Grant listings

Dr Tanmay Bharat
University of Oxford

Dr Hernán Burbano
University College London

Dr Hansong Ma
University of Cambridge

Dr Daniel Streicker
University of Glasgow

Dr Edze Westra
University of Exeter 

Dr Sophie Ambler
University of Lancaster

Dr Stefan Hanß
University of Manchester

Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
University College London

Dr Rian Thum
University of Manchester

Dr Alexia Yates
University of Manchester 

Professor Jeremias Adams-Prassl
University of Oxford

Professor Paul Davies
University College London

Dr Nadine El-Enany
Birkbeck, University of London

Professor Emily Grabham
University of Kent

Dr Guido Rossi
University of Edinburgh

Dr Ana Caraiani
Imperial College London

Professor Heather Harrington
University of Oxford

Dr Richard Montgomery
University of Birmingham

Dr Nick Sheridan
University of Edinburgh

Professor Sasha Sodin
Queen Mary, University of London

Dr Liam Kofi Bright
London School of Economics and Political Science

Dr Elselijn Kingma
King’s College London

Dr Laura Quick
University of Oxford

Dr Emily Thomas
Durham University

Dr Joseph Webster
University of Cambridge

Dr Judith Bovensiepen
University of Kent

Dr Emily Dawson
University College London

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite
University of Birmingham

Dr Nisha Kapoor
University of Warwick

Dr Lucy Mayblin
University of Sheffield
 

Gala Dinner Programme

Biological Sciences

Dr Tanmay Bharat
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford
Tanmay Bharat is at the forefront of groundbreaking developments in cryo-electron microscopy and tomography and their application to the structural analysis of native molecules within whole cells. He has made significant contributions to understanding viruses, actin-like proteins and DNA segregation in E. coli and has discovered a novel mechanism of phage-mediated antibiotic resistance. His current work is focused on revealing the molecular organisation of one of the most abundant groups of proteins on earth – the surface layer (S-layer) proteins of bacteria and archaea. S-layers determine the ways in which these cells interact with their environments and how they impact on multiple functions, including cell movement, adhesion and biofilm formation. By extending his studies to include model archaeal systems, he aims to understand the fundamental principles that underlie S-layer biogenesis and how these structures are dynamically regulated through the cell cycle.

Dr Hernán A Burbano
Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London
Hernán Burbano’s pioneering work established the new field of herbarium genomics. Having been a member of the original team that sequenced the Neanderthal genome, his more recent research uses DNA extracted from historical herbarium specimens and archaeological plant remains in combination with modern samples to track the history and evolution of plants associated with humans. He has used molecular and computational methods to reconstruct the domestication of crops, for example showing how maize, originally domesticated in present-day Mexico, spread northwards and became adapted to a temperate climate. He has also studied the population history of potatoes and the genes involved in their adaptation to new environments following their arrival in Europe from the Americas in post-Columbian times. In addition, he has traced the evolutionary history of plant pathogens, such as the strain of potato late blight which triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century.

Dr Hansong Ma
The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge
Hansong Ma is a world leader in the field of mitochondrial genetics. By isolating mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutants and creating animals carrying two mitochondrial genotypes, Dr Ma has made mitochondrial genetics accessible in a multicellular animal. Amongst her groundbreaking research advances, she showed that deleterious mtDNA mutations are selectively eliminated by purifying selection during oogenesis, but certain sequence polymorphisms can grant pathogenic mitochondrial genomes a selfish advantage so that they outcompete functional genomes and impair health. Moreover, Dr Ma demonstrated that homologous recombination occurs in animal mitochondria and capitalised on this to develop the first system to isolate recombinant mtDNA, providing a means to genetically engineer animal mtDNA. By illuminating the mechanisms underlying mtDNA competition and maintenance, her research will lead to interventions that could alleviate or even prevent mitochondrial disease and age-related decline in mtDNA quality.

Dr Daniel Streicker
MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research and Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow
Through his innovative and wide-ranging studies of the evolutionary and ecological processes that govern disease transmission in natural systems, Daniel Streicker has made significant contributions to a fundamentally important area of research. His vampire bat rabies study system is striking for its effective interdisciplinary approach, as well as providing information on the way this lethal disease spreads into human and livestock populations. Dr Streicker’s research has an important applied aspect that, through modelling and hypothesis testing, seeks to develop effective control measures. His research includes understanding how changes in land-use, vampire bat control measures and habitat type influence the maintenance of the rabies virus in rural South America. His research programme marks the start of a ‘big data’ approach to emergent disease prevention.

Dr Edze Westra
Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter
Edze Westra’s work probes the evolutionary underpinnings of an ancient bacterial immune system that might give insights into the workings of our own systems of immunity. Bacteria suffer from virus infections just as humans do and they have evolved their own immune system to repel them. Known as CRISPR, this stores and then remembers the gene sequences of viruses it encounters and when one reappears the CRISPR system literally cuts it apart. Humans have in recent years appropriated the CRISPR system, not to repel viruses, but to recognise and remove or modify unwanted gene sequences in other species, including our own. Dr Westra’s work asks the question of how any immune system can possibly remember everything it has seen. He finds that in large populations, different bacteria CRISPR systems remember different sequences and this can reduce the prevalence of infectious pathogens for everyone. His work has fundamental implications for understanding population-level immunity in human populations at a time when this is urgently needed.

History

Dr Sophie Ambler
Department of History, Lancaster University
Both of Sophie Ambler’s books break new ground in exciting ways. Her first book, on the political role and political thinking of the bishops under Henry III exposed the ‘theocratic nature’ of English politics in the thirteenth century, emphasising the importance for the bishops of scriptural authority and the question of the right to resist tyranny, at a time of great political tension that has traditionally been analysed from a secular constitutional perspective. Especially important in her best-selling second book, on Simon de Montfort, is her awareness of the European context of his career (his father led the Albigensian crusade against the Cathar heretics), along with a subtle understanding of how the ideology of crusading seeped into the political struggles of the English barons. Her future project takes her in new directions, using untapped sources and probing the psychology of war recruits from new perspectives. 

Dr Stefan Hanß
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester 
Stefan Hanẞ is a specialist in the material culture of the early modern period whose research covers Europe, the Americas and Asia and has appeared in German, Italian and Turkish as well as English. His prize-winning PhD on global event-making and the material culture of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) drew on sources in nineteen languages in more than a hundred and seventy archives, libraries and museums (and was published as a three-volume monograph). Dr Hanẞ has pioneered the use of digital microscopes and scientific laboratory analysis for studying the properties of materials such as featherwork and textiles in colonial Peru. The recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (2019), his next project investigates the history of hair in the Habsburg world, examining how head, facial, body and animal hair functioned as a cultural touchstone around which identities and subjectivities revolved, in what he calls a ‘hair-literate society’.

Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Department of History, University College London 
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is a historian of modern Britain whose work has transformed understandings of social and cultural shifts since 1945, with implications that extend to other countries. Her outstanding book, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2018) reconstructed a popular discourse of ‘classlessness’ that imagined England as a large, amorphous and diverse middle group which articulated class as snobbery and led to a decline in deference. She complicates the usual story of a transition from social democracy to ‘neoliberalism’ by showing that Margaret Thatcher was more the product than the creator of ‘popular individualism’ and that her aim was for a moral rather than merely economic rejuvenation of Britain. She is now turning to a second major theme. As Britain was the first nation to deindustrialise, she aims to draw on oral history and quantitative data to produce a complex account of its deindustrialisation.

Dr Rian Thum
Manchester China Institute, University of Manchester
Rian Thum is a historian of China and Central Asia, with a particular focus on Islam. His book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) shows how Uyghurs forged a sense of homeland by refashioning manuscripts and accounts of pilgrimage that emanated from the wider Islamic world. While such identity-making projects are usually associated with the spread of printing and nationalism, in the Uyghur case it was driven by the interaction of manuscript technology, sacred places, inter-oasis travel and pious graffiti. His book won four prizes. Dr Thum is currently working on a new book with Harvard University Press that argues that Islamic networks nourished ties between China and India from the sixteenth century to the present. The enduring character of this contact has been overlooked by scholars of Chinese Islam, who have paid insufficient attention to Persian, Turkic and Arabic texts. Dr Thum has been active in engaging policy-makers and journalist on the current situation among the Uyghurs. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. 

Dr Alexia Yates
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
Alexia Yates is an economic and social historian of modern France who has begun pathbreaking work on the politics, people and practices that transformed property development into a business in late nineteenth-century Paris. She has a particular interest in new groups of market intermediaries – estate agents, architects and joint-stock companies – who were central in creating a commercial market for housing and capitalism more broadly. Her new work will focus on how property relations altered and shaped the emergence of modern imperialism and later decolonisation. Property was important not only to underpinning European sovereignty but also for racialising and dispossessing colonial peoples. Using the French empire as a significant case study (among others), she will explore how property was acquired during the first period of globalisation as well as how it shaped the process and spaces of Europeans’ departures from colonial zones. 

Law

Professor Jeremias Adams-Prassl
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Jeremias Adams-Prassl’s work has for some time now charted the transformation of the world of work that has so disrupted the ‘employer–employee’ relationship as to make it almost unrecognisable. He has used imaginative and rigorous research techniques to draw out insights and questions that range way beyond employment law and go right to the heart of how to build and sustain human potential and talent and how to thrive in a fast-changing and borderless organisational context. He understands the engine room of high-velocity international capital markets, its value extraction techniques and the impact these have on how and where people trade their labour, who to, who for and the way they are treated while doing so. His work has been used and cited by courts around Europe. A comparative employment law scholar of international standing, his recently published monograph broke new ground in highlighting the precarity and increased inequality these changes have generated. The focus of his work is now turning to data science, to explore the growing practice of automated and algorithmic management that artificial intelligence ushers in. 

