Visiting Scholars Archive
Michaelmas Term 2021
Professor Ariane Burke, Université de Montreal, Canada, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Prof Ariane Burke is an archaeologist based at the Université de Montréal (Canada) where she directs the Ecomorphology and Palaeoanthropology Laboratory and leads the Hominin Dispersals Research Group. Her research activities focus on human/environment interactions during Prehistory, the archaeology of climate change and spatial cognition. Prof Burke uses interdisciplinary approaches, including spatial analysis and modelling techniques, to assess the impact of climate change on human systems, population dynamics, gene flow and ultimately, patterns of cultural evolution. Her research on spatial cognition and more specifically, human wayfinding, is what brings her to Cambridge where she will complete a research project designed to quantify variability in human spatial cognition as a function of sex and/or age and explore its evolutionary implications.
Professor Burke is sponsored by Professor Barker.
Find out more about her research projects at www.hominindispersals.net
Professor Philip Clart, Leipzig University, Germany, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Philip Clart is Professor of Chinese Culture and History at Leipzig University, Germany. He received his PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1997; prior to coming to Leipzig he taught at the University of British Columbia (1996-1998) and at the University of Missouri-Columbia (1998-2008). He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chinese Religions, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
His main research areas are popular religion and new religious movements in Taiwan, religious change and state/religion relations in China, as well as literature and religions of the late imperial period (10th–19th c.).
During his two terms at St John’s College he will be working on a book manuscript with the tentative title The Continuing Adventures of Han Xiangzi: Popular Literature and Religion in China (17th–20th c.). This will be the summation and conclusion of a long-running project on the cycle of legends surrounding the Daoist immortal Han Xiangzi, which he began with an integral translation of an early 17th-century novel (published by University of Washington Press in 2007). He will carry the story forward to the diversification of the narrative in various genres of popular literature through the Qing and Republican periods (1644–1949), including narrative ballads (daoqing and gece), prosimetric tales (baojuan), and local opera.
In addition, he plans to carry out supplementary library research on extant nineteenth and early 20th-century Han Xiangzi text editions in British collections, in particular in the libraries of the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the British Library.
Professor Philip Clart is sponsored by Dr Adam Yuet Chau.
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.
Professor Andrea Gamberini, FRHistS, University of Milan, Italy, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Andrea Gamberini is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Milan. His research interests focus on Late Medieval Italy and fall into three main strands: political and social history of the 13th-15th centuries (with special attention for the state-building process, the relations between city and countryside, and social mobility), political languages and communication (both written media and visual culture/iconography), and ecclesiastical history (mainly the episcopate).
Andrea’s latest book is The Clash of Legitimacy: The State-Building Process in Late Medieval Lombardy, Oxford, OUP, 2018.
While at St John’s, he proposes to study the representations of hell and sinners in the many Last Judgements’ frescoes painted across the Italian peninsula between the 14th and 15th centuries: although the seven capital sins never changed throughout the Middle Ages (at most they changed their ranking), their visual exemplification varied from place to place and over the course of time. To the question “who goes to hell?”, the stances expressed in paintings by cities and communities were indeed quite different and the outcome was a series of sinners’ galleries having diverse features in different places. Local tensions tended, in short, to reflect themselves in Last Judgement paintings. Hence his interest in visual sources generally overlooked by historians.
Professor Gamberini is sponsored by Professor Patrick Boyde.
Professor Yasunori Kasai, Tokyo University, Japan, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Having read firstly law at Tokyo (LL.B. 1978) and then classics at Bristol (PhD 1992), Professor Kasai has been working widely on law, religion and forensic oratory of the Ancient Greece and Rome. Before becoming Professor of Classics at Tokyo University (now emeritus), he taught law and classics at Niigata University and Otsuma Women’s University. In his doctoral study of peitho and its middle voice, peithomai in Homer, he argues that the two distinct types of behaviour and speech are envisaged in Homer; the one is ‘defiance’, confronting and defying the other party which is represented by the active (and passive) voice of peitho, the other is ‘compliance’ or ‘compromise’, which is represented by the middle voice peithomai. The research at St John’s College in Cambridge will, he hopes, help to develop his ideas and explore Greeks’ attitudes towards the conflicts and disputes in legal, economic, religious, and philosophical contexts. He hopes, eventually, to write a book (provisionally entitled) The Greeks on Compromise.
He had the privilege of being elected to Visiting Fellow of Balliol College (1999-2000), the sister college of St John’s.
Professor Kasai is sponsored by Professor Tim Whitmarsh.
Summer 2021
Professor Jeremy Schmit, Kansas State University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Schmit uses theoretical physics to understand the behaviour of systems containing large numbers of biomolecules. These systems exhibit complex phenomena, such as aggregation, phase transitions, self-assembly, and viscosity, that cannot be inferred from the properties of individual molecules. These emergent properties play an important role in cellular organisation, neurodegenerative diseases, and the formulation of therapeutic molecules.
Professor Schmit is sponsored by Professor Knowles.
Easter Term 2021
Dr Vivienne Westbrook, KIMEP University Kazakhstan, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Vivienne Westbrook is a Cultural Historian, a Professor of English and Cultural Studies and the Research Director for the College of Humanities and Education at KIMEP University in Kazakhstan. She is an Honorary Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Sciences and the School of English and Cultural Studies as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the Oceans Institute, the University of Western Australia.
Viv is currently the General Editor of four series that span the areas of Humour Studies, Animal Studies, Memoir and Maritime History and Culture. She is also the Editor of a new journal at KIMEP University: Language, Culture, Environment. During her Lady Margaret Beaufort Fellowship, she will, primarily, be working on a volume in the Oceans, Seas and Shorelines: a natural and cultural environmental history series with Dr. Mark Nicholls.
Dr Westbrook is sponsored by Dr Nicholls.
Find out more about her research projects at https://viviennewestbrook.com
Lent Term 2021
Dr Vivienne Westbrook, KIMEP University Kazakhstan, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Vivienne Westbrook is a Cultural Historian, a Professor of English and Cultural Studies and the Research Director for the College of Humanities and Education at KIMEP University in Kazakhstan. She is an Honorary Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Sciences and the School of English and Cultural Studies as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the Oceans Institute, the University of Western Australia.
Viv is currently the General Editor of four series that span the areas of Humour Studies, Animal Studies, Memoir and Maritime History and Culture. She is also the Editor of a new journal at KIMEP University: Language, Culture, Environment. During her Lady Margaret Beaufort Fellowship, she will, primarily, be working on a volume in the Oceans, Seas and Shorelines: a natural and cultural environmental history series with Dr. Mark Nicholls.
Dr Westbrook is sponsored by Dr Nicholls.
Find out more about her research projects at https://viviennewestbrook.com
Michaelmas Term 2020
Dr Vivienne Westbrook, KIMEP University Kazakhstan, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Vivienne Westbrook is a Cultural Historian, a Professor of English and Cultural Studies and the Research Director for the College of Humanities and Education at KIMEP University in Kazakhstan. She is an Honorary Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Sciences and the School of English and Cultural Studies as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the Oceans Institute, the University of Western Australia.
Viv is currently the General Editor of four series that span the areas of Humour Studies, Animal Studies, Memoir and Maritime History and Culture. She is also the Editor of a new journal at KIMEP University: Language, Culture, Environment. During her Lady Margaret Beaufort Fellowship, she will, primarily, be working on a volume in the Oceans, Seas and Shorelines: a natural and cultural environmental history series with Dr. Mark Nicholls.
Dr Westbrook is sponsored by Dr Nicholls.
Find out more about her research projects at https://viviennewestbrook.com
Lent Term 2020
Professor Francis Stewart, Dresden University of Technology, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Francis Stewart is Professor of Genomics at the Dresden University of Technology, which is one of the 11 elite German universities. He studied at the University of New South Wales, Sydney before post-doctoral work at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. In 1991 he started his own group at EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratories) working on epigenetic regulation in mammalian development. Notably his lab described the PhD finger and the first histone 3 lysine 4 methyltransferase complex. His lab also pioneered several genetic engineering methodologies including the gene switch based ligand regulated site specific recombination (now popular as CreERT2/tamoxifen) and the recombinant DNA engineering methodology termed ‘recombineering’. In 2001 he moved to Dresden as the first appointment to the Biotechnology Center, now the Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering at Dresden University. His lab continues to develop genetic engineering technologies and plumb epigenetic mysteries, in particular the relationship between histone methylation and gene expression in mammalian development. His sabbatical with Ernest Laue will employ recent technology developed by the Laue lab to investigate the involvement of histone methyltransferases in the nuclear architecture of differentiating embryonic stem cells.
