work and times of Bishop John W. Colenso, a Second Wrangler and Smith’s Prizeman at St John’s after which he became a fellow in 1837. Dr Murray’s specific area of research whilst at Cambridge will be the Correspondence of Bishop Colenso, curated in the African Studies section of the Cambridge Library Collection with the view to a publication of a monograph for the Historical Publications Southern Africa (HISPA, established in 1918).
Dr Dan Teodorovici, University of Stuttgart, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Dan Teodorovici (*1972 in Braşov / Kronstadt, Romania) is an architectural and planning historian and curator trained at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Stuttgart (1993-2000), where he is currently working as senior researcher at the Institute of Urban Planning.
He got his PhD in 2010 with a study on Romanian cosmopolitan architect and Palladian George Matei Cantacuzino (1899–1960).
As a practicing architect Dan has worked in Stuttgart and Paris, with his expertise encompassing projects of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture.
Since 2012 he has curated exhibitions in Germany, England and Romania, and is committed to the sustainable and inclusive urban development of Stuttgart through the Civic Association Info-Laden Rosenstein. His writings include publications in German, English, Romanian and Chinese (English monograph on Cantacuzino in 2014).
His research interests include International Urbanism, Classicism, Palladianism, planning history, conservation and infrastructural urbanism, along with interactions between traditions and Modernism.
In co-operation with his sponsor, professor Deborah Howard, Dan will devote his research care at St John´s College to the urbanistic aspects in the work of late Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). Because Palladio is one of the most influential architects and theoreticians of all time, his legacy has prompted ample research in architectural history, but Dan´s approach will try to see his work in a new light. Both Palladio’s writings and his designs reveal a sensibility towards urbanism that permeates his architectural vision. Dan´s approach will focus of the intrinsic urban aspects of Palladio´s works, especially on how Palladio´s projects generate or help to generating high quality urban spaces, for instance in terms of how they relate to the existing urban fabric, and how they mediate between inner spaces and courtyards on the one hand, and public space on the other. His study proposes to add a new aspect to the understanding of Palladio’s complex work and ongoing influence.
Professor Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs), Johns Hopkins University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Laura Vasilyeva is Assistant Professor of Music History at Johns Hopkins University (Peabody Institute). Her research - at the broadest level - concerns sound and music since 1800. Her first book, Opera and the Built Environment, centres on an architectural form built thousands of times over since the 1800s across the globe: the teatro all’italiana, a theatre now known for its characteristic tiers of stacked boxes and dominant red hue. The main claim of the book is that our understanding of what opera means - and has meant - is transformed when we explore the surfaces, thresholds, and unexamined recesses common to these structures. Opera emerges as indivisible from these architectural structures and the politics which shaped their construction and standardisation. While a Visiting Fellow, Professor Vasilyeva will build on this manuscript, commencing work on a second book, Skin: Musical Encounters at the Surface. This book explores the importance of dermal surfaces in how we think about music. From the racialisation of sonic encounters to the role of skin in instrumental method manuals, the book examines the meanings that inhere in these membranes between inner and outer worlds.
Professor Vasilyeva is sponsored by Professor John Rink.
Easter Term 2022
Professor Maoz Kahana, Tel Aviv University, Visiting Fellow
Maoz Kahana is an Associate Professor in the Jewish History Department, Tel Aviv University, Israel. His research focuses on deciphering and elucidating rabbinical literature and Jewish law and legal cultures within the social and intellectual contexts of the early modern European history as well as its minority Jewish culture. His research and teaching integrates intellectual and social history; legal and cultural methods. Characteristic themes of his work are print and book history, the scientific revolution, magic, law, and the divine, Sabbateanism and Rabbi's allure to Sabbatean literature, Chassidic Halakhic writings, Jewish legal cultures and European romanticism, the emergence of European coffeehouses, and others.