Professor Paul Davies
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Paul Davies is one of the leading common law scholars of his generation, with a broad interest in private, especially contract and commercial, law. His prize-winning monograph Accessory Liability (Hart Publishing, 2015), examined the neglected topic of civil claims against third parties who participate in wrongdoing. This original work has been relied upon by appellate courts both in the UK and overseas. As part of his Philip Leverhulme Prize-funded research, Professor Davies will build upon his 2015 monograph to examine the role of intermediaries in commercial law. Other strands of this project will survey the limits of contract law and investigate the practically important topic of overlapping claims and remedies. The different strands of this ambitious research agenda all address commercially significant topics which are currently under-researched. A key ambition running through his past and proposed work has been to improve the efficacy of our commercial law through a deeper understanding of its practical workings. It is anticipated that this future work will also be relied upon by judges and law reform agencies in this country and internationally.

Dr Nadine El-Enany
Department of Law, Birkbeck, University of London
Nadine El-Enany, Reader in Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law at Birkbeck, is a scholar of migration and race. She has established herself as a leading voice in the highly salient debate about the continuing impact of Britain’s colonial past on its legal and social system. Her recent monograph, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2021), has reached not only a legal but also a wider scholarly and public audience. She now plans to analyse how racial inequality is mapped onto space and realises itself in the distribution of resources such as clean air: a topic that will surely become a central object of scholarly and social concern in the wake of the pandemic. Dr El-Enany’s project will use socio-legal and critical tools to broaden our understanding of the intersection between race and the environment and to prompt a re-examination of how state violence is conceptualised.

Professor Emily Grabham
Kent Law School, University of Kent
Emily Grabham is a leading socio-legal scholar who has produced an impressive body of imaginative and highly original work on law and time. She skilfully and effectively combines theoretical analysis with ambitious empirical examination of the precise workings of regulation. Professor Grabham’s exploration of the mutual shaping of law and time is underpinned by a concern with equalities, paying close attention to how people experience time. Her research engages with crucial areas of law, cutting across legal sub-disciplines. The brilliance of her writings have been widely recognised and her work is held in the highest esteem within and beyond the legal discipline. She has been awarded prestigious prizes for her monograph Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the Enactment of Law (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and her articles ‘Time and Technique: The Legal Lives of the 26 Week Qualifying Period’ and ‘Doing Things with Time: Flexibility, Adaptability, and Elasticity in UK Equality Cases’.

Dr Guido Rossi
School of Law, University of Edinburgh
Guido Rossi is a leading legal historian of his generation. His research has been archival, but in a very distinctive way. Rather than be content with the idea that there was some form of universal lex mercatoria in the medieval and early modern period, he has sought to discover what merchants actually did. He has examined their letters and private business records. He studies with great skill not just the primary sources in many languages, but also engages fastidiously with a wide range of other sources about how business worked during that period. His conclusion overturns accepted wisdom and shows that English commercial law developed in ways very similar to other European countries, rather than distinctively. He has been able to immerse himself in the scholarly works on medieval canon law and civil law and link these with commercial law. Dr Rossi has transformed this area of legal history by comparative scholarship and by showing the importance of legal practice and practice-related works, complementing scholarly works as sources for understanding the law. His scholarly and erudite work is already shaping the future landscape of legal historical scholarship. 

Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Ana Caraiani
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Ana Caraiani is an early career researcher who has already established herself at the international vanguard of number theory and algebraic geometry. Her research illuminates deep connections between these fields and has been described by referees as fearless, beautiful and groundbreaking. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and winner of a European Mathematical Society Prize. This fast-growing field provides a new framework for much of pure mathematics and, together with her collaborators, Dr Caraiani has helped to shape it with new insights which settle longstanding problems while pointing the way to new mathematics.

Professor Heather Harrington
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
Heather Harrington works on algebraic systems biology and topological data analysis. Her research addresses deep problems in complex systems and reaction networks widely occurring in biological processes, such as in cell signalling. She applies highly theoretical approaches and computational methods, ranging from algebraic, geometric to topological, to analyse both models and data. This has resulted in important new insights into the pathways involved in cancer, as well as in neuronal networks. Her research also addresses the various ways diseases may spread, not just within an individual, but also in a population. Her advances in data analysis have led to new, robust methods for dealing with noisy data (a common situation), in particular estimating the shape of parameter space in models. She has developed and promoted several powerful numerical software packages, perhaps most notably tools for computing persistent homology in topological data analysis. Moreover, she has shared this software with the wider academic community. She won both the 2018 Whitehead Prize and the 2019 Adams Prize.

Dr Richard Montgomery
School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham
Richard Montgomery received his PhD in 2015 from the University of Cambridge and, following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, joined the University of Birmingham in 2018. His research is in Probabilistic and Extremal Graph Theory, and has often focused on solving hard long-standing problems with new and influential methods. His solution to an important conjecture of Kahn, among other work, saw him awarded the 2019 European Prize in Combinatorics. More recently, with Pokrovskiy (UCL) and Sudakov (ETH) he solved Ringel’s conjecture from 1963 for large complete graphs (a major graph packing question) and, with Hong Liu (Warwick), the odd cycle problem of Erdos and Hajnal from 1966.

Dr Nick Sheridan
School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh
Nick Sheridan is one of the leading researchers worldwide in symplectic topology and homological mirror symmetry (HMS). His work is characterised by technical brilliance supported by beautiful geometrical insight and creativity and he has made profound contributions to our understanding of Fukaya categories and of HMS. Ever since his 2012 PhD, his ideas have moved this research field in completely novel directions. In work of great originality and prominence, he resolved the influential conjecture of Kontsevich from 1994 in its central form, namely that HMS holds for the quintic threefold and moreover for Fano and Calabi–Yau hypersurfaces in projective spaces of all dimensions. In joint work with Sheel Ganatra and Tim Perutz, he proved that classical mirror symmetry can be recovered as a corollary of HMS. In recent work with Ivan Smith, he has displayed an impressive ability to blend modern concepts from homological algebra and topology in order to advance symplectic geometry.

Professor Sasha Sodin
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London
Sasha Sodin has made significant contributions to random matrix theory and the theory of random Schrödinger operators. Since Wigner’s pioneering work in the 1950s, random matrices have served as fundamental models for complex quantum systems. Professor Sodin’s work on random matrices has settled a number of open problems and conjectures in the subject. His most celebrated result is the proof of a limit theorem for the distribution of the largest eigenvalue of random band matrices, with the limit depending on the width of the band relative to the matrix size. A striking feature is the appearance of Airy process in the appropriate scaling limit, when the band width is much greater than the matrix size raised to the power 5/6. He has furthermore contributed to the rigorous understanding of Anderson localisation in various higher-dimensional disordered systems, using an impressive combination of techniques from classical analysis and probability theory. 

Philosophy and Theology

Dr Liam Kofi Bright
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science
Liam Kofi Bright is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on social epistemology, focusing on how scientific institutional structures affect our ability to produce and disseminate knowledge. His influential articles have creatively applied the mathematical techniques of formal epistemology to these problems. He plans to use similar methods to build bridges between core areas of analytic philosophy and pioneering figures in Africana philosophy, in particular by exploring the ideas of the under-appreciated Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu on cultural universals in relation to contemporary social epistemology and on truth in relation to contemporary philosophical logic.

Professor Elselijn Kingma
Department of Philosophy, King’s College London
Elselijn Kingma is a philosopher with a degree in medicine, whose previous work concerns the conceptualisation of health, the ways in which biology and engineering combine in the newly developed field of synthetic biology and the metaphysics of pregnancy. For example, she has disputed the view that the foetus is contained in pregnancy, arguing instead that the relation of foetus to mother is a part–whole relation. The project she will pursue with Leverhulme funding develops her thinking on pregnancy and early childhood. One focal point of the planned research is ectogestative or ‘artificial womb’ technology. Another is whether, on her understanding of the maternal–foetal relation, sub-optimal foetal outcomes due, for example, to a mother’s smoking or drinking, are properly understood as doing harm to the foetus.

Dr Laura Quick
Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford
Laura Quick’s groundbreaking research on the Hebrew Bible, along with superb linguistic and literary skills, benefits from close engagement with studies in material culture, history of medicine and sociology. She explores the various genres and modes of discourse found in the Hebrew Bible against the background of ancient Near Eastern literary culture. Dr Quick studies gender, dress and social status as means of communication in the ancient literary records, thus greatly enhancing our understanding of the social world which produced the Hebrew Bible. She will work on beauty and aesthetics in the Hebrew Bible, opening up new perspectives on the ancient social, intellectual and philosophical values which animate and inform ancient Near Eastern literature.

Dr Emily Thomas
Department of Philosophy, Durham University
Emily Thomas’s research focuses on seventeenth to twentieth century Anglo-American metaphysics. With her three most recent books she has not only attracted the attention of experts and won international prizes and major research awards, but found a wider readership. Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the revolutionary changes in the metaphysics of time that occurred in the seventeenth century. Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2018), an edited volume, celebrates the major role women philosophers played during that period. Highly praised on publication it has since become a set text on philosophy reading lists worldwide. The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores philosophical issues related to travel, from the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the present day. Widely discussed and celebrated in popular media it has established the author’s reputation as a public intellectual. In her current research, Dr Thomas continues her work on the history of time theories and on American and British women philosophers of the nineteenth century.

Dr Joseph Webster
Department of Divinity, University of Cambridge
Joseph Webster is a leading anthropologist of religion and his published works – particularly his monographs The Anthropology of Protestantism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and The religion of Orange politics (Manchester University Press, 2020) – have been internationally recognised as offering the most prominent statement to date of the anthropology–theology dialogue. His significant achievements include two immersive ethnographic studies of contemporary Protestantism in Scotland – on millenarianism among the Exclusive Brethren and ethno-religious nationalism among the Orange Order. With the successful completion of this research, he is now well equipped to begin his next major project: a comparative study of apocalyptic Protestant communities in Co. Antrim, Ulster’s so-called ‘Bible Belt’. Transferring his distinctive, innovative and interdisciplinary methodology from Scotland to Northern Ireland, Dr Webster will conduct a multi-sited study of Protestant fundamentalist sociality and eschatology in order to understand the moral dynamics of religiously conservative millenarian communities in Antrim and the theologies they represent. 