Professor Stewart is sponsored by Professor Howard.
Professor Tone Bringa, University of Bergen, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Tone Bringa is Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Since she completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology on practiced Islam and ethnic belonging in Bosnia at the London School of Economics, she has explored the causes and effects of the war in Bosnia. More generally, she has been concerned with topics such as collapse of multi-ethnic states, post-socialist transformations, changing religious landscapes, and the politics of belonging highlighting how nationalist ideologies, fear and hate rhetoric directed at the “ethnic other” lead to genocide.
More recently, she has explored the spatial and temporal aspects of borders and the interaction between symbolic boundaries and territorial borders over time in order to gain a better understanding of the ethnic territorialisation of space, both through everyday spatial practices and through political means.
While a Beaufort Visiting Fellow at St. John’s she will be writing up fieldwork data, gathered in several villages and urban suburbs in Turkey settled by émigrés from Bosnia and Serbia who came to the country over the course of the 20th century. Based mainly on oral histories, this research resonates theoretically and thematically with several concerns that run through her academic work, not least a long term analytical and ethnographic approach which allows us to see how large scale historical events and developments shape and direct individuals’ life trajectories and their communities.
Her latest book is Eurasian Borderlands: Spatializing Borders in the Aftermath of State Collapse, co-edited with Hege Toje (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Professor Bringa is sponsored by Professor Szreter.
Professor Antonello Alici, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Antonello Alici, architect, is Chair of History of Architecture at Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, and Member of the Doctorade School in Engineering Sciences, where he teaches a course on “Cultural Heritage”. In 2018 he was appointed Associate Professor in History of Architecture in the National Academic Competition.
He studied Architecture at the University of Florence and made his Doctoral studies on Renaissance Religious architecture in Central Italy at the University of Chieti-Pescara. His main research interests, besides studying Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture, are in Contemporary Architecture. Thanks to several scholarships in Finland, he has lectured and published essays on avant-garde Finnish National Romanticism at the turn of last century, on the travels to Italy of Finnish architects, and more recently on Aino and Alvar Aalto. He was Visiting Scholar at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies at University of Cambridge in 2016/2017, and Visiting Professor at the International Doctoral Programme in Architectural Heritage Management and Tourism at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He has given courses and seminars at the Aalto University in Helsinki and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
He is the Program Director of a summer school called ‘The Culture of City. Understanding the Urban Landscape”, that started a new series in the Marche region in 2018, with the topic “Living with Earthquakes. A strategic plan for earthquake prone regions”.
His interest on the relationships between Italian and British architects was the main reason he applied for a research year at the Martin Centre for Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2016/2017, an experience that proved to be central in focusing on the urban and architectural history of contemporary Cambridge. The postwar debate on the future of the city and on its identity as a ‘university city’ is particularly relevant to a revived interest internationally in post-war British architecture. This chapter becomes even more relevant when the archives of sir Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson have been made available at the RIBA Collection. The Centennial of the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo in 2019-2020 inspries him to explore his close connection with British culture, from William Morris and Patrick Geddes to the school of Cambridge and Team 10.
His main aim in coming to Cambridge as a Beaufort Visiting Fellow is to improve his knowledge and continue his research on the postwar urban and architectural history of Cambridge.
The contribution of the University and individual colleges deserves a more thorough study, and this can begin with the documents that are available in the architects’ and colleges’ archives. Following his recent publication on Peterhouse (A. Alici, Peterhouse. Prove di modernità in un college di Cambridge, «Città e Storia», XII, 2017, 2, pp. 287-313), he aims to research in detail the policy of St John’s College in the commission of new buildings and facilities for students and fellows, from the Maufe Building, completed in 1939, to the New Library, designed by Edward Cullinan architects and opened on January 1994.
The central focus of his research will be on the Cripps Building, built in 1963-67, and judged from its completion as a masterpiece, both for its design and its contribution to the urban landscape. It bears all the hallmarks of one of the most important and successful partnerships of the time, Powell & Moya. This furnishes a relevant case study for research, making use of the partnership’s archives, and working from the College’s own archives, to follow the discussions and decisions that led to the building as we see it now.
Professor Antonello Alici is sponsored by Professor Deborah Howard.
Professor Jing Lei, Carnegie Mellon University, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Jing Lei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained PhD in statistics from University of California, Berkeley in 2010, advised by Professor Peter Bickel. His research interests includes nonparametric inference, probability theory, high dimensional inference, and network data. He received a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2016, and received American Statistical Association Noether Young Scholar Award in 2016. During his visit at Cambridge, Prof Lei will work on distribution free nonparametric inference with application to hypothesis testing, and efficient estimation of multi-model network data with a tensor structure, using novel probability tools for matrix data. Prof Lei also plans to develop a new course on modern probability theory with applications in statistics.
Professor Bruce Hay, California Institute of Technology, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
As a Beaufort Visiting Fellow, Professor Hay will synthesise his research while writing manuscripts on gene drive and mitochondrial quality control; interact with the extraordinarily active Drosophila and mitochondrial biology communities around Cambridge, and work with faculty and entrepreneurs in and around Cambridge on ways to slow or reverse diseases of ageing associated with defects in mitochondrial function.
Professor Hay is sponsored by Professor Knowles.
Dr Nicola McDonald, University of York, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Dr Nicola McDonald (BA, MA University of Toronto, MPhil, DPhil, University of Oxford) is Senior Lecture in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her current research concentrates on Middle English romance, the most important form of secular literature to emerge from medieval England, and its fundamentally interrogative character. Romance, she posits, is not only a new learned language, a modern self-consciously literate genre, sure in its capacity to rival its namesake, Rome, but late medieval English lay culture’s preeminent mode of inquiry. Relevant publications include the landmark Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (2004), the recent Thinking Medieval Romance (2018) and the online Database of Middle English Romance (2012). While at St John’s, her research will focus principally on the audiences of Middle English romance, including the surviving manuscripts (many of which are housed in Cambridge collections) and the evidence they provide not just for ownership but for the radically different hermeneutics that their typically diverse contents model.
Dr McDonald is sponsored by Dr Da Rold.
Professor Susanna Berger, University of Southern California, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Susanna Berger is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. She was previously a member of the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Her research and teaching explore diverse facets of art and visual culture in early modern Europe (ca. 1500–1800), from prints and drawings of philosophical knowledge to central works in the history of European painting by Caravaggio and other artists. Her first book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2017. This project is a transnational study of the relations between images and philosophical knowledge in early modern Italy, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. The central thesis of the book is that in this period the production and contemplation of visual art were conceived as activities essential to philosophical thought, not supplementary exercises. The Art of Philosophy was awarded the 2018 Bainton Art and Music Prize for the best book in English in the field of early modern art and music from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. A Chinese translation is forthcoming in 2021. She is currently working on a book about the ways in which Italian and French artists, elite collectors, and scholars first theorized the notion of visual expertise. In addition, she is collaborating with Daniel Garber on an edited volume, entitled Teaching Philosophy in the Early Modern Period: Text and Image. This book explores the pedagogical contexts in which philosophical knowledge was made in the early modern era and disputes over science were played out.
Professor Berger is sponsored by Dr Abbott.
Dr Brighton Mupangavanhu, University of the Western Cape, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Dr Brighton M Mupangavanhu is a member of the Mercantile & Labour Law Department at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape (UWC), who joined the Law Faculty in 2014. He teaches commercial law subjects at LL.B, namely Corporate Law & Law of Payment Instruments (to become Commercial Transactions Law after 2020) and Company Law for B. Comm students. He holds a PhD: Commercial Law Degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT); an LL.M from University of Natal (now UKZN); an LL.B from Fort Hare University (UFH). In addition, Dr Mupangavanhu’s professional development/training is evidenced by a Legal Education and Development (LEAD) certificate from the Cape Town-based School for Legal Practice and a PG Certificate in Legal Practice (UCT). He also obtained a teaching and learning certificate for a course entitled Towards Professionalisation of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education (UWC). In 2019, Dr Mupangavanhu graduated with a certificate in the Program for Academic and Professional Leaders course at UWC (2018-2019), aimed at enhancing leadership capabilities. Dr Mupangavanhu specialises and conducts research in the following areas of interest: Corporate Governance & Finance Law; Banking and Financial Services Law; the interface between corporate law and other areas of law such as contract law, legal interpretation, constitutional law & intellectual property law. Dr Mupangavanhu supervises and teaches postgraduate students at LL.M (Masters) and LL.D (Doctoral) levels primarily in the areas of corporate law and banking/financial services law. Scholarships held during his academic studies include: the Presidential Scholarship to study towards an LL.B degree; the Wilfred Kramer Grant and Law Faculty Special Scholarship – for doctoral studies at UCT. Dr Mupangavanhu’s research work has attracted the interest of legal practitioners, academics and company boards as evidenced by several invitations to be a keynote speaker at conferences, invitations to address company boards on various corporate governance and corporate finance law matters and to offer on-boarding induction workshops by company boards in Cape Town and Johannesburg in particular, and also invitations to examine LL.M and PhD theses from South African and other African public universities as well as some private universities. Dr Mupangavanhu’s individual accolades received to date include graduating with a number of distinctions at LL.B; being named best Constitutional Law student at LL.B level and top student in Constitutional Practice module during the LEAD course at the School for Legal Practice. He has held middle management positions within higher education prior to joining the Law Faculty as an academic in 2014. Dr Mupangavanhu has presented several conference papers at various local & international conferences held in South Africa and at a regional conference in Namibia. In 2020, Dr Mupangavanhu will be a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the UK, after he received the Colenso Visiting Scholarship at St John’s College.