His second book, A Heartless Chicken and Other Wonders: Religion and Science in Early Modern Rabbinic Culture, was published (2021) in Bialik Institute Publishing House, Jerusalem was recently nominated for the best book in Jewish Thought for the years 2019-2021. His current work, which he will work on during his stay in St. John's, explores the ways in which European materials and methods found their way into the heart of rabbinic Jewish literature of the 16th-19th centuries. Among the topics he discusses are Greco-Roman mythology, humanistic philology, and ways of religious thinking about time and history.
https://telaviv.academia.edu/MaozKahana/
http://humanities1.tau.ac.il/segel/maozk/
Dr Sandra Booysen, National University of Singapore, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Sandra Booysen is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, where she currently serves as Deputy-Director of the Centre for Banking & Finance Law and Editor-in-Chief of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies. Sandra’s research interests are in the fields of contract, consumer protection and banking law. Sandra’s recently published book, Financial Advice and Investor Protection (Edward Elgar, 2021) is an edited volume that examines various facets of investor protection, particularly retail investor protection, from a comparative angle. Prior to joining academia, Sandra practiced law in London and Johannesburg, with a focus on commercial litigation, and is admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales, and as an attorney and notary in South Africa. During the period of her visit to St John’s College, Sandra will be working primarily on a variety of topics concerning banking law. She will also be developing a joint paper which she is co-authoring with Dr Jodi Gardner on the judicial portrayal of women in private law.
Professor Saul M. Olyan, Brown University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Saul M. Olyan is Samuel Ungerleider Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI, where he has taught since 1992. He is the author of books, articles and essays in the areas of biblical literature, history and religion; his most recent authored books are Violent Rituals of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Friendship in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2017). During his stay at St John’s College, he intends to concentrate on research and writing related to his current book project entitled Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible. The focus of his efforts will be the completion of a chapter of the book entitled “Animal Culpability and Its Ramifications for Legal Status” and the drafting of the book’s conclusion.
Professor Jim Dalling, University of Illinois, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor James Dalling is a Professor of Ecology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His research interests focus on how tree species diversity is maintained in neotropical forests, and on plant community responses to global change on tropical mountains. He recently published a book Fortuna Forest Reserve, Panama: Interacting Effects of Climate and Soils on the Biota of a Wet Premontane Tropical Forest (Smithsonian Contributions to Botany No. 112). While at Cambridge he will work on a review integrating the role of biotic interactions between plants, their seed dispersers, and their microbial mutualists into predictions of future community assembly under climate change.
Prof. Dalling’s current research projects are described at publish.illinois.edu/dalling
Dr Ann Benson, Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
After a long academic career in science education at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, and the Open University and as a consultant on assessment for the U.K.’s Cabinet Office and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), Ann decided to focus on her love of historical research and took an archaeological, garden and architectural history MA at Bristol University (Distinction, 2012). Ann is now a writer and lecturer on Garden and Architectural History specializing in the Tudor and Stuart periods within the United Kingdom. She has published three research-based books and many papers in these fields and was awarded FSA in 2015 and FRHistS in 2019. Ann’s current research is on the designed landscape history of the medieval and Tudor colleges of the University of Cambridge, and for which she was awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship funding (2018-19). St John’s Beaufort Visiting Fellowship in 2020 supports the writing of her research for publication in journals, a book proposal for Yale University Press and the preparation of college exhibitions.
Professor David Cressy, Claremont Graduate University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor David Cressy is Research Professor in Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, California, and George III Professor of British History Emeritus at Ohio State University.
His publications include Gypsies: An English History (Oxford, OUP, 2018), England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles (Oxford, OUP, 2020), and Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea (Oxford, OUP, in press for 2022).
Sponsored by the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation, David’s research at Cambridge will examine the multitasking virtuoso administration of William Cecil, first Baron Burghley (1520-1598), student at St John’s 1535-40, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 1559-98, and Principal Secretary to Queen Elizabeth I. Its initial focus will be on Cecil’s handling of a crisis in the political, commercial, and legal affairs of three kingdoms, precipitated by a shipwreck on the coast of Northumberland. Cecil’s primary concerns included the security of the realm, the safety of the queen, the welfare of the kingdom, and relations with England’s neighbours. But during 1565-6 he required all his skill to assuage northern magnates, to placate Dutch merchants, and to fend off claims from Mary Queen of Scots, while upholding the law of the land and the law of the sea. Further distraction during these months involved the ‘riotous insolency’ and ‘wild fury broken loose’ in St John’s College over the wearing of caps and surplices that some fellows decried as ‘popish trumpery’. Other claims on Cecil’s attention included his suffering from sciatica and gout, and the birth of his first grandson in January 1566. Extensive documentation reveals Cecil’s ability to keep multiple threads of thought running simultaneously, with application both to grand strategy and the needs of the moment.