Sociology and Social Policy

Dr Judith Bovensiepen
School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent
Judith Bovensiepen, an anthropologist at the University of Kent, is a highly distinctive researcher and a leading expert on East Timor and Southeast Asia. Her doctoral thesis, which turned into her first book, The Land of Gold (Cornell University Press, 2015), explored how displaced people returning to their ancestral lands interact with their environment. Her proposed research investigates oil and gas corporations and the ways in which these corporations (and states) engage in forms of ‘wilful blindness’, when it involves the extraction of natural resources. Dr Bovensiepen argues for the need for a different approach to understanding the disconnect between corporate action and the self-professed commitment to sustainability and social responsibility. This ethnography will form the basis for another monograph. Her research has strong potential impact, as it addresses ideas about corporate responsibility and the effects of oil development in developing societies such as East Timor. This research will also provide important insights into the effects of development in neighbouring countries.

Dr Emily Dawson
Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London 
Emily Dawson is interested in how structural inequalities affect people’s experiences of science in their day-to-day lives. Her aim is to help make ‘public’ science accessible for all and she is a member of various advisory boards and research networks in the UK, Europe and the US. Her book, Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning (Routledge, 2019), reporting ethnographic work with various communities (including Asian, Somali, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American and Sierra Leonean) was nominated for several prizes and widely discussed. This work is theoretically rich, examining intersectionality, social justice, identity ‘performance’ and social reproduction. As Dr Dawson writes, ‘science communication practices construct a narrow public that reflects the shape, values and practices of dominant groups, at the expense of the marginalised’. A future project on the ‘co-construction of race/ethnicity and science in popular culture’ will address this, bridging science and technology studies, sociology of education and cultural studies. 

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite
Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, University of Birmingham
Kayleigh Garthwaite will build on her pioneering ethnographic research into the experiences of food banks in England, documented in her award-winning book, Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (Polity Press, 2016). Through her work she has detailed the impact of welfare reform, social disadvantage and health inequalities on food poverty. She will extend her empirical gaze to explore food banks in the US and Canada as well as the UK, with a particular focus on the normalisation of food charity. This in turn prompts questions around the entrenchment, institutionalisation and corporatisation of food charity. What is the relationship between governments, non-profit and commercial sectors in the provision of charitable food? Are there policy alternatives to charitable food? How might those experiencing food poverty gain an effective voice? This research is poignant and timely as we live through and experience the aftermath of a pandemic.

Dr Nisha Kapoor
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Nisha Kapoor has fast established herself as a leading voice in race, citizenship and state security studies, with a series of works on segregation, colonial governmentalities, Islamophobia and the rise of racial neoliberalism in the UK and the US. In her book, Deport, Deprive, Extradite (Verso Books, 2018), Dr Kapoor takes frontline critical race theory, international relations and criminology deep into the murky territory of state surveillance and punishment during the ‘War on Terror’. In next steps, she is extending her work to technologies and state bordering practices in China and India. Her analysis maps the emergent institutional configuration of surveillance regimes embedded in state–corporate partnerships and their broader political economy. As well as its political urgency and insistence on the human dimension of individual narratives, Dr Kapoor’s writing is notable for its deft combination of theory, methods and documentation. She was the recipient of a ESRC Future Research Leaders award 2015–2018.

Dr Lucy Mayblin
Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield
In a remarkably short space of time, Lucy Mayblin has developed an exciting and significant body of research that examines themes of migration, asylum, citizenship and (post)colonial legacies in the context of a globalised socio-political and cultural environment. Her work covers migration and asylum-seeking in the UK from a variety of angles but also extends beyond UK borders to other European countries, particularly Poland. Arguably more important however, is Dr Mayblin’s imaginative theorisation of the impacts of human movement in a global environment where perceptions of mobility are increasingly contested. In her forthcoming research, Dr Mayblin will be investigating the idea of ‘crimes of solidarity’ – laws that ‘make it illegal for citizens to support irregular migrants across the world’. She will develop a conceptual framework to advance awareness and understanding of crimes of solidarity. This framework will, in turn, shed light not only on the current attitudes of a range of governments to asylum-seekers and refugees, but also on prevailing official interpretations of the idea of citizenship and what it means to be a ‘citizen’. 

Dr Amin Benaissa
University of Oxford

Dr Myles Lavan
University of St Andrews

Dr Alex Mullen
University of Nottingham

Dr Amy Russell
Durham University

Dr Shaul Tor
King’s College London

Dr Juliet Biggs
University of Bristol

Dr Stephen Brusatte
University of Edinburgh

Dr Heather Graven
Imperial College London

Dr Babette Hoogakker
Heriot-Watt University

Dr Amanda Maycock
University of Leeds

Dr Alis Deason
Durham University 

Dr Simone De Liberato
University of Southampton

Dr Katherine Dooley
Cardiff University

Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair
University of Manchester

Dr John Russo
University of Bristol

Dr Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos
University of Oxford

Professor Chris Hanretty
Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Sophie Harman
Queen Mary, University of London

Dr Lauren Wilcox
University of Cambridge

Professor Lea Ypi
London School of Economics and Political Science

Professor Emily S Cross
University of Glasgow

Dr Stephen Fleming
University College London

Dr Claire Haworth
University of Bristol

Dr Harriet Over
University of York

Professor Nichola Raihani
University College London

Dr Erika Balsom
King’s College London

Dr Daisy Fancourt
University College London

Dr Ian Kiaer
University of Oxford

Dr Peter McMurray
University of Cambridge

Dr Tiffany Watt Smith
Queen Mary, University of London

Gala Dinner Programme

Classics

Dr Amin Benaissa
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford

Amin Benaissa is one of three General Editors of the world-renowned Oxyrhynchus Papyri at Oxford. He is a wide-ranging classical scholar who combines the technical skills of papyrology with the literary and historical acumen required to place the texts and documents he studies in their broader cultural and historical contexts. He has edited over a hundred literary texts and documents from various collections. He is known for his 2012 work on Rural Settlements of the Oxyrhynchite Nome, an extensive resource for the study of the historical geography and rural society of Graeco-Roman Egypt. In 2018 he published his second major book, an edition with translation and commentary of the fragments of the first-century CE epic poet Dionysius. Dr Benaissa’s next project, an intellectual biography of Apion, promises to be a major contribution to the study of the literary and religious culture of Roman Alexandria.

Dr Myles Lavan
School of Classics, University of St Andrews

Myles Lavan’s monograph, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013), explores metaphors of enslavement in Latin texts to demonstrate how the Roman elite construct their relationship with their Imperial subjects as one of control by a superior culture. He thus challenges the prevailing scholarly consensus which regarded the early Roman Empire as committed to an integrationist mission. In this and other works, Dr Lavan brings to bear the expertise of a sensitive critic of Latin literature, combined with an historian’s control of both source-based and model-based methodologies. His quantitative and probabilistic approach to long-standing problems in Roman history shows what can be done with computational models in the study of the pre-modern world, and will be developed further in forthcoming publications.

Dr Alex Mullen
Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham

Alex Mullen’s landmark study Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean (2013) transformed the field. Analysing a broad range of archaeological material as well as written texts, she offers an integrated account of cultural influence and cultural change across a very extended period, emphasising the importance of contact between Southern Gaul and Italy from an early date. Dr Mullen has also made contributions to the study of language use in Britain in the pre-Roman and Roman periods. Her innovative ERC project on the Latinization of the Northwestern Roman provinces (LatinNow) builds on this phenomenal range of expertise, bringing together a group of specialists to study a still broader geographical area, in order to shed new light on the relationship between language use and identities across a broad swathe of the Roman Empire.

Dr Amy Russell
Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University

Amy Russell’s first book on the Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome won the 2017 C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit. Making a pioneering use of spatial theory, it showed that while it has been recognised that the language of the ‘public’ helped shape the construction of the ‘private’ in domestic space, reciprocally the ‘private’ intruded on ‘public’ space in complex and revealing ways. Her forthcoming publications are a monograph, Senatorial Monuments and Political Identity, and an edited volume on The Roman Republic and Political Culture. In 2019, she is leading a Major Project at Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study, bringing together an interdisciplinary team to explore how ‘The People’ as a unified political entity is defined and operates. Her new project will enlist new institutional theory in a major re-examination of the Populus Romanus.

Dr Shaul Tor
Departments of Classics and Philosophy, King’s College London

Shaul Tor’s work to date has focused largely on Presocratic writers, and is marked by its combination of meticulous textual analysis and broad creative imagination. In his major monograph, Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology, and in a clutch of articles, Dr Tor sets the surviving fragments of the Presocratics in their wider cultural context, reading Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus alongside the poet Hesiod, and challenging the assumption that, in the Greek context, critical reasoning and divine revelation are incompatible. His work can take single-sentence fragments and entirely recast our understanding of their authors. It has made a major contribution to the ‘theological turn’ in the study of Greek religion. Further articles develop new ways of understanding Hellenistic Pyrrhonian Scepticism and the appeal of ancient Pyrrhonism in relation to central questions in contemporary philosophy.

Earth Sciences

Dr Juliet Biggs
School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol

Juliet Biggs isageophysicist who uses satellite geodesy to investigate volcanic and tectonic processes. Having developed a method to use satellite radar to measure rates of active fault movement, she widened her focus to volcanic processes. She developed methods to identify, measure and model deformation in satellite-based global surveys of volcanoes and to integrate other observations. Such systematic work enabled her to quantify links between deformation and eruption. Dr Biggs has shown thatfew eruptions occur without observable deformation and that many volcanoes hitherto thought to be dormant are undergoing deformation. Her work has led to the establishment of the Global Deformation Database Task Force. A foremost researcher on volcano geodesy she is developing machine-learning algorithms to identify deformation that mightindicate pending eruptive activity. She also works closely with space agencies and volcano observatories in developing countries.

Dr Stephen Brusatte
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh

Stephen Brusatte is an earth scientist who is transforming our understanding of evolution on long timescales. Working mostly in the field of dinosaur palaeobiology, he has contributed a series of new insights into the nature and drivers of major evolutionary transitions. His work has shown that the evolution of birds from dinosaurs was in fact a gradual process, but that once flight was established a rapid burst in bird development was enabled. This is now providing a model for transitions in other groups. Dr Brusatte’s work is characterised by creative approaches that draw on concepts and techniques from diverse areas of biology, geology and computing, and include rigorous numerical approaches to large datasets, and use of new imaging techniques. Another hallmark is his approach to public engagement, including advisory roles with the BBC and National Geographic, and popular science books.