Dr Mupangavanhu is sponsored by Dr Jodi Gardner.
Michaelmas Term 2019
Professor Francis Stewart, Dresden University of Technology, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Francis Stewart is Professor of Genomics at the Dresden University of Technology, which is one of the 11 elite German universities. He studied at the University of New South Wales, Sydney before post-doctoral work at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. In 1991 he started his own group at EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratories) working on epigenetic regulation in mammalian development. Notably his lab described the PhD finger and the first histone 3 lysine 4 methyltransferase complex. His lab also pioneered several genetic engineering methodologies including the gene switch based ligand regulated site specific recombination (now popular as CreERT2/tamoxifen) and the recombinant DNA engineering methodology termed ‘recombineering’. In 2001 he moved to Dresden as the first appointment to the Biotechnology Center, now the Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering at Dresden University. His lab continues to develop genetic engineering technologies and plumb epigenetic mysteries, in particular the relationship between histone methylation and gene expression in mammalian development. His sabbatical with Ernest Laue will employ recent technology developed by the Laue lab to investigate the involvement of histone methyltransferases in the nuclear architecture of differentiating embryonic stem cells.
Professor Stewart is sponsored by Professor Howard.
Professor Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, University of California, Santa Barbara, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Director of the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids (CPOS) and Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Professor Nguyen received her PhD degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University from 2001-2004. She joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB in July 2004. Recognition for her research includes the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2007 Harold Plous Award, the 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, the 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, the 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, the 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the 2015-2018 World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. Her current research interests are doping in organic semiconductors, charge transport in organic semiconductors, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors. Her sabbatical with George Malliaras will focus on interfacing electronic devices with human body for applications in healthcare. She will also work with Sir Richard Friend on understanding charge generation in organic solar cells.
Professor Nguyen is sponsored by Professor Sir Richard Friend.
Professor Theo Broodryk, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa, Colenso Visiting Fellow
Professor Theo Broodryk is an Associate Professor and the Managing Attorney of the Stellenbosch University Law Clinic. He completed his postgraduate LLB-degree in 2008. He commenced his articles of clerkship at Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs Inc in 2009 where he also practised as an attorney until September 2012. Prof Broodryk commenced employment with the Stellenbosch University Law Faculty in October 2012. He is responsible for lecturing Civil Procedure and Legal Skills. He holds the BA, LLB and LLD degrees. He authors Eckard’s Principles of Civil Procedure in the Magistrates’ Courts, has published numerous law journal articles and has been awarded research funding awards and scholarships to conduct research at leading law schools internationally. Prof Broodryk’s research at Cambridge University will consider the regulation of small amount credit and how the private law interacts with social policy and social welfare. It will specifically be aimed at considering the regulation of modest credit amounts and the different dispute resolution methods available under South African and English consumer protection legislation, including class actions. The research will aim to make a contribution to the future development of legal theory in this regard.
Professor Theo Broodryk is sponsored by Dr Albors-Llorens.
Professor Walter Woon,National University of Singapore, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Professor Woon is presently Senior Counsel and David Marshall Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore; concurrently Dean, Singapore Institute of Legal Education; Chairman and Senior Consultant, RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP. Formerly Attorney-General, Ambassador and member of the board of directors of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Intraco Ltd and Natsteel Ltd. Published works include Woon's Corporations Law; Company Law; and The ASEAN Charter - A Commentary' Professor Woon hopes to finish his book Essential Company Law while in Cambridge.
Professor Woon is sponsored by Dr Gardner.
Professor Tone Bringa, University of Bergen, Beaufort Visiting Fellow
Tone Bringa is Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Since she completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology on practiced Islam and ethnic belonging in Bosnia at the London School of Economics, she has explored the causes and effects of the war in Bosnia. More generally, she has been concerned with topics such as collapse of multi-ethnic states, post-socialist transformations, changing religious landscapes, and the politics of belonging highlighting how nationalist ideologies, fear and hate rhetoric directed at the “ethnic other” lead to genocide.
More recently, she has explored the spatial and temporal aspects of borders and the interaction between symbolic boundaries and territorial borders over time in order to gain a better understanding of the ethnic territorialisation of space, both through everyday spatial practices and through political means.
While a Beaufort Visiting Fellow at St. John’s she will be writing up fieldwork data, gathered in several villages and urban suburbs in Turkey settled by émigrés from Bosnia and Serbia who came to the country over the course of the 20th century. Based mainly on oral histories, this research resonates theoretically and thematically with several concerns that run through her academic work, not least a long term analytical and ethnographic approach which allows us to see how large scale historical events and developments shape and direct individuals’ life trajectories and their communities.
Her latest book is Eurasian Borderlands: Spatializing Borders in the Aftermath of State Collapse, co-edited with Hege Toje (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Professor Bringa is sponsored by Professor Szreter.
Professor Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht
Rosi Braidotti has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding Professor in Women’s Studies. In 1995 she became the Founding Director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies, a position she held until 2005. Rosi Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University.
Rosi Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women’s Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed until 2005.
Braidotti’s publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection with social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies. The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory. Influenced by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and especially “French feminist” thinker Luce Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti has brought postmodern feminism into the Information Age with her considerations of cyberspace, prosthesis, and the materiality of difference. She considers how ideas of gender difference can affect our sense of the human/animal and human/machine divides.
Rosi's latest book is Posthuman Knowledge, published by Polity Press, Cambridge in 2019.
As the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, Professor Braidotti will undertake research on the theoretical foundations of the posthuman turn – in its post-humanistic and post-anthropocentric inceptions – and its effects on contemporary feminist theory practice. More specifically, she will aim to assess the implications of the posthuman predicament in epistemological and ethical terms, not only for feminist philosophy but also for contemporary reflection on the Humanities as a whole.
Professor Braidotti is sponsored by Professor Ulinka Rublack.
Easter Term 2019
Professor Margaret Barrett, The University of Queensland, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Professor Margaret Barrett is Founding Director of the Creative Collaboratorium at The University of Queensland (2010) and former Head of the School of Music at The University of Queensland (2008 – 2018). Her research encompasses children’s early learning and development in music, the pedagogies of creativity and expertise in music, arts program evaluations, and a cultural psychology of music education. She has served as President of the international Society for Music Education (2012 – 2014), Chair of the Asia-Pacific Symposium for Music Education Research (2009 – 2011), Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education (2013 – 2015), and President of the Australian Society for Music Education (1999 – 2001). Awards have included a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (The Smithsonian, 2018), Awards for Excellence in Research Engagement (UQ 2016), Excellence in Research Higher Degree Supervision (UQ – 2016), Excellence in Teaching (UTas, 2004), and, Fellowship of the Australian Society for Music Education (2011). During her residency at St John’s College she will be extending her research in the domains of children’s invented song-making and the Intangible Heritage of Children’s Musical Cultures, the pedagogies of choral singing and the affordances and constraints of Collaborative Creativity in musical contexts.
Professor Barrett is sponsored by Professor Rink.
Dr Yohanns Bellaiche, Institut CURIE, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Dr Yohanns Bellaiche is Deputy director of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Curie Institut (Paris, France). Recent works from his lab has defined novel principles regulating mitosis and epithelial tissue dynamics. His research projects combine state of the art methods at the interface between physics and biology to explore epithelial dynamics from the subcellular to the tissue scale. His research group has, in particular, defined the mechanisms of spindle orientation during both symmetric and asymmetric cell division and delineate the mechanisms coupling cell junction formation and the last step of mitosis, cytokinesis. His study of the role of tumor-suppressors has uncovered that they performed unexpected function in the regulation of tissue mechanical properties and dynamics. Lastly, his group has proposed an unified physical framework to quantity morphogenesis from cells to the tissue scale considering all epithelial cell behaviours.This has been instrumental to understand the role of cell division in epithelial tissues and to decipher the interplay between migration and proliferation.