Professor Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs), Johns Hopkins University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Laura Vasilyeva is Assistant Professor of Music History at Johns Hopkins University (Peabody Institute). Her research - at the broadest level - concerns sound and music since 1800. Her first book, Opera and the Built Environment, centres on an architectural form built thousands of times over since the 1800s across the globe: the teatro all’italiana, a theatre now known for its characteristic tiers of stacked boxes and dominant red hue. The main claim of the book is that our understanding of what opera means - and has meant - is transformed when we explore the surfaces, thresholds, and unexamined recesses common to these structures. Opera emerges as indivisible from these architectural structures and the politics which shaped their construction and standardisation. While a Visiting Fellow, Professor Vasilyeva will build on this manuscript, commencing work on a second book, Skin: Musical Encounters at the Surface. This book explores the importance of dermal surfaces in how we think about music. From the racialisation of sonic encounters to the role of skin in instrumental method manuals, the book examines the meanings that inhere in these membranes between inner and outer worlds.
Professor Vasilyeva is sponsored by Professor John Rink.
Professor Judith Frishman, Leiden University, Netherlands, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Judith Frishman is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies at Leiden University where she headed the programmes of the Leiden Centre for the Study of Religion in 2015-2019.
She was a member of the advisory board of the project "Dynamics of Ritual Practices in Judaism in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present" at the Max Weber Kolleg, Universität Erfurt between 2015-2020 and was awarded fellowships there in the autumn of 2018 and 2019.
Project proposals:
The study of Jews and Judaism in modernity has increasingly engaged the interest of scholars over the past 50 years. Prof Frishman's fascination is with the effects of Enlightenment and modernity on Jewish identity, both collective and individual, in Western Europe. The link between the rise of nationalism and the majority religion in the 19th c. brought about a rethinking of what it meant to be Jewish. Having lost political autonomy yet accused of double loyalty, Jews sought to redefine themselves in terms of a religious denomination. How Jews then reformed and recast their religion, engaging in polemics with Christianity and the Christian majority has been the topic of much of her research. The parallels with the present debates concerning Islam and the integration of Muslims in Western Europe seem obvious, yet no one has as yet made a concerted effort to compare the integration of these two minority groups.
During her fellowship at Cambridge Prof Frishman hopes to work closely with the colleagues at the Cambridge Interfaith Programme with the aim of preparing a grant proposal to do this comparative work.
Additionally, she would like to commence research on the transnational development of Reform Judaism based on hitherto unpublished Rabbinic Correspondence. More specifically, her focus will be on the development of the thoughts of two radical reformers: Samuel Hirsch and David Einhorn (and, in so far as relevant, Hirsch’s son Emil G. Hirsch).
Professor Frishman is sponsored by Dr MacDonald.
Lent Term 2022
Professor Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs), Johns Hopkins University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Laura Vasilyeva is Assistant Professor of Music History at Johns Hopkins University (Peabody Institute). Her research - at the broadest level - concerns sound and music since 1800. Her first book, Opera and the Built Environment, centres on an architectural form built thousands of times over since the 1800s across the globe: the teatro all’italiana, a theatre now known for its characteristic tiers of stacked boxes and dominant red hue. The main claim of the book is that our understanding of what opera means - and has meant - is transformed when we explore the surfaces, thresholds, and unexamined recesses common to these structures. Opera emerges as indivisible from these architectural structures and the politics which shaped their construction and standardisation. While a Visiting Fellow, Professor Vasilyeva will build on this manuscript, commencing work on a second book, Skin: Musical Encounters at the Surface. This book explores the importance of dermal surfaces in how we think about music. From the racialisation of sonic encounters to the role of skin in instrumental method manuals, the book examines the meanings that inhere in these membranes between inner and outer worlds.
Professor Vasilyeva is sponsored by Professor John Rink.