Dr Heather Graven
Department of Physics and Grantham Institute, Imperial College London

Heather Graven is a climate scientist who has pioneered the application of radiocarbon in studies of the global carbon cycle; for example, by quantifying the emissions of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from human activities and by placing new and independent constraints on the oceanic uptake of atmospheric CO₂. Her research on understanding the relationship between human activities, the global carbon cycle and climate change has been embraced by the IPCC, on behalf of which she helps to organise the biogeochemical Earth System Model intercomparison experiments to inform future assessment reports. Dr Graven will use this award to quantify the uptake of CO₂ by terrestrial ecosystems with an emphasis on revealing and understanding the mechanisms at play. She also conducts a wide range of outreach and media activities and in doing so has become an ambassador for climate change research.

Dr Babette Hoogakker
Institute of Life and Earth Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

Babette Hoogakker has expertise in palaeooceanography, especially in understanding circulation and chemistry of past oceans and links to CO₂ in the geological past. She pioneered new methods to reconstruct oxygen concentrations in past oceans using isotopic measurements from fossilised marine foraminifera, a great achievement since the assessment of past oxygen levels in the ocean has proved exceptionally challenging. Her work highlighted changes in the oxygen content of ocean waters during glacial-interglacial periods at the time of the last ice age, critical for understanding the link with the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the course of glacial episodes. Dr Hoogakker is known for her pioneering new methods for understanding climate change and will focus part of her future research on studies of organic carbon in foraminifera to understand past ocean productivity, carbon cycling and climate change.

Dr Amanda Maycock
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds

Amanda Maycock is a renowned climate scientist who uses a combination of atmospheric measurements and numerical models to understand interactions between atmospheric chemistry, radiative transfer and climate dynamics. Her work has led to substantial developments in our understanding of the role of the stratosphere in the climate system, including how changes in the concentration of stratospheric trace gases affect global and regional surface climate. Dr Maycock has taken leading roles in several international science programmes within the atmospheric sciences, establishing and developing new areas of investigation. She contributes to the International Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, which monitors the successes of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and the IPCC, which informs the multilateral discussions under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Physics

Dr Alis Deason
Department of Physics, Durham University

Gaining an insight into our place in the Universe is one of the major challenges of modern astronomy and galaxies are one of its key building blocks. Alis Deason’s pioneering work has shown how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbour, Andromeda, provide a unique opportunity to study galaxy formation in action. Dr Deason pioneered studies of the Milky Way halo using large survey data coupled with cosmological simulations. She was able to show that the Milky Way has probably experienced just one big accretion event in the past and overall has had fewer large mergers than would be typical. Her work on galactic halos has wider significance in that they may contain the keys to understanding the nature of the dark matter of which they largely consist.

Dr Simone De Liberato
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton

Simone De Liberato is a physicist who works in solidstate cavity quantum electrodynamics. He has played a substantial role in developing the research field of ultra-strong light-matter coupling, starting from theoretical analysis but leading to collaborative worldleading experiments with a number of other groups. In addition to his prediction of the breakdown of the Purcell effect he has anticipated a wide range of related phenomena that are now being pursued experimentally. His research on intersubband polaritons and on localised phonon polaritons is pointing towards a new generation of mid-infrared and terahertz source and devices. His broadly inclusive and innovative approach are also evident in his public engagement work (including with the BBC), in his co-founding several successful technology businesses, and in his role as an advocate for entrepreneurship amongst scientists.

Dr Katherine Dooley
School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

Katherine Dooley has played a key role in the development of instrumentation for the LIGO interferometers that made the monumental discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes and colliding neutron stars. She was one of a small handful of scientists in residence at the sites who carried out the creative work – in quantum optics, sensing and control – needed to commission the low-noise detectors. Dr Dooley’s early work was critical to increase the sensitivity and stability of the LIGO and GEO600 laser interferometers and achieve record strain sensitivities. Her Prize will support a quest to develop challenging new technologies that will increase the length of stable observational runs that are possible with interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.

Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair
School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science and the National Graphene Institute, University of Manchester

Rahul Raveendran Nair is a materials physicist who has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of the physical properties of graphene and other two-dimensional materials. His discovery that the optical absorbance of graphene is ‘quantised’, given by the product of the fine structure constant, α, and π came as a surprise and furthered our understanding of the optoelectronic properties of graphene. Another remarkable discovery of his research is the superpermeable water flow through graphene oxide membranes. This work has led to new uses of graphene and graphene oxide in tuneable molecular sieving and is leading to the development of next-generation smart membrane technologies for applications such as water filtration, organic solvent nanofiltration, seawater desalination and in artificial biological systems.

Dr John Russo
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol

John Russo has combined powerful computational and theoretical techniques to address a suite of fundamental problems in soft condensed matter, and especially the structure of phase changes. In many cases these have challenged long-held assumptions, such as his finding that orientational order, rather than density, triggers crystallisation of hard and soft spheres. He has also contributed to the fundamental understanding of the glass transition in two and three dimensions. Applying aspects of this thinking to a substance as familiar as water, he and his collaborators have identified a hitherto unknown metastable form of ice, and explained some of waters many anomalous behaviours with a novel two-state model of its local structure. These ideas and methodologies create an opportunity to deepen our understanding of nucleation, in partnership with strong soft matter experimental groups worldwide.

Politics and International Relations

Dr Ezequiel González Ocantos
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

In Latin America, judges have become key architects of fundamental rights. This represents a major transformation of the role of the judiciary in this region, one with profound implications for the distribution of power in society. In Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial change and human rights trials in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ezequiel González Ocantos providesarigorous explanation of this transformation and its implications. This research has made a substantial contribution to debates about the nature of judicial power, the role of social mobilisation and the diffusion of new paradigms of rights adjudication in shaping the behaviour of courts. It has also informed briefs filed by international NGOs before the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission. His future research will explore the consequences of another major
transformation in the political involvement of Latin American courts: the anti-corruption judicial activism that has led to the resignation (Guatemala 2016), impeachment (Brazil 2016), indictment (Argentina 2017), and conviction (Brazil 2018) of former and sitting
presidents.

Professor Chris Hanretty
Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London

Chris Hanretty is a leading scholar of public opinion, representation, legislative behaviour, and in the use of advanced statistical methods to study these phenomena. He has published influential work on non-majoritarian institutions, in particular quantitative work on courts and broadcast media. He has shown a relationship between appointments and judicial behaviour in West-European constitutional courts as well as the lack of such a link in the UK. His main contribution is in developing techniques for estimating constituency opinion in the UK, especially non-survey data, which can be used to understand a variety of problems of representation, such as MP voting patterns, as well as forecasting election outcomes. He is best known for having produced estimates of how each Westminster constituency voted in the 2016 EU membership referendum, estimates which have been cited repeatedly in parliamentary and public debates. He will be able to use the funds from the Prize to continue his research into constituency opinion by matching new data and estimating refined statistical models.

Professor Sophie Harman
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London

Sophie Harman is established in three different disciplines, international relations, global health and the comparative political economy of development. In doing so she has built an original research agenda that critically examines international policy towards fighting HIV/AIDS, international developmentin Africa and gender and visibility. Her use of film-making as a tool of social science research is yet more evidence of innovation and originality. Her research has produced a series of ground-breaking journal articles, and research driven single authored and jointly written books. Her work has pioneered much needed research into hitherto understudied aspects of the global south and has a strong public engagement component. In 2018 she was awarded the Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar by the Political Studies Association, and in 2019 was nominated for the BAFTA for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer.

Dr Lauren Wilcox
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge

Lauren Wilcox has drawn upon and added to feminist theories of embodiment to make an important contribution to our understanding of political violence within the framework of international relations. In doing so, she has opened up a surprisingly neglected area that will now benefit from her pioneering work, encouraging further study of the place of the embodiment of the subject in war and critical security studies. Her work in this field has already had significant impact and has helped to shape new debates in feminist and critical international relations. Building upon this, but taking some of its insights further, she is presently working on a project concerning ‘war beyond the human’, exploring the significance of the current posthuman moment as it affects the technologies, but also the ethics of war – and above all provoking us to think how we should understand these processes and the residues of the categories of thought with which they have been associated.

Professor Lea Ypi
Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

Lea Ypi has made significant contributions to a number of debates in contemporary political theory. In her work on global justice, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP), she has developed a distinctive theory of cosmopolitanism that sheds new light on the relationship between political theory and political practice. Her most recent work, The Meaning of Partisanship (OUP, co-authored with Professor Jonathan White), explores the role of political parties in public life. This is a topic that has been unduly neglected by political theorists. The Meaning of Partisanship has created and defined a new normative agenda, stimulating others to debate these vital issues. In addition, Professor Ypi has made contributions to the interpretation of Kant and Marx, the ethical issues surrounding immigration, and the nature and implications of colonialism, among other topics. She is a winner of the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in Political Science.

Psychology

Professor Emily S Cross
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow

Emily Cross has established herself as a leading authority in social robotics, working at the cutting-edge of a rapidly expanding field. Her research interests envelope the arts, science and technology and she is equally comfortable in and between domains that some regard as antithetical. She uses theory and methods from a number of disparate fields, including social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, empirical aesthetics and robotics. She addresses fundamental basic scientific questions about perception, action and the perception of action, exploring the role of experience and expectation in kinaesthetic empathy. The relevance of this for ‘real world’ issues is both obvious and profound. Professor Cross already has a strong international reputation and is regularly invited to consult, advise and give keynote presentations and lectures around the world.

Dr Steve Fleming
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London

Steve Fleming is an outstanding scientist whose work addresses the psychological processes and neural systems that support metacognition. He approaches this topic in an interdisciplinary fashion, using a range of psychological, physiological and neuroimaging methods, and has been keen to draw out the clinical implications of his work. Dr Fleming shaped the burgeoning field of metacognitive neuroscience a few years ago, by co-editing the first book on the topic with Chris Frith (The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition, 2014). He often tackles scientific problems that have been thought to be purely philosophical, and his future research plans include explorations of links between metacognition and consciousness.