While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, his project aims to develop novel optogenetics approaches to advance the understanding of the link between gene expression and cell dynamics.
Dr Bellaiche is sponsored by Professor Simons.
Professor Gabriele Cornelli, University of Brasília, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Professor Gabriele Cornelli is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brazil. He is Director of the Archai UNESCO Chair on the Origins of Western Thought and Professor in Postgraduate Programs in Metaphysics and Bioethics at UnB. He has been President of the International Plato Society (2013-2016), of the Brazilian Society of Classical Studies (2012-2013) and of the Brazilian Plato Society (2008-2010). He is also an honorary member of the Società Italiana di Storia della Filosofia Antica and a founding member of the International Association for Presocratic Studies. He is currently Editor of the Plato journal, Archai journal and Atlantis journal, and also Editor of four monographs Series: Brill's Plato Studies Series (Brill) Archai (Annablume, SP), Cátedra (Paulus, SP) and Filosofia e Tradição (UNESCO, Brazil). His research focuses mostly on presocratic and platonic literature, with a special emphasis on the Pythagorean traditions. His latest book, In Search of Pythagoreanism: Pythagoreanism as an historiographical Category, was published by De Gruyter (Boston / Berlin, 2013) and try to methodologically challenge the illusion that it is possible to reach the thing in itself, the true history, and instead to consciously accept that each interpretation of Pythagorean traditions throughout its historical development is necessarily mediated. He has been working more recently on topics related to Plato ethics, religion and literary background and published several articles on the topic in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French. While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, he will do research on Plato Reception in Latin American literature.
Professor Cornelli's sponsor is Professor Tim Whitmarsh.
Professor David Holcman, Ecole Normale Superieure, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Professor David Holcman is an Applied Mathematician and Computational Biologist. He initiated and developed the Narrow Escape theory. His research focuses on reconstructing cellular organisation at a nanometer resolution from large data sets such as single particle trajectories, HiC, etc. He is also involved in modelling neuron-glia circuit interactions.
For that goal he developed models, simulations, data analysis and solve asymptotically equations. Recently, his interest has moved toward predictive medicine from transient EEG signals. Professor Holcman collaborates with Professor E. Laue to better characterise the nucleus organisation and the role of re-modellers.
Professor Holcman's sponsor is Professor Laue.
Dr Mary Jackes, University of Waterloo, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Mary Jackes is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her major interest is in the methods of bioarchaeology.
Following two degrees in social anthropology at Australian universities, Mary was drawn to biological anthropology and left for Cambridge to do a diploma in physical anthropology (a colonial era qualification resurrected for her) and subsequently worked for the BM(NH) Catalogue of Fossil Primates. She was accepted by the University of Toronto to do a PhD, but also worked for several years at Olduvai and Laetoli. Deciding that the reconstruction of prehistoric life through bioarchaeology would be more challenging than palaeontology, she returned to Toronto to complete a thesis on a Huron ossuary. She was then hired by the Royal Ontario Museum to study a Neutral Nation burial complex at a time when the disturbance of First Nations’ burials had become very controversial. After a short break working for the South Australia Museum, she began a long-term collaboration with David Lubell on projects in Algeria and Portugal, concentrating on human osteology but also working with faunal material. Most recently, she has focussed on palaeodemography with a special interest in adult age estimation, the representativeness of samples and the use of known-age skeletons ‒ for example, salvaging the original Spitalfields data files in association with Theya Molleson. Involved in this was the reconstruction of sites dug long ago and their post-excavation history (essential for an understanding of the limitations of samples), as well as working on mortuary archaeology, specifically regarding Muge Mesolithic sites in Portugal. The integrity of buried bone and problems arising from early AMS dating and stable isotope analyses in Mesolithic and Neolithic Portugal have also been of interest. Her work on mortuary archaeology has included detailed study of human remains from a Capsian site in Algeria, dug in 1930, with an extraordinary culture of post-mortem manipulation of skeletons, as well as one skeleton with a broad range of anomalies and sequelae of trauma.
Mary’s emphasis on methodology arises from the difficulties of analysing Iroquoian secondary burials, the complexities of cave burials in Portugal (the deep cave of Caldeirão and shallow burial caves such as Casa da Moura, dug in the 1860s), China (Jiangshai at the Ban Po Museum ‒ dug during the Cultural Revolution and partially reburied), Spain (several caves at La Garma, excavated by Pablo Arias, Santander).
The large numbers of loose teeth in caves has led to a particular interest in teeth and their value in estimating a minimum number of individuals, expanded beyond the normal MNI derived from bones. This led to collaboration with Trinette Constandse-Westerman on a reconstruction of dental data from a grave yard in Zwolle, The Netherlands, and a new analysis of the teeth (the skeletons and documents now deposited at the University of Amsterdam). Her current project is a small Neolithic burial cave at Roquemissou, in association with the Université de Toulouse, and Espace Archéologique Départemental de Montrozier, Aveyron. The human remains from this site have required attention to age assessment of very fragmentary infant and juvenile teeth and bones, and she plans to spend some time while in Cambridge looking at infant material and familiarizing herself with bone changes due to leukemia in very young children (the Duckworth collection and others in London and elsewhere, as necessary). At the same time she hopes to follow up on questions about chemical and other analyses of enamel and calculus from French and Spanish teeth.
Dr Jackes's sponsor is Professor Barker.
Professor David Lubell, University of Waterloo, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
David Lubell, an archaeologist, is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research focuses on human-environmental relationships and the interdisciplinary analysis of palaeoecological, palaeoeconomic and bioarchaeological data. He is primarily interested in the late Pleistocene-early Holocene prehistory of the western Mediterranean, especially southern Europe and the Maghreb, and on palaeoeconomies in which land snails were an important food resource.
David took both his BA and PhD at Columbia University. His first field work was in central Turkey in 1963, with his eventual doctoral supervisor Ralph Solecki. He subsequently excavated with Solecki at Yabroud in Syria in 1964 (after an abortive attempt to work with James Mellaart at Çatalhöyük), with Fred Wendorf in Egypt in 1966-67 where he did the research used for his doctorate on the very early Late Palaeolithic Fakhurian, and with the American Museum of Natural History expedition to Afghanistan in 1971 (directed by Louis Dupree). Beginning in 1972, he began his own research program on the prehistoric cultural ecology of Capsian escargotières in Algeria in collaboration with Achilles Gautier, and they were joined in subsequent years by William Farrand, Fekri Hassan, Mary Jackes, James Ritchie and Peter Sheppard among others. The final monograph of the project, Holocene Prehistory in the Télidjène Basin, Eastern Algeria, was published by Archaeopress in 2016. When research in Algeria became untenable in the late 1970s, he and Mary Jackes began a long-term collaboration with Christopher Meiklejohn on the prehistory and bioarchaeology of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Portugal that is still continuing. They have also collaborated with Margherita Mussi in Italy, Pablo Arias in Spain and Thomas Perrin in France. David has also continued the interest in lithic typology and technology which was central to his doctoral research.
Professor Lubell's sponsor is Professor Barker.
Professor Keith Breckenridge, University of Witwatersrand, Colenso Visiting Scholar
Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and Deputy Director at WISER, at Wits University, and one of the editors of the Journal of African History. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems.
While at St Johns he will be completing a book on the political economy of contemporary biometric identification systems on the African continent that he is calling Biometric Capitalism.
Professor Breckenridge's sponsor is Professor Szreter.
Lent Term 2019
Professor Gabriele Cornelli, University of Brasília, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Professor Gabriele Cornelli is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brazil. He is Director of the Archai UNESCO Chair on the Origins of Western Thought and Professor in Postgraduate Programs in Metaphysics and Bioethics at UnB. He has been President of the International Plato Society (2013-2016), of the Brazilian Society of Classical Studies (2012-2013) and of the Brazilian Plato Society (2008-2010). He is also an honorary member of the Società Italiana di Storia della Filosofia Antica and a founding member of the International Association for Presocratic Studies. He is currently Editor of the Plato journal, Archai journal and Atlantis journal, and also Editor of four monographs Series: Brill's Plato Studies Series (Brill) Archai (Annablume, SP), Cátedra (Paulus, SP) and Filosofia e Tradição (UNESCO, Brazil). His research focuses mostly on presocratic and platonic literature, with a special emphasis on the Pythagorean traditions. His latest book, In Search of Pythagoreanism: Pythagoreanism as an historiographical Category, was published by De Gruyter (Boston / Berlin, 2013) and try to methodologically challenge the illusion that it is possible to reach the thing in itself, the true history, and instead to consciously accept that each interpretation of Pythagorean traditions throughout its historical development is necessarily mediated. He has been working more recently on topics related to Plato ethics, religion and literary background and published several articles on the topic in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French. While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, he will do research on Plato Reception in Latin American literature.
Professor Cornelli's sponsor is Professor Tim Whitmarsh.
Dr David J. Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
David J. Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, and holds an extramural appointment as Affiliate Professor in Prehistory, Climate and Environment, GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Meltzer’s principal research interests center on the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the hunter-gatherers who, toward the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age), became the first people to colonize the Americas. He seeks to understand their origins, when and how they made their way there, and how they met the challenges of moving across and adapting to a vast, unknown, ecologically diverse landscape in the midst of significant climate change. He has investigated those matters through archaeological fieldwork in many parts of North America, in collaboration with geneticists to investigate who these populations were, and with colleagues in geology, paleoecology, and vertebrate paleontology to explore the environmental stage on which the peopling process unfolded. He also has a research interest in the history of late 19th to early 20th century science, the subject of his most recent book, The Great Paleolithic War: how science forged an understanding of America’s Ice Age past (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
During his time as a Beaufort Visiting Scholar, Meltzer will continue his collaborative work with St. John’s Fellow and Prince Philip Professor Eske Willerslev, applying the results of ancient DNA analysis to the population history of the Americas. In addition, he will fully revise and update his 2009 book, First peoples in a New World: colonizing Ice Age America, to be published in a second edition by Cambridge University Press.
For further information, including publications, see: https://people.smu.edu/dmeltzer/
Dr Meltzer’s sponsor is Professor Willerslev.
Professor Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is an art historian focusing on American art from the colonial period onward, with particular interests in craft and materiality theory, print studies, and the history and philosophy of science. She received her A.B. in English and Art History from Stanford (1992) and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale (2000), and joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 2002. She will occupy the Slade Professorship in Fine Arts at Cambridge University in winter 2019 and will deliver the Mellon Lectures at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2021.
Within an art-historical discipline built on arguments about the virtuality and transcendence of images, Roberts has consistently sought to return attention to the material intelligence of art. She is the author of three books spanning American art from the 1760s to the 1970s. Her first book, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), examines the ways that Smithson's celebrated earthworks and traveling projects confront the social and material histories of the sites they occupy. Her book Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), forges a material history of visual communication by tracing the literal transportation of pictures through the swamps, forests, oceans, and cities of the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. Treating pictures that register, in various ways, the material complications of their own transmission, the book explores the relationship between communication/transportation media and period understandings of visual representation. In 2012 she curated the exhibition Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print for the Harvard Art Museums; the catalog was also published that year. That project, which grew out of an undergraduate seminar, led to her co-authorship (with Susan Dackerman) of the catalogue raisonné of Jasper Johns's monotypes (published 2017). It also sparked her interest in the broad cultural and philosophical implications of the physical operations of printing – reversal, transfer, incision, contact, etc. – and led her to her current book project, titled The Matrix: Contemporary Art and the Life of Print.
At Harvard she has been active in the promotion and development of a new gateway curriculum in the Humanities; she is a co-creator of the Frameworks course "The Art of Looking," which introduces students to the aesthetic, historical, and social intricacy of the visual arts. She is also a founder, along with Ethan Lasser of the Harvard Art Museums, of the "Minding Making" project (mindingmaking.org), which aims to develop rigorous new methods of incorporating technical and artisanal knowledge into the historical and interpretive disciplines.
At Cambridge, Professor Roberts will be delivering the Slade Lectures in the Department of History of Art, focusing on print and printmaking as methods in contemporary art.
Professor Roberts' sponsor is Dr Chen.
Dr Yohanns Bellaiche, Institut CURIE, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Dr Yohanns Bellaiche is Deputy director of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Curie Institut (Paris, France). Recent works from his lab has defined novel principles regulating mitosis and epithelial tissue dynamics. His research projects combine state of the art methods at the interface between physics and biology to explore epithelial dynamics from the subcellular to the tissue scale. His research group has, in particular, defined the mechanisms of spindle orientation during both symmetric and asymmetric cell division and delineate the mechanisms coupling cell junction formation and the last step of mitosis, cytokinesis. His study of the role of tumor-suppressors has uncovered that they performed unexpected function in the regulation of tissue mechanical properties and dynamics. Lastly, his group has proposed an unified physical framework to quantity morphogenesis from cells to the tissue scale considering all epithelial cell behaviours.This has been instrumental to understand the role of cell division in epithelial tissues and to decipher the interplay between migration and proliferation.
While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, his project aims to develop novel optogenetics approaches to advance the understanding of the link between gene expression and cell dynamics.
Professor Michela Sassi, Università di Pisa, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Maria Michela Sassi is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Università di Pisa, Italy. She works on a broad range of subjects within Greek philosophy and science, such as the body/mind relation in mental processes, emotions and reason in the moral thought of philosophy and tragedy, the experience of colours in the Greek world. She has authored such books as The Science of Man in Ancient Greece (Chicago University Press, 2001); Indagine su Socrate. Persona filosofo cittadino (Einaudi, Torino, 2015); The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece (Princeton University Press, 2018).
While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John's, she will be working on the issue of homonoia in Plato and Aristotle's political thought. Professor Sassi's sponsor is Professor Malcolm Schofield.
Dr Naomi Weiss, Harvard University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar
Naomi Weiss is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Much of her research has focused on the performance and representation of music and dance in archaic and classical Greece, particularly in tragedy, on which she has published multiple articles. Her first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) takes a new approach to the study of the classical Greek theater by exploring the dramatic function of mousike (music, song, dance) in the plays of Euripides. She has co-edited The Genres of Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke, Brill forthcoming) and is currently co-editing another, entitled Music and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean (with Lauren Curtis). While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, she will be starting work on a new book, tentatively entitled Seeing Theater: Staging and Spectacle in Classical Athens. This project aims to explore how ancient Greek theater shapes its audiences as viewers – how tragedy, comedy, and satyr play construct the phenomenological experience of their audiences, and how this experience is restaged and appropriated in other media.
Dr Weiss's sponsor is Professor Gowers.