Dr Claire Haworth
School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol

Claire Haworth is an exceptionally talented psychologist, and a rising star in the field of Behavioural Genetics. In her early career, she was funded by two consecutive fellowships; an interdisciplinary fellowship from the MRC and ESRC, and a research fellowship from the British Academy. Her research focuses on mental health and wellbeing and the dynamic interplay between genetic and environmental influences. Her groundbreaking work has demonstrated how genetic influences can change as we get older or when we are exposed to different social and environmental conditions. Results of Dr Haworth’s studies highlight the ways in which genetic risks impacting on mental health might be mitigated by behavioural interventions. She was awarded the British Psychological Society's Spearman Medal in 2017, for outstanding published work in psychology.

Dr Harriet Over
Department of Psychology, University of York

Harriet Over completed her postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and since then has established herself as an acknowledged expert on social learning. Her research focuses on how children learn about the social world through observation and imitation. Using a combination of creative laboratory experiments and observational research in naturalistic settings, drawing on anthropology as well as developmental and social psychology, her work has moved the study of imitation away from a focus on cognitive, instrumental outcomes to recognising its pivotal role in building social relationships and understanding intergroup relations. She has published in leading journals in social, developmental and comparative psychology, won a number of prestigious awards and been successful in attracting substantial external funding.

Professor Nichola Raihani
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London

Nichola Raihani’s research explores the causes and consequences of variation in social cognition and behaviour, both from a proximate psychological perspective and from an ultimate evolutionary perspective. She undertook a four-year research fellowship at the Institute of Zoology, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship prior to her appointment as Professor in 2017. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from social, evolutionary, and clinical psychology, as well as evolutionary biology, behavioural economics and anthropology. Professor Raihani has developed an international network and publishes regularly both in popular science outlets and high quality academic journals. A major focus of her research now is to explore the socio-cognitive and behavioural consequences of variation in paranoid ideation.

Visual and Performing Arts

Dr Erika Balsom
Department of Film Studies, King’s College London

Erika Balsom has established an international reputation for cutting edge research, especially in the interdisciplinary spaces her work has opened up between film studies, art history, aesthetics and ethics. Her first book, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2013), examines the transformations of cinema after digitisation. Her second major monograph, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art (Columbia University Press, 2017), took up related questions of distribution, circulation and reproducibility. She has further co-edited an influential anthology Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016). Dr Balsom has also been one of the youngest scholars invited to deliver a prestigious Kracauer Lecture at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. In 2017, she was invited to be film curator in residence at the GovettBrewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, resulting in her commissioned essay An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (New Plymouth, New Zealand: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, 2018).

Dr Daisy Fancourt
Department of Behavioural Science and Health, University College London

Daisy Fancourt previously worked as a professional pianist while completing her doctoral thesis in Psychoneuroimmunology. Since, her research has explored the psychological and physiological impact of the arts on our health. She has worked as Arts Manager at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and published the first practical textbook, Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her project over the next few years is focused research that combines diverse disciplinary approaches to explore the impact of arts engagement for individuals and society. Dr Fancourt’s work will analyse national data to explore how arts engagement across the lifespan is linked with mental health/cognition/wellbeing, the interrogation of why we see these results, and research to support the scaling up of successful projects. Her work includes collaboration with UK Arts Councils, Public Health England, NHS England and the World Health Organisation.

Dr Ian Kiaer
The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford

Ian Kiaer combines a rigorous academic career with considerable international standing as an artist. His work researches architectures and specific buildings that act as resonant carriers for meaning. His process and practice takes form in extended mixed media, including painting, drawing and wall texts, juxtaposed and installed with projected film and photographs, architectural models and adapted objects, bringing together delicate and vital correspondent elements and traces to act as carriers of often-fractured narratives – charged to discover questions of wholeness and permanence. His new work will research the brutalist structure of a particular panoramic restaurant in Lisbon. Designed by Chaves de Costa, it is a building that has moved from a model of luxury during the Estado Novo dictatorship, to its present abandoned state as a site for graffiti, and parkour.

Dr Peter McMurray
Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist, media artist and lecturer at Queens' College, University of Cambridge.
His research focuses on music, sound and ritual in contemporary Islam with special emphasis on migration and refugee movements in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. He is currently completing a book and media project entitled Pathways to God; The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin, whilst other recent publications have covered the influence of 'viral' music videos on social media channels, the importance of tape in the development of sound recording history, and the use of cartography in the mapping of sound and location. Dr McMurray plans to expand his research into further work looking at the ways music, sound, noise and silence play significant roles in the lives of refugees.

Dr Tiffany Watt Smith
Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London

Tiffany Watt Smith’s research in emotions, the body and performance draw on her experience as a theatre director. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between theatre and science. Her book On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell-Shock (2014) has become a key reference point for scholarship in the history of emotions and theatre studies. Her next book, written for a general audience, The Book of Human Emotions (2015), argues for the importance of understanding the history and politics of our ideas about emotions, and has had an international reach. Dr Watt Smith’s future project, on the performance of sleep, will offer original insights into the historical intersections between science, medicine and performance. She has a significant international and public profile, working regularly for broadcasting media, newspapers and journals, and on theatre projects that intersect with her research.

Dr Susana Carvalho
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford

Dr Manuel Fernandez-Gotz
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh

Dr Oliver Harris
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester

Dr Camilla Speller
Department of Archaeology, University of York

Dr Fraser Sturt
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton

Dr John Bower
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol

Dr Scott Cockroft
EaStCHEM School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh

Dr David Glowacki
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol

Dr Susan Perkin
Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford

Professor Aron Walsh
Department of Materials, Imperial College London

Dr Vasco Carvalho
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Dr Camille Landais
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science

Professor Kalina Manova
Department of Economics, University of Oxford

Professor Uta Schönberg
Department of Economics, University College London

Dr Fabian Waldinger
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science

Dr Anna Barnett
Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex

Professor Cinzia Casiraghi
School of Chemistry, University of Manchester

Dr David Connolly
Institute for Infrastructure & Environment, Heriot-Watt University

Dr Alexandra Silva
Department of Computer Science, University College London

Dr Peter Vincent
Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London

Dr Katherine Brickell
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr Vanesa Castán Broto
Development Planning Unit, The Bartlett, University College London

Dr Mark Graham
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Dr Harriet Hawkins
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr David Thornalley
Department of Geography, University College London

Dr William Abberley
School of English, University of Sussex

Professor Alexandra Harris
Department of English, University of Liverpool

Dr Daisy Hay
Department of English, University of Exeter

Dr Lily Okalani Kahn
Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London

Dr Hannah Rohde
Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

Professor Michael Brockhurst 
University of York 
Evolutionary biology and experimental evolution 

Dr Elizabeth Murchison 
University of Cambridge 
Cancer genetics 

Professor Ewa Paluch 
University College London 
Cell biophysics 

Dr Thomas Richards 
University of Exeter 
Evolutionary genomics of eukaryotic cellular complexity and microbial diversity 

Dr Nikolay Zenkin 
Newcastle University 
Biochemistry and molecular biology of gene expression 

Professor Manuel Barcia Paz 
University of Leeds 
Atlantic slavery and slave trade history; Brazil and Cuba (nineteenth century) 

Dr Aaron Moore 
University of Manchester 
Comparative history of East Asia 

Dr Renaud Morieux 
University of Cambridge 
Anglo-French relations in the eighteenth century in Europe and empires 

Dr Hannah Skoda 
University of Oxford 
Medieval socio-cultural history, particularly violence and reactions to change 

Dr David Trippett 
University of Bristol 
Music history, nineteenth century intellectual history, aesthetics and media theory 

Dr Alexandros Beskos 
University College London 
Computational statistics and Monte-Carlo methods 

Dr Daniel Kral 
University of Warwick 
Graph theory, extremal combinatorics and theoretical computer science 

Dr David Loeffler 
University of Warwick 
and 
Dr Sarah Zerbes 
University College London 
Number theory 

Professor Richard Samworth 
University of Cambridge 
Nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics 

Dr Corinna Ulcigrai 
University of Bristol 
Dynamical systems and ergodic theory 

Dr Jonathan Birch 
London School of Economics and Political Science 
Philosophy of the biological and behavioural sciences 

Dr Tim Button 
University of Cambridge 
Metaphysics, philosophies of logic, language, and mathematics 

Professor Ofra Magidor 
University of Oxford 
Philosophy of logic and language, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mathematics 

Dr Anna Mahtani 
London School of Economics and Political Science 
Philosophy of probability and philosophy of logic and language 

Dr Holger Michael Zellentin 
University of Nottingham 
Qur’anic studies and Jewish studies 

Professor Alan Bogg 
University of Oxford 
International, European and Comparative Labour Law 

Dr Prabha Kotiswaran 
King’s College London 
Feminist legal theory, criminal law, rape, trafficking, sex work, sexual violence, and the sociology of law 

Dr Sarah Nouwen 
University of Cambridge 
International criminal law, the intersections of law and politics and peace processes 

Professor Erika Rackley 
University of Birmingham 
Gender and diversity in the judiciary and legal profession 

Dr Michael Waibel 
University of Cambridge 
International (economic) law, international dispute settlement, law and economics 

Dr Lucie Cluver 
University of Oxford 
Preventing HIV-infection and reducing social disadvantage for AIDS affected children 

Dr Hazem Kandil 
University of Cambridge 
Revolution and war in the modern Middle East, France and the US 

Dr Victoria Redclift 
University of Surrey 
The sociology of migration and political exclusion 

Dr Katherine Smith 
University of Edinburgh 
Public health and inequalities 

Dr Imogen Tyler 
University of Lancaster 
The sociology of inequality; social and cultural theory

Biological Sciences

Professor Michael Brockhurst
Department of Biology, University of York
Michael Brockhurst is one of the leading evolutionary ecologists of his generation. He carries out world-leading research at the interface of evolutionary biology and medical microbiology. He has exploited whole genome data and experimental evolution techniques to make major advances in our understanding of the coevolution of species interactions, providing the first direct experimental evidence at the molecular level for the Red Queen hypothesis. He has also carried out pioneering work on sociality in bacterial populations, and on the evolutionary dynamics of bacterial infections. Working with NHS clinicians, he has applied evolutionary thinking to show that rapid bacterial evolution has important consequences for the development of novel antimicrobials, and for the prognosis and treatment of chronic bacterial infections such as cystic fibrosis. In addition to his core scientific work, which is supported by a range of highly competitive grants, his public engagement work has led to collaborative work with artists and technologists funded by the Arts Council and the Wellcome Trust.
http://www.york.ac.uk/biology/research/ecology-evolution/michael-brockhu...