Michaelmas Term 2018
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Dr Naomi Weiss, Harvard University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Naomi Weiss is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Much of her research has focused on the performance and representation of music and dance in archaic and classical Greece, particularly in tragedy, on which she has published multiple articles. Her first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) takes a new approach to the study of the classical Greek theater by exploring the dramatic function of mousike (music, song, dance) in the plays of Euripides. She has co-edited The Genres of Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke, Brill forthcoming) and is currently co-editing another, entitled Music and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean (with Lauren Curtis). While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, she will be starting work on a new book, tentatively entitled Seeing Theater: Staging and Spectacle in Classical Athens. This project aims to explore how ancient Greek theater shapes its audiences as viewers – how tragedy, comedy, and satyr play construct the phenomenological experience of their audiences, and how this experience is restaged and appropriated in other media. |
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Dr Rocio Sanchez Ameijeiras, University of Santiago, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Professor of Art History at the University of Santiago de Compostela (accredited professor), she enjoyed long stays of research at the University of Rome I (La Sapienza) and the Warburg Institute in London. Author of more than sixty works publishes by international prestigious companies, such as Akal, Brill, Brepols, Ashgate or Princeton University Press or in indexed periodicals –Archivo Español de Arte, Speculum, or Hispanic Research Journal, among several others. The unique impact of her research reported her gratifying invitations to multiple international congresses or to lecture in different countries – United Kingdom, Germany, France, Ireland, Israel, Austria, Portugal or the United States of America- both in Universities or research centers or institutions of international recognition such as the Trinity College in Dublin, Fizwilliam College,Cambridge; Princeton University, Desdren Universität, Université de Génêve; Museo del Prado, Madrid; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon or The Courtauld Institute in London, and she has also been required to write several encyclopedia entries in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, New Oxford Grove Encyclopedy of Art o el Dictionnaire critique d’iconographie médiévale. |
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Professor Ragnhild Elisabeth Paulsen, University of Oslo, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Ragnhild Elisabeth Paulsen is Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway. Her main research interests include molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and neuroprotection of the developing brain. She is employing and promoting the use of the chicken embryo as a model system for testing neurodevelopmental toxicity of pharmaceuticals and environmental toxicants. She has a particular interest in glutamate receptors of the NMDA receptor class. For further information, including publications, see: https://www.mn.uio.no/farmasi/english/people/aca/rpaulsen/index.html While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, she will do research on and widening her knowledge of human brain organoids and functions of NMDA receptors. Professor Paulsen’s sponsor is Professor Graham Burton. |
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Dr Gioia Filocamo, Istituto superiore di Studi musicali Giulio Briccialdi, Terni, Italy, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Dr Filocamo's sponsor is Dr Castelvecchi. |
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Dr Matthew Prebble, Australian National University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Dr Prebble is working with Prof. Tim Bayliss-Smith on the archaeology and ethnohistory of irrigated agricultural systems of the Mase Basin, West New Georgia, Solomon Islands. Archaeological excavations of these megalithic garden systems and associated village sites reveal striking patterns of high intensity landscape use in the rainforest covered interior of New Georgia. Irrigated gardens are restricted in distribution in the Western Pacific and explanations for their disjunct distribution cannot be easily explained. We are trying to determine when they were first constructed, how they were maintained over time, and their function, in light of what is known about trade and exchange, the political economy in the region over the last 1000 years, but also recent findings in palaeoclimate science. Together with Prof. Edvard Hviding (University of Bergen), we will also be examining archival material on the ethnohistoric use of these systems, which were mostly abandoned between the late 19th and early 20th century. http://palaeoworks.com/people/matthew-prebble/ Dr Prebble's sponsor is Professor Bayliss-Smith. |
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Dr Owen McMillan, Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Dr McMillan earned his PhD from the University of Hawaii in 1994 and did his postdoctoral research at University College London (1994-1997). Dr. McMillan is broadly interested in the genomics of adaptation and speciation and the links between them. He maintains an active research program in ecological and evolutionary functional genomics focused on neotropical diversity at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama (https://stri.si.edu/scientist/owen-mcmillan). Current research foci include i) the population history of mimicry, ii) the functional basis of wing colour pattern variation in neotropical butterflies, and iii) adaptation and speciation in coral reef fishes. In addition to conducting research, Dr. McMillan stewards STRI’s vibrant and diverse scholarship community. As a Beaufort Fellow, Dr McMillan will interact with the extraordinarily active genomics community around Cambridge and use the opportunity to synthesize his research, write manuscripts and explore novel ways to apply genomic data to questions about the origins and maintenance of biological diversity. Dr McMillan's sponsor is Professor Jiggins. |
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Easter Term 2018
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Professor Jonathan Post, University of California, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Jonathan Post is Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been a Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. His scholarship focuses on early modern poetry, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Donne, and the seventeenth-century poets, including Milton, and on modern poetry from T. S. Eliot to the present. He is especially interested in the transformational aspects of poetry from the early modern period into the present, along with a side-interest in the subject of walking in verse and the visual arts. He is the author of books on Henry Vaughan (Princeton), Sir Thomas Browne (MacMillan), Seventeenth-Century Lyric Poetry (Routledge), Anthony Hecht (Oxford) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems (Oxford), as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry and The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Johns Hopkins). While a Beaufort Scholar at St John’s, he will be pursuing research on Donne and Thomas Carew, making use of the manuscripts at St John’s, and widening his knowledge of Donne and Australian Poetry. Professor Post’s sponsor is Professor Kerrigan. |
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Professor Alfred Pawlik, University of the Phillippines, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Alfred Pawlik researches the fields of Prehistoric Archaeology and Quaternary Ecology and the analysis of artefacts made of stone, shell and bone. His interest covers the prehistory of Southeast Asia and Europe, traceology, prehistoric technology, and human behavioural and cultural responses to changing environments. |
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Professor Andreas Holzem, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Andreas Holzem is a German historian of Christianity (Habilitation 1996, Dr. theol. 1992; Diploma in Theology 1987), full professor in church history of medieval, early modern and modern times at the Tübingen Department of Theology (since 1999). |
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Professor Chris Clarkson, University of Queensland, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Professor Chris Clarkson is an archaeologist conducting research into the spread of modern humans out of Africa and the colonisation and subsequent Aboriginal history of Australia. He has spent the last 20 years analysing sites and artefacts from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia in order to understand the cultural signature of the first modern human colonists and the likely routes taken to Australia. His excavations at sites in Australia, India and southeast Asia have led to discoveries that have changed perspectives on the timing and nature of first modern human colonisation of these regions. This work is best represented by his publication last year in the journal Nature of the discovery of 65,000 years of human occupation in northern Australia. While in Cambridge as a Beaufort Scholar he intends to further pursue this research, undertaking research on a book for Cambridge University Press on ancient technology, working in collaboration with Professor Graeme Barker on artefacts from the key African site of Haua Fteah held at the Museum of Anthropology (a site he recently re-excavated), as well as establish new collaborations with Cambridge scholars Christine Lane and Mike Bithel in Geography looking at dating early sites and modelling colonisation routes to Australia. Professor Clarkson's sponsor is Professor Barker. |
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Lent Term 2018
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Professor Jonathan Schneer, Georgia Institute of Technology, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Jonathan Schneer is the modern British historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA. He is the author of seven books, including London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (Yale University Press, 1999), The Thames: England’s River (Yale University Press, 2004), The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, 2010) which won a National Jewish Book Award, and Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet (Basic Books, 2015). He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. Before teaching at Georgia Tech, he taught at Yale University. He served for many years on the editorial boards of the Radical History Review and Twentieth Century British History. While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, he will be conducting research for a book on the British General Strike of 1926. Professor Schneer's sponsor is Professor Tombs. |
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Dr Gioia Filocamo, Conservatory of Music of Terni, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Gioia Filocamo is an Italian musicologist (PhD in Musical Philology, 2001; Degree in Drama, Art, and Music Studies, 1994; Diploma in Piano, 1988) and historian (PhD in History, 2015), a full professor in Poetry for Music and Musical Dramaturgy at the Conservatory of Music of Terni (Italy). After having devoted her academic research to musical philology, she turned to cultural history connected to music from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Her interest in Early Modern society concerns the cultural function of music: the oldest polyphonic Requiem pieces in Italy; the fear of death and the activity of Italian lay confraternities connected to music (also related to public executions); saints and sins in Italian devotional sung poetry; the social role of confraternities; social and musical life inside nunneries; connections between food, art and music; and music in court and religious contexts. Her most recent work deals with social and cultural implications of Italian opera, specifically its musical structures as related to dramaturgy. Some of her recent reflections also encompass a gender perspective. Her strong desire to spend some productive time in Cambridge is motivated by her recent scholarly interests, based on the lengthy research that resulted in her second PhD dissertation (in Modern History): the investigation of the text, context and contents of the huge corpus of 211 laude (devotional poems typically in Italian intended to be sung) compiled for the Confraternita di Santa Maria della Morte (Confraternity of St Mary of Death) of Bologna, the first institution ever to deal with spiritual and psychological assistance to prisoners condemned to death, founded in 1336. |
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Professor Elizabeth Tyler, University of York, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Elizabeth Tyler is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her research into early and high medieval English literature focuses on poetry and history-writing in Latin, English and French. It aims to develop new models for the integral place of England within European literary culture on both sides of the Conquest. These models are multilingual, reflecting the linguistic and social diversity of medieval England, and entangled, working across Flanders, France and the German Empire. Tyler’s work emphasises Anglo-Saxon England (alongside early medieval Ireland) as an important laboratory for the development of written vernaculars, which exerted a crucial impact on vernacularisation in Western Europe as a whole. Her publications include: England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c. 1000 – c. 1150 (2017); Anglo-Saxon Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar (2006); and an edited collection, Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c. 800 – c. 1250 (2011). Tyler co-directs the Centre for Medieval Literature (CML) – a Danish centre of excellence based jointly at the University of Southern Denmark and the University of York. CML works to develop theoretical models for the study of medieval literature on a European scale. While at St John’s, Tyler will be beginning her project, ‘Connected Vernaculars in the Latin West, c. 500- c. 1100’. This project looks at the writing of vernacular languages as an interconnected elite phenomenon rather than as the beginning of national literatures. She will also be continuing to work on a project on poetic anthologizing in the Latin West. Both projects involve collaboration with Professor Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (St John’s). |
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Professor Michael Puett, Harvard University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also a non-resident long-term fellow for programs in anthropological and historical sciences and the languages and civilizations of East Asia at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between history, philosophy, anthropology, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s, he will be conducting research for a book on commentaries in Chinese late antiquity. Professor Puett’s sponsor is Professor Tim Whitmarsh. |
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Dr Josh West, University of Southern California, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Josh West is Associate Professor of Earth Sciences and Zinsmeyer Chair in Marine Studies at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on the chemical and physical processes at the surface of the Earth. He works on how these processes operate over millions of years of geological time to sustain a habitable planet, and over shorter time scales to shape soil and water resources, as well as produce hazards like landslides and debris flows. He is particularly interested in Earth's long-term carbon cycle, which has remarkably maintained a climate that can support life over billions of years despite frequent large perturbations. West has authored over 60 peer reviewed publications in journals including Nature. While a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John's, he will be working on a research project evaluating how large earthquakes perturb Earth's surface environment, collaborating with Dr. Ed Tipper to investigate the case study of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal. |
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Professor Ana Maria Mauad, Celso Furtado Visiting Scholar Professor Ana Maria Mauad is Professor of History at the University Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she is the Coordinator of the Laboratory of Oral History and Image. Dr. Mauad is a National Council Researcher (CNPq), and a Scientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro. She is also a member of the International Graduate Program of Portuguese Heritage Influence, University of Coimbra (Portugal), University of Bologne (Italy), University of Mondlane (Mozambique) and University Federal Fluminense (Brasil). She has held Fellowships and Residencies at: Intituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad Santiago de Chile; University of California-Berkeley; International Forum for U.S Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, INAH, Mexico; Universidad de Mar del Plata, Argentina; Laboratorio de Audiovisual de Investigaciones Sociales, Intituto Mora, Mexico; and CAPES-Cofecub month research, Paris. She still coordinates collective projects involving collaboration among professors from different universities in Latin America. During her time in Cambridge she will develop her present research on the concept of public photography titled “Photography and Public Visual Space in Contemporary Societies” focusing on the historicity of the audiences of photographic exhibitions and the history of different collections of photographs in UK. |
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Michaelmas Term 2017
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Professor George Alter, University of Michigan, Beaufort Visiting Scholar George Alter is Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. His research integrates theory and methods from demography, economics, and family history with historical sources to understand demographic behaviors in the past. From 2007 to 2016 Alter was Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest archive of social science data. He has been active in international efforts to promote research transparency, data sharing, and secure access to confidential research data. During his visit to St John’s College Alter will be working with colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure to re-analyse English family histories from 1580 to 1900. He is particularly interested in the adoption of family limitation, and he has been comparing recent transitions to lower fertility in Africa to fertility declines in Europe and East Asia. Professor Alter's sponsor is Professor Szreter. |
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Professor Stefan Schulz, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Stefan Schulz is Professor of Organic Chemistry and Head of the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He is interested in Natural Product Chemistry with a focus on Chemical Communication and Chemical Ecology, the understanding of the function of natural products in the native biological systems. His research covers the identification and isolation of chemical compounds from natural sources, their stereoselective synthesis and analysis, and studies on their biosynthesis in the original organism. Most work is done in close cooperation with biologists on specific systems such as arthropods, bacteria, or vertebrates. In Cambridge, research projects on the evolution and function of pheromone signalling in butterflies will be intensified in cooperation with Professor Chris Jiggins. The projects will be linking expertise in genetics, behavior and speciation with chemistry, hopefully resulting in a clearer picture of pheromone communication and its evolution in general. http://www.oc.tu-bs.de/schulz/index_en.html. Professor Schulz's sponsor is Professor Jiggins. |
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Dr Susana Torres Prieto, IE University, Madrid, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Susana Torres is Associate Professor of Humanities and Academic Director of Humanities at IE University (Madrid). Her research interests focus on medieval Slavic literature and culture, with particular focus on East Slavic (Medieval Slavic Studies: New Perspectives for Research (ed.), 2009). She has worked extensively on heroic literature both vernacular and in translation, (Cantos épicos rusos, 2003) particularly on how it contributed to develop an imperial ideology of power, and also on apocryphal gospels, on which she has published several articles on how to better approach critical editions of Slavic texts. During her Beaufort Visiting Fellowship she will focus on producing a monograph in which questions of literary generic classification and social function of the texts will be dealt with more extensively, taking into account not only recent discoveries and new appreciations on the techniques of manuscript culture in Medieval Russia, but also approaches already applied to other European medieval literary traditions in order to place medieval Russian literary studies within the European concert where it rightly belongs. Dr Torres' sponsor is Professor Ni Mhaonaigh. |
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Professor Edward Greitzer, MIT, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Edward M. Greitzer is the H. N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, where he has been the Director of the Gas Turbine Laboratory and Deputy Department Head. He received his BA, MS, and PhD from Harvard. In addition to his academic experience he worked at United Technologies Corporation for nearly a decade, both at the Pratt & Whitney Division and at the United Technologies Research Center. His research interests include gas turbines, turbomachinery, propulsion system-airframe integration, active control of fluid systems, vortex flows, and industry-university collaboration. He was the MIT lead on the Cambridge-MIT Silent Aircraft Initiative and has had several previous stays at Cambridge as an Overseas Fellow. Professor Greitzer will be working at the Whittle Laboratory (Engineering Department). One objective is to complete a text on fluid dynamic Concept Questions. A second important goal, however, is to foster the longstanding and fruitful collaboration between the Cambridge Whittle Laboratory and the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory that has been one of the highlights of his career. http://aeroastro.mit.edu/Greitzer. Professor Greitzer's sponsor is Dr Hynes. |
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Professor Martin Parniske, LMU Munich, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Professor Martin Parniske studied biology, microbiology, biochemistry and genetics at the universities of Konstanz and Marburg, Germany. From 1986 until 1991 he performed diploma and doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dietrich Werner on chemical communication of the root with the bacterial microbiome with a focus on flavonoids and isoflavonoids. From 1992 until 1994 Martin carried out biochemical studies on the interaction of plant transcription factors and DNA at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany as a postdoctoral fellow funded by the German Research Foundation. From 1994 until 1998 he studied the evolution of plant disease resistance genes in the lab of Jonathan D.G. Jones. In 1998 Martin was appointed as an independent group leader at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK. In 2004 he accepted a call for the chair of Genetics at the Faculty of Biology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.From 2011 until 2013 he acted as the Dean of the Faculty of Biology of the LMU Munich. As the head of the Institute of Genetics at the Faculty of Biology of the LMU Munich, Martin teaches students at the Bachelor, Master and Doctoral (Dr. rer. nat.) level. Topics taught include Genetics, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, Genetics and Society, Plant Nutrition and Sustainable Food Production. Professor Parniske’s sponsor is Dr Paszkowski. |
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Easter Term 217
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Professor Yang Lu, Peking University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Yang LU is Professor of History of Peking University. After received his Ph.D in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, he has been concentrating his work on history of medieval China, especially the transformation of imperial power and political culture, and the use of writing in shaping elite identity, in Tang empire. He is also deeply interested in comparative studies between medieval Chinese empires and the world of late Antiquity and medieval Europe. As a Beaufort Scholar at St John's, he plans to work on a monograph on the rise of Tang literocracy, a group of social-political elite that dominates the society from the 8th to early 11th century, and explores new way to compare the medieval Chinese emphasis on writing and the Renaissance emphasis on the art of rhetoric. Professor Lu's sponsor is Professor McMullen. |