Dr Elizabeth Murchison
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge
Cancers are a class of disease caused by cells that multiply out of control inside our bodies. They are one of the leading causes of mortality, especially in aging populations. Up until recently it was assumed that cancers die together with the individuals they have made ill. But that consensus has now been overturned by Elizabeth Murchison who studies a rare form of cancer that can be transmitted from one individual to another like an infectious disease. So far this infectious cancer has only been observed in dogs and in the Tasmanian Devil, a small marsupial mammal that lives in Tasmania. Tasmanian devils spread the cancer by biting each other, and in dogs it is spread by sexual activity, making their cancer a venereal disease. Remarkably, Murchison has been able to show that each of these cancers arose just once in a single individual, and have continued to survive as cancerous cells get transmitted to others. In the case of dogs, Murchison has shown that the founding individual lived around 11,000 years ago. Murchison’s work raises questions of profound importance to the field of cancer studies. How, for example, do these infectious cancer cells escape detection by the new host’s immune systems? And, if these infectious cancers can exist in dogs and Tasmanian devils, do they also exist – as yet undetected – in other mammals, including humans?
http://www.vet.cam.ac.uk/directory/murchison

Professor Ewa Paluch
MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London
Ewa Paluch is one of the leading exponents of research at the interface of physics and biology, applying biophysical techniques and quantitative imaging to address fundamental questions in cell biology. Dr Paluch has carried out pioneering research into the biophysical mechanisms regulating cell shape, cell division and cell movement. Her research focuses on the role of the actin cortex, which enables the cell to exert mechanical force and resist external stresses. Dr Paluch has made a major contribution to life science and is a world leader in her field.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lmcb/research-group/ewa-paluch-research-group

Professor Thomas Richards
College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter
Tom Richards investigates the relationship between genome evolution, cellular organisation and microbial ecology. He has pioneered the use of whole genome data to understand the evolution of cellular traits and the likely characteristics of the last universal common ancestor to eukaryotic organisms. In a very short period of time, he has developed a world-leading reputation in understanding the role that horizontal gene transfer has played in the evolution of pathogenic lineages in very diverse groups of micro-organisms. His work provides completely new insight into the evolutionary diversity of microbial eukaryotes and is re-defining the tree of life. Professor Richards’s exceptional publications and recent discoveries demonstrate that he is a true leader in the field of evolutionary genomics. 
http://biosciences.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=tom_richards

Dr Nikolay Zenkin
Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences, Newcastle University
Professor Zenkin is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his distinguished and groundbreaking research into the mechanisms controlling information flow from DNA into RNA at the level of the molecular enzymology of the complex multi-subunit RNA polymerase. Zenkin’s work is characterised by his penetrating use of biochemistry and genetics to discover mechanisms controlling RNA polymerase functionality, with wide ranging implications for all genetic systems. Currently at Newcastle University, Zenkin has studied at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and at the Waksman Institute, Rutgers University in the USA. 
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/camb/staff/profile/nikolay.zenkin

History

Dr Manuel Barcia Paz
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Manuel Barcia Paz has made pioneering contributions to the history of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century in three monographs distinguished by their originality of argument, and by the ingenious work with difficult archives in three widely-separated locations (Cuba, Spain, and Brazil) and two languages which underpin them. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Slave Resistance on Cuban Plantations (2008) uses colonial records to open to us the inner world of slave society with an extraordinary subtlety. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 (2012) is the first major study of what was an important early nineteenth-century slave rebellion. One of its key insights, made possibly by Barcia Paz’s discovery of sources which indicated the African ethnic groups from which rebels came, was that Africans who had significant military experience in Africa were central to the revolt. This led to his third book, the West African Warfare in Cuba and Brazil (2014), a powerful ‘connective history’ which shows the interlinked character of war in Africa and slave rebellions in two otherwise disconnected theatres of New World slavery. In his latest work, he examines the linked histories of sports and politics in twentieth-century Cuba and the United States. Barcia Paz combines the careful gaze of the microhistorian on individual actors with a capacity to see the larger regional and global connections which bridge Cuba and Brazil to Latin America, to West Africa, and North America.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/125056/156/manuel_barcia_paz

Dr Aaron Moore
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
Dr Aaron Moore is an historian with a special interest in East Asia. Having received his PhD in 2006 from Princeton, he held temporary appointments at Harvard University, the University of Virginia and the University of Oxford and since 2010 he has been a lecturer at Manchester. His principal publication to date is a monograph (Harvard UP, 2013) which examines the lived experience of Japanese soldiers at war through their diaries, comparing their responses to training, propaganda and battlefield experience with that of their American counterparts. He has also published numerous shorter pieces and peer-reviewed articles. The panel was impressed by the ambition of his work, its comparative and transnational scope, and also by his skilful use of difficult sources in a number of Asian languages. Developing his interest in the subjective and the personal, Dr Moore intends to use diaries to explore the mentalities of Chinese communists as they, too, evolved from ordinary citizens into ‘good’ Maoists. He is also eager to follow the development of futuristic and utopian thought in a comparative context in Russia, China, Turkey and Japan, primarily through the prism of popular media and science fiction. To this end, he hopes to use some of his prize money to learn Turkish. 
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/aaron.moore

Dr Renaud Morieux
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Renaud Morieux was educated in France (at the École Normale Supérieure) and England and has taught in France and, now, at Cambridge. He has written a remarkable book (soon to be translated into English) on the English Channel/La Manche as a zone of encounter between the French and the English during the long eighteenth century – the book covers geography, cartography, fortifications, maritime law, smuggling, commerce, travel and much else; he has a further equally remarkable book on French and English prisoners of war forthcoming. He is that rare thing, a genuinely comparative historian, equally at home in the archives of two nations, and able to throw illumination on the history of both by bringing out unexpected similarities and differences. He will now be writing a book on international customary law in the eighteenth century, and will be extending his enquiries to archives in India and North America.
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/rm656@cam.ac.uk

Dr Hannah Skoda
Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Hannah Skoda, who has been Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College Oxford since 2010, has made highly original contributions to the study of violence in late medieval Europe. In her prize-winning book, Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330, she developed pioneering methods of analysis, focusing her attention on the disempowered. Using the insights of anthropology and of literary scholarship, she has uncovered the ways in which violence was used to negotiate social relations. Her interest has extended to student riots and domestic violence as well as political protest. Her next project concerns nostalgia in fourteenth-century Europe, embracing both pastoral idylls and chivalric ideals.
http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/skoda.html

Dr David Trippett
Department of Music, University of Bristol
David Trippett has already gained international recognition for his highly innovative approach to the history of nineteenth-century music. His prize-winning study of Wagner’s melodies confronts some of the basic issues of musical aesthetics, while at the same time setting them securely within the cultural context of their times. Not only does he examine the different ways in which Wagner’s contemporaries wrote about the effects of melody; he also shows how their views engage with some of the fundamental scientific questions of the day, and specifically those that relate to the bodily senses and the human capacity for speech. This is indeed path-breaking research. Dr Trippett lays out a new agenda for the writing of musical history, in which he himself seems well placed to assume a leading role.
http://www.davidtrippett.com/

Law

Professor Alan Bogg
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Alan Bogg is one of the foremost academic labour lawyers of his generation, producing work that is legally rigorous, whilst also being theoretically informed and transnational in scope. His reconceptualisation of collective bargaining law is recognised as amongst the most significant works in labour law published in the common law world in recent times. Using concepts in liberal political philosophy, he has tracked changing legal strategies and public policies in workers’ rights in recent years, and argues for an understanding of collective labour relations grounded in a civic republican politics. His work also demonstrates how analysis of national legal approaches can be enriched by deep comparative awareness. His defence of a conception of freedom of association that encompasses a fundamental right to collective bargaining, for example, engages work on recent Canadian approaches to freedom of association. More recent work on the legal and theoretical dimensions of ‘voices at work’ is a uniquely systematic study comparing Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In focusing on the collective dimensions of work relations, Alan Bogg’s original and creative work could hardly be more important, at a time when the regulation of the labour market has come into renewed prominence as a central political issue in this age of austerity.
http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/profile/bogga

Dr Prabha Kotiswaran
Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Prabha Kotiswaran has an outstanding record of achievement in interdisciplinary research on gender and law. A scholar whose work has truly international reach, as well as broad implications for socio-legal theory, she has established a world-wide reputation for her studies of human trafficking and sex work. Her 2011 monograph, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, which won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics, demonstrated the adverse consequences on sex workers of the increased criminalisation of prostitution and argued for a reframing of sex work in terms of labour instead. She will use her Leverhulme Prize to extend this research in three related directions: a monograph subjecting the law’s treatment of women’s labour in sex work, dancing, surrogacy and domestic work to critical examination; an edited volume evaluating the criminal justice approach of international law on human trafficking; and two books developing her collaborative work on ‘governance feminism’, assessing feminists’ success in governance projects, particularly criminal law reform. The extension work will likely have considerable political and social significance.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/law/people/academic/pkotiswaran.aspx

Dr Sarah Nouwen
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge
Since receiving her doctorate in 2010, Sarah Nouwen’s courageous and ground breaking research into the impact of the International Criminal Court in conflict situations has established her as a leading scholar of international law. Her outstanding work combines innovative empirical insights with theoretical sophistication and legal analysis. She skilfully and effectively tests the claimed ideals of international criminal law against practice, revealing the realities of legal interventions in highly complex and sensitive environments, including conflict zones. Dr Nouwen’s extensive fieldwork has so far been completed with the assistance of a string of small grants and awards. The award of the Leverhulme prize will enable her to pursue important empirical work into peace negotiations in international law. 
http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/people/sarah-nouwen

Professor Erika Rackley
Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Professor Rackley is a brilliant feminist scholar who has held two chairs even though she is only 38. It is almost ten action-packed years since she attained her doctorate but there are no signs of her slowing down – she will shortly be taking up a highly competitive British Academy mid-career fellowship. As this suggests, the candidate has clearly demonstrated significant past achievements with an international impact. Her recent monograph on Women, Judging and the Judiciary was awarded the 2013 Peter Birks prize – probably the most prestigious book prize for legal academics in the UK and Ireland. She was a co-investigator in the seminal ESRC Feminist Judgments project which has had a major international impact and is now being copied in other parts of the world. Professor Rackley has also been highly influential in the judicial diversity debate in the past few years in England and Wales. Engaged and relevant, the law panel had few concerns about her future promise, considering her project proposal to have the potential to be ground-breaking in academic and policy terms, as well as challenging and ambitious. 
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/staff/profile.aspx?ReferenceId=8...