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Professor Jean Szlamowicz, Université de Bourgogne (France), Beaufort Visiting Scholar Professor Jean Szlamowicz specializes in linguistics, translation and music. Formerly a student at the Ecole Normal Supérieure in Fontenay, an assistant in Cambridge (Girton, St John’s) and a senior lecturer at the Sorbonne University in Paris, he now teaches in Dijon in the English department. His fields of study include oral syntax, semantics, and translation studies. He has published two handbooks in French/English translation (2011, Outils pour le commentaire de traduction and 2012, Outils pour Traduire, Ophrys). In discourse analysis he has focused on the rhetoric of political activism and contemporary anti-Semitism, publishing a critical study of Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (2011, Détrompez-vous!, Intervalles). He has translated several novels into French (Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes; Bowl of Cherries by Millard Kaufman; The Axeman’s Jazz by Ray Celestin…) and one into English, Parisian Gentleman by Hugo Jacomet, a study in menswear, another of his academic fields of interest. A member of the Académie du Jazz created by Jean Cocteau and former contributor to Jazz Hot, he currently writes for the Chicago jazz magazine Downbeat. As a producer, he runs the Paris-based organization Spirit of Jazz. His next book, entitled Jazz Talk, is a sociolinguistic exploration of the jazz jargon. As a visiting scholar, he plans to complete a book in translation studies, as well as two studies on wine terminology and another on pragmatic connectors. Professor Szlamowicz's sponsor is Professor Boyde. |
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Professor Catherine Alexander, Durham University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Catherine Alexander is Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University with a long interest in waste: the politics and economics of waste, how it variously appears as matter, metaphor, something to be managed away or transformed into value. She will be working on two edited collections which are considering first, indeterminacy, as a particular form of waste with specific effects and, second, the imaginative and other work required to transform different wastes to value – which considers why potential value often fails to be realised. She will also be writing a monograph on the small one-company town, which is centred on Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Centre (NNC) and abuts the former Soviet nuclear test site in north east Kazakhstan. The NNC has the related tasks of managing this past and spearheading what is often called Kazakhstan’s nuclear renaissance as a global peaceful nuclear leader. Professor Alexander's sponsor is Dr Watson. |
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Professor Dimitri El Murr, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Dimitri El Murr is Associate Professor in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and an Honorary Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research area is Ancient Philosophy, especially Socrates, Plato and political Platonism in Antiquity and beyond. His latest books include The Platonic Art of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-edited with G. Boys-Stones and Ch. Gill; a collection of essays on Plato’s Theaetetus (La Mesure du savoir. Études sur le Théétète, Paris, Vrin, 2013); and a monograph on political science in Plato entitled Savoir et gouverner. Essai sur la science politique platonicienne (Paris, Vrin, 2014). As a Beaufort scholar at St John’s, he plans to work on a new book provisionally entitled The Laws of attraction: Plato on friendship and politics. Arguing that Plato has a systematic, wide-ranging, and philosophically challenging conception of friendship in the manner of Empedocles, the aim of this book is to propose a detailed reconstruction of Plato’s account of philia (friendship) throughout the dialogues, thus helping to see how the Platonic psychological analysis of philia as a form of desire, the treatment of friendship as a political means of social cohesiveness, and the analysis of philia as a cosmological principle all fit together. Professor El Murr's sponsor is Professor Schofield. http://perso.univ-paris1.fr/elmurr https://univ-paris1.academia.edu/DimitriElMurr |
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Professor Renate Dürr, University of Tübingen, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Renate Dürr has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Tübingen since October 2011 and Dean of the History Department since 2013. From 2006 to 2011, Dürr was Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Kassel; prior to that, she worked as an assistant professor in Early Modern History at the University of Frankfurt am Main and was a visiting instructor at several universities, including the University of Basel. In 2006, Renate Dürr’s research focused on the history of Jesuit missions within the context of global history. In her publications on the flow of knowledge and culture between the Old and New Worlds, Dürr has examined Jesuit letters and travelogues, which were often published in Der Neue Welt-Bott, a German missionary journal which was published from 1726 to 1758. As a Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St John’s College, she will work on her next book about this journal, which she is currently writing together with Prof. Ulrike Strasser (University of California – San Diego). It will be published by Brill. Professor Dürr's sponsor is Professor Rublack. |
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Professor Tzvi Abusch, Brandeis University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Professor Tzvi Abusch is Rose B. and Joseph Cohen Professor of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Religion, Brandeis University. He is a scholar of ancient Near Eastern texts. His expertise is in the languages and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Near Eastern religions, and the Hebrew Bible. His primary fields of research and publications are Mesopotamian religion, magic, literature, and thought as well as biblical-Babylonian interconnections. During his stay in Cambridge in 2017 he intends to continue his work of editing and interpreting ancient Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft incantations and rituals and to work on volume 3 of the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals (which he is editing together with D. Schwemer) and II) to study and analyse selected Akkadian prayers and thereby to continue work on the interpretation of Babylonian prayers and their historical development. Professor Abusch's sponsor is Dr Worthington. |
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Dr Robert Miller, Catholic University of America, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Dr Robert Miller is an Associate Professor of the Old Testament at the Catholic University of America and Director of the Biblical Studies faculty. He earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 1998, with a concentration in Hebrew Bible. Dr Miller is the author of several books and many articles on early Israel, its history, archaeology, and literature. His research in Cambridge is on 'Southern Elements in the Origins of Israelite Yahwism', investigating biblical traditions about the source of Yahwism in northwestern Arabia, Ancient Near Eastern confirmation of this, and archaeological evidence for its importance. Dr Miller's sponsor is Dr MacDonald. |
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Lent Term 2017
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Professor Catherine Alexander, Durham University, Beaufort Visiting Scholar Catherine Alexander is Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University with a long interest in waste: the politics and economics of waste, how it variously appears as matter, metaphor, something to be managed away or transformed into value. She will be working on two edited collections which are considering first, indeterminacy, as a particular form of waste with specific effects and, second, the imaginative and other work required to transform different wastes to value – which considers why potential value often fails to be realised. She will also be writing a monograph on the small one-company town, which is centred on Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Centre (NNC) and abuts the former Soviet nuclear test site in north east Kazakhstan. The NNC has the related tasks of managing this past and spearheading what is often called Kazakhstan’s nuclear renaissance as a global peaceful nuclear leader. Her sponsor is Dr Helen Watson. |
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Professor Krste Asanovic, University of California, Berkeley Professor Krste Asanovic has been developing and promoting the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, developed in his group at UC Berkeley, as a way to reinvigorate the computer hardware industry by lowering the barrier to entry for new ideas. He is coming to St John's to collaborate with his sponsor Robert Mullins and others at the Cambridge Computer Lab to further develop new secure architectures based on the RISC-V architecture. |
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| Professor Richard Lockhart, Simon Fraser University | |
| Professor Ezra Zubrow, University of Buffalo | |
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Dr Huasheng Song, Zhejiang University Huasheng Song is an associate professor in economics at Zhejiang University in China. He received his Ph.D. from Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is a member of Jiusan Society in China which is a political party comprising of intellectuals engaged in science and technology. Dr. Song’s research centers on international trade, regional economics and Chinese economy. As a Beaufort visiting scholar at St. John’s college, he plans to wrap up two ongoing research projects on trade policy uncertainty and firms dynamics in export markets, and foreign exchange rate fluctuation and pricing strategy of firms in export markets. He also aims to explore new collaborative research topics while residing at the college. His sponsoring fellow is Dr Crowley. |
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Dr Quentin Deluermoz, Université Paris 13 Quentin Deluermoz is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Université Paris 13. He is a member of the laboratory PLeiade (Université Paris 13), associate member of the Centre de recherches historiques (CRH - EHESS) and a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His research focuses on the social and cultural history of order and disorder in the 19th Century Europe (including its Empires). He has published "le crepuscule des revolutions (1848-1871)" (Paris, Seuil, Histoire de la France contemporaine, 2012), "Norbert Elias et le XXe siècle" (Paris, Tempus, 2014), and, with Pierre Singaravelou "Pour une histoire des possibles" (Paris, Seuil 2016). After working on police-society relationship in the 19th century Paris, London and Berlin, his research focus now on the Paris Commune. As a Beaufort Visiting Scholar, he plans to finish the book on this topic which aims, by combining ethnographic approaches "from below" with local, European and global perspectives, to propose a new interpretation of that major revolutionary event situated within the profound changes of the "global 1860s". |
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Professor Michael Duggan, St Mary's University, Calgary Michael Duggan is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary’s University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His academic research focuses primarily on early Judaism and Christian origins with an attendant concern for interreligious dialogue in the 21st century. At St John’s College, his research will centre on the profile of the Jerusalem Temple in the biblical compendium of Ezra-Nehemiah with the intention of producing a monograph on the topic. The Temple reconstruction was foundational to establishing Jewish identity in the Persian era (539-332 BCE) and beyond. In the book of Ezra, intergovernmental communications (in Aramaic) between the regional administrators in Yehud and their superiors in Persia situate this construction project within the designs of the Achaemenid administration for ruling its empire. This is a story about the resettlement of exiles during an era of incipient globalization in the ancient world. Professor Duggan’s sponsor in Cambridge is Professor Stefan Reif. |
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Dr Max du Plessis, University of Kwazulu-Natal - Colenso Visiting Scholar Max du Plessis, is a barrister in South Africa, associate professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban) and a senior research associate at the Institute for Security Studies. The primary focus of his research and writing over the past few years has been international criminal justice and the work of the International Criminal Court in and about Africa. As a barrister in South Africa (and associate tenant, Doughty Street Chambers, London), Max has been working on domestic cases dealing with arrest warrants for senior government officials implicated in international crimes (including President Bashir of Sudan, Tzipi Livni of Israel, and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe) and litigating and advising on them in South Africa and other countries. He most recently acted on behalf of the Southern African Litigation Centre in seeking to ensure that the South African government complies with its obligations to arrest Bashir - arguing against the government's claim that Bashir has immunity from arrest under customary international law on account of him being head of state. |
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