Dr Michael Waibel
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge
Michael Waibel has an outstanding portfolio of research on legal aspects of sovereign debts and defaults including a prize-winning monograph which has been highly influential in the field. His scholarship has had a major impact on perceptions of the legal framework for sovereign debt and of the viability of recourse to international fora for the settlement of sovereign debt disputes arising from emerging markets to the Eurozone. Dr Waibel’s highly original work also explores potential parallels between insolvent countries and insolvent companies, analogies between standard form contracts in domestic law and model treaties, and the impact on the development of international law. He brings to his scholarship a deep understanding of the political and economic factors that shape the development of international law and the international economic system, which he combines with strong historical and comparative perspectives.
http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/people/michael-waibel

Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Alexandros Beskos
Department of Statistical Science, University College London
Dr Alexandros Beskos is a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at University College London and one of the most promising statisticians of his generation. He works in computational statistics and is particularly interested in the theory and applications of Monte-Carlo methods. Many of his projects are linked to overcoming the ‘curse of dimensionality’, namely that the established methods in statistics often become ineffective in high or infinite dimensions. His work is not only highly influential in statistics, but also in applied probability and applied mathematics more generally. He is a leading expert for sampling in high-dimensional spaces and, in collaboration with Roberts, he developed the first known exact algorithm for the sampling of diffusions. This work constitutes a major breakthrough in Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and opened the path to exact inference for diffusions. He has also made important contributions to sequential Monte Carlo methods, showing that advanced design can lead to stable methods even in very high dimensions. This is a hot topic with important applications, for example in geophysics and fluid dynamics. More recently he started a collaboration applying modern methods of computational statistics to complex biostatistics models. He is a founding member of the Applied Probability Section of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and has served the section in a variety of roles.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/people/alexandrosbeskos

Dr Daniel Kral
Mathematics Institute and Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick
Daniel Kral is one of the top young mathematicians in the country working in the area of combinatorics. One of his major results is that the number of perfect matchings in a cubic graph is exponential: previously, even obtaining superlinear lower bounds had been a significant challenge. He has also proved interesting “removal lemmas” for systems of equations in subsets of finite fields and more general Abelian groups, and shown that a permutation of the first n integers that mixes up the ordering of a random four points with the expected frequencies must be quasirandom, and therefore for any fixed k must mix up the ordering of k points with the expected frequencies as well. These are just a few of his results, several of which, including the three just mentioned, have solved significant open problems.
http://www.ucw.cz/~kral/

Dr David Loeffler
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
and 
Dr Sarah Zerbes
Department of Mathematics, University College London
A Philip Leverhulme Prize in Mathematics and Statistics is awarded to Dr David Loeffler and Dr Sarah Zerbes for their joint work in Number Theory. Their outstanding achievement is the construction of an Euler System associated with the convolution of modular forms. Euler Systems have been viewed as particularly important since the first one was produced by Kolyvagin and used to prove cases of the conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer concerning the arithmetic of elliptic curves. The results of Loeffler and Zerbes have similarly impressive applications.
Since Kolyvagin’s work, only a handful of new Euler systems have been found, all by extremely special methods. A particular attraction of the methods of Loeffler and Zerbes is that their approach promises to be effective in broader circumstances. 
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/people/staff/david_loeffler/
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucahsze/index.html

Professor Richard Samworth
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Richard Samworth is awarded a Phillip Leverhulme for his broad and influential foundational and methodological contributions to many areas of Statistics, including non-parametric maximum likelihood, classification; high-dimensional penalised regression and model selection; density estimation; and the bootstrap. His seminal contributions on nonparametric classification, one of the most important and rapidly growing areas on the interface between Statistics and Machine Learning, have had a profound impact on the development of the field. He has also demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities in his activities on behalf of many of the world’s leading statistical societies and journals, and his work in building up Statistics within the University of Cambridge.
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~rjs57/

Dr Corinna Ulcigrai
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
Dr Corinna Ulcigrai has made major contributions to ergodic theory and dynamical systems and is acknowledged as one of the leaders of her generation in those fields. In particular, in a paper based on her PhD thesis she has solved an important long-standing problem on the ergodic properties of locally Hamiltonian flows on surfaces by showing that typically such flows are not mixing. With K. Fraczek she also proved an important result that surprised leading experts in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics from both mathematics and physics. This result shows that, for a broad class of billiard dynamics that includes the 100 year old Ehrenfest model describing a particle in a period array of square scatterers, the system is not ergodic in most directions. In addition, with her collaborators, she has proved important and deep results about the ergodic properties of several important classes of dynamical systems such as interval exchange maps and Teichmüller dynamics.
http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/people/profile/maxcu

Philosophy and Theology

Dr Jonathan Birch
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
Evolutionary theory offers to explain cooperative social behaviour in a wide range of species. Jonathan Birch works on the conceptual foundations of a widely accepted framework for understanding co-operation, namely, W.D. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness. One of the very few philosophers to have studied this theory and its applications in depth, Birch is contributing to the amendment and expansion of the theory, and helping to adjudicate sharp controversies among biologists on theories of kin selection. His work is important not only to the philosophy of biology, and to a sophisticated philosophical understanding of evolutionary theory, but also to the way unnoticed conceptual differences can illuminate disagreement in natural science. He has contributed to the philosophy of language by indicating how the content of signals can be related to evolutionary dynamics, and he is embarking on a project that locates the role of prosocial emotions and normative judgement in the evolution of human social and ethical life. This work promises to develop philosophy at its boundary with current work in psychology, economics and anthropology.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/people/birch.aspx

Dr Tim Button
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Tim Button has made insightful contributions to the philosophy of logic and mathematics. His work makes distinctive and impressive use of technical results and shows how these results can be used as useful tools in developing and exploring deep philosophical themes. In particular, his recent book, The Limits and Reasons (OUP, 2013), has reopened the debate about internal and external realism to great acclaim, a debate which has been recently ignored by the analytic tradition. He argues that we are epistemologically placed somewhere between the poles of being radically deceived and always right, but we cannot hope to say exactly where.
http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/tecb2/

Professor Ofra Magidor
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford
Professor Ofra Magidor has established an international reputation in philosophy by working across the fields of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics. She uses the impetus of particular, and apparently narrow, philosophical questions – about category mistakes, for example, or about vagueness – to present radical reorientations of wide philosophical areas, especially by ranging across the sub-disciplines in the subject. Her 2013 book, Category Mistakes, revives an old problem in philosophy first articulated by Aristotle and exploited by Ryle in tackling the mind/body problem. Magidor’s comprehensive reassessment considers the varieties of ways in which category mistakes might be explained, and concludes that such mistakes are indeed meaningful, but that they fail to fulfil conversational presuppositions: so the explanation of the phenomenon is properly given by a pragmatic account. This account of what may seem a small problem has broad and important implications, not only for the philosophy of language, but also for metaphysics. Further, Magidor has published important work on other topics – on ‘semantic sovereignty’ (on the relation between semantic and physical facts, or facts about use); on arbitrary reference; on strict finitism in mathematics; and on possible worlds and the restriction of epistemic transparency. She will use the award to pursue further her interests in metaphysics (on endurantism and perdurantism), in the philosophy of language and logic (on vagueness, and on conditionals); and to finish another book connecting problems in the philosophy of language with metaphysics (beginning from arbitrary reference and semantic sovereignty). 
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball1646/

Dr Anna Mahtani
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
Anna Mahtani is a scholar specialising in formal epistemology whose work displays the depth of insight achievable by the deployment of formal techniques on traditional problems concerning probability and decision making, and also on the foundations of the so-called ‘epistemicism’ position on vagueness. Also characteristic of her work is an eschewal of speculation in favour of well-grounded results concerning fundamental questions, not peripheral ones. Her current work on the intensionality of deference in decision making promises to be of the utmost significance.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/people/mahtani.aspx

Dr Holger Zellentin
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham
Dr Holger Zellentin has already established himself as one of the outstanding experts on the relation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the formative ‘late antique’ period. Internationally educated at Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Jerusalem and Princeton, he is now Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. His first monograph, Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature, re-evalutes the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Mesopotamia from the 4th to 7th centuries CE through a new analysis of the rabbis’ use of satire. His second book, The Qur’an’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as Point of Departure reassesses the foundational legal principles and laws of the Qur’an by demonstrating its points of overlap and continuity with the influential Christian church-order text, the Didascalia. Dr Zellentin has also recently edited a large survey volume on Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity. He is now working on two further monographs: one on Ritual and Law in the Qur’an and in the Late Ancient Near East, the other a further study of early rabbinical thought in context: Rabbinic Rhetoric Under the Cross. His broad intellectual goal for the future is to gain a yet fuller appreciation of the complex mutual influences of Jews, Christians and Muslims in this crucial period of development and transition.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/theology/people/holger.zellentin

Sociology and Social Policy

Dr Lucie Cluver
Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
Lucie Cluver conducts world leading research on the complex and extensive hazards that face AIDS-affected children. Her work has focused, for instance, on the psychological issues that AIDS-orphaned children encounter and also on how parental AIDS-illness increases child abuse and sexual risk behaviours amongst adolescent girls. These insights into the impact of AIDS on young people have led to a raft of research papers and significant funded projects that have had important results. For example, the fact that family-focused cash transfers alone are sufficient to reduce HIV-risk behaviour amongst adolescent girls, while cash + care schemes are required to produce a similar effect amongst adolescent boys is a significant finding and one that has had important practical results. The implementation of policies based on Dr Cluver’s research by governments in sub-Saharan Africa have seen 10,000 community workers trained to develop programmes for millions of AIDS-affected children in sub-Saharan Africa. The Leverhulme Prize will be used to further this work, and specifically to test the innovative integration of social welfare and abuse reduction on adolescent HIV-risk – these interventions having the potential to interrupt the negative pathways that are started by parental AIDS (increased poverty, school drop-out, mental health distress and increased transactional sexual relationships).
https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/profile/cluver.html

Dr Hazem Kandil
Sociology Department, University of Cambridge
Dr Hazem Kandil is an outstanding scholar, who broke new ground with his analysis of the Egyptian regime and the 2011 uprising, published in a 2012 monograph, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. He followed this with the first in-depth study of the Muslim Brotherhood and its relationship with its own members (Inside the Brotherhood, 2014). He is regarded as a scholar of international standing and a leading authority on recent political events in Egypt, who has successfully challenged consensus views by articulating a clear and comprehensively researched analysis, which has advanced understanding of the coercive state, and the longer term relationships between political, military and security institutions. Dr Kandil makes extensive use of archival research, analysis of historical documents and interviews with key figures. These enable him to support his claims and develop his novel theoretical positions. Dr Kandil’s work has proved highly influential and has received extensive international attention from academia, media and government officials. His next book on Power Triangle: Military, Security and Politics in Regime Change, develops his theoretical model of the uneasy relationship between military, political, and security institutions, applying it to both Turkey and Iran. His future work will extend his interest in the military factor in social development, initially with a study of the institutional basis of American war doctrine; and subsequently extending further his national and historical sweep with a study of conscription, focusing on case studies of Egypt and France. 
http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/hkandil

Dr Victoria Redclift
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey
Victoria Redclift is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her methodologically and theoretically groundbreaking research is focused on new forms of political engagement in South Asia, exploring the formal and informal dimensions of practices of citizenship. Her highly topical work on the Urdu speaking community in Bangladesh at a time of transition to full citizenship brings together issues of belonging, space and rights in a context of statelessness, displacement and ongoing nation-state formation. Dr Redclift’s research works within, and pushes the boundaries of contemporary scholarship on citizenship, ethnicity and postcolonial theory, particularly around ethnic relations, political process and the challenges of diverse religious identities within modern nation-states. Her monograph, published in 2013, Statelessness and Citizenship: camps and the creation of political space, was shortlisted for the Philip Abrams prize in 2014. Dr Redclift’s new work, supported by the Philip Leverhulme Prize, builds on this important work to explore the transnational dimensions of citizenship experiences among the Bengali Muslim diaspora in Britain and the US (at a time when issues of religious identity and transnational politics are at the forefront of concern). Dr Redclift’s combination of empirical exploration, theoretical interrogation and non-academic engagement promises to provide important illumination into these complex and crucial issues. 
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/sociology/people/victoria_redclift/

Dr Katherine Smith
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Dr Katherine Smith is a Reader in Social Policy whose research into the policy and legislative developments of public health and health inequalities is of international significance. Of note are her investigations into the ways in which stakeholders from commercial, academic, and third sector organisations influence health and social policies. Her work is truly interdisciplinary and through publishing extensively in sociological, medical, policy, and social policy journals she speaks to diverse audiences. She is the author of the monograph Beyond Evidence Based Policy in Public Health: the Interplay of Ideas, which is a groundbreaking analysis of the complex interplay between ideas, evidence and policy, and is based on over a hundred interviews with key informants (e.g. ministers, civil servants, researchers, advisors and journalists). It provides an extraordinary insight into how policies are negotiated, constructed and ‘made’. Supported by the Philip Leverhulme Prize she will extend this research through an exploration into how members of the public engage with issues of health inequalities. She intends to deploy and develop a range of methodological tools to enhance what has come to be referred to as ‘deliberative democracy’. Such public engagement has the potential to draw the public in the policy process and to contribute to tackling the tenacious problem of health inequalities.
http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/social_policy/katherine_smith

Dr Imogen Tyler
Sociology Department, University of Lancaster
Imogen Tyler has received a number of awards and has made a major contribution to the study of inequalities. She has critically examined the processes of protest and resistance in the UK. She has an international profile and has focused on the issue of stigma, which she plans to study in more detail. She is engaged politically and practically and has played an important role in shaping thinking in these key areas of social policy. Her book Revolting Subjects has been very well received and was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing in 2014.
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/imogen-tyler%28b10d1ced...

Dr Patrick Finglass
University of Nottingham
Archaic and classical Greek poetry, especially Stesichorus, Pindar and Sophocles

Professor Miriam Leonard
University College London
Classical reception, intellectual history, Greek literature and philosophy

Dr Michael Squire
King’s College London
The intersection between Graeco-Roman visual and literary cultures

Dr Peter Thonemann
University of Oxford
The history and culture of pre-Islamic Turkey

Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos
University of Nottingham
Ancient Greek history

Dr Matt Friedman
University of Oxford
Vertebrate palaeontology and evolution

Dr Richard Katz
University of Oxford
The physics of magma genesis and transport in the convecting mantle

Dr Kirsty Penkman
University of York
The application of analytical chemistry to geochronology, archaeology and earth science

Dr Laura Robinson
University of Bristol
The use of chemical tools to examine ocean-climate linkages today and in the past

Dr Paul Williams
University of Reading
Geophysical fluid dynamics

Dr Jo Applin
University of York
American and European art of the 1950s and 1960s

Dr Matthew Potter
Northumbria University
Visual culture and the construction of national identities

Dr Richard Taws
University College London
Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art and visual culture

Dr Tamara Trodd
University of Edinburgh
For her work on media and technologies in twentieth-century and contemporary art

Dr Leon Wainwright
Open University
The history of modern and contemporary art in Britain and the Caribbean

Dr Kimberley Brownlee
University of Warwick
Legal and moral theory: civil disobedience, ideals, punishment, human rights

Professor James Chalmers
University of Glasgow
Criminal law

Dr Ioannis Lianos
University College London
The interaction of economic thought with the legal system

Dr Marc Moore
University College London
Anglo-American corporate law and governance; capital markets and theory of the firm

Ms Anthea Roberts
London School of Economics and Political Science
Public international law, particularly investment treaty law and arbitration

Dr Toby Gee
Imperial College London
Number theory

Dr Jonathan Marchini
University of Oxford
Statistical genetics

Dr Andre Neves
Imperial College London
Geometric analysis

Dr Christoph Ortner
University of Warwick
Numerical analysis and applied analysis

Professor Lasse Rempe-Gillen
University of Liverpool
Complex dynamics

Dr Duncan Bell
University of Cambridge
The history of imperial ideologies in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain

Dr Alexander Morrison
University of Liverpool
Central Asian history, Russian Imperial history and South Asian history

Dr Sadiah Qureshi
University of Birmingham
Modern history of race, empire and science

Dr Sujit Sivasundaram
University of Cambridge
Modern imperial and world history from 1750–1850, especially Asia and the Pacific

Dr David Todd
King’s College London
Global history of ideas in France and Anglo-French Imperial relations, 1780–1914

Classics

Professor Patrick Finglass
Department of Classics, University of Nottingham
In nine years since the award of his DPhil, Professor Patrick Finglass has established himself as one of the world's leading scholars of Greek lyric and tragic poetry. His monumental commentaries on Sophoclean tragedy (Electra, 2007; Ajax, 2011) are already standard works of reference, a remarkable achievement for a scholar of his age; yet Finglass has produced not only these, but also a third major commentary (on Pindar's Pythian 11, 2007) and a substantial number of magisterial articles, especially on the text and interpretation of Sophocles. His work to date is characterized by an extraordinary combination of the energy and ambition of youth and the erudition and judgement that normally come only with a lifetime's experience. Commentaries on the remaining plays of Sophocles and on the fragments of the lyric poet, Stesichorus, are eagerly awaited; these will further cement what is already a towering international reputation.
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/people/patrick.finglass

Professor Miriam Leonard
Department of Greek and Latin, University College London
Professor Miriam Leonard is a powerful and original voice in the field of classical reception studies. Intellectually imaginative, sensitive and critical, she speaks across disciplines; her internationally-significant work lies at the intersection of Classics and History of Ideas in modern Europe, particularly France and Germany. Her monographs Athens and Paris and Socrates and the Jews explore the ways in which a European identity has been created, and her next book will move beyond classical philosophy to investigate the role of tragedy in the emergence of modernity. Professor Leonard is also an innovative teacher, using Socratic teaching methods and teaching across disciplines. Her work illustrates not only how Classics as a scholarly discipline was formed, but also the enduring power of the classical texts to provide a way of speaking about contemporary societies.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/staff/fulltimestaff/miriamleonard

Dr Michael Squire
Department of Classics, King’s College London
Dr Michael Squire’s research into the visual culture of the Graeco-Roman world has made a fundamental contribution to both classical art history and reception studies, and has changed the way that classicists and art historians think about the relationship between ancient art and literature.  Dr Squire has an impressive publication record, which includes three highly-regarded monographs and three edited books.  His most recent monograph on the Tabulae Iliacae – the first on the subject in English – was awarded the James R Wiseman Prize by the Archaeological Institute of America, and has been described as “one of the most significant analyses of Graeco-Roman art, replication and collecting in recent years”.  The international pedigree of Dr Squire’s research is reflected in the range of journals and books in which he has been published; in the variety of international prizes and fellowships he has won (including the Alexander von-Humboldt Stipendiat in Berlin and Munich); and in the fact that he has published in French, German and Italian, as well as in English.  Dr Squire’s current research into the Imagines of Philostratus continues to cross disciplinary boundaries, and it will certainly gain the same sort of international recognition as his previous work.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/classics/people/academic/squire/inde...

Dr Peter Thonemann
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
Dr Peter Thonemann is an ancient Greek historian and epigrapher of extraordinary range and subtlety, whose work – notably his major monograph on the Maeander Valley – has set new standards for research in ancient historical geography. His work integrates the study of all forms of ancient evidence, and deploys innovative theoretical models, to tell an enormously rich story of the interplay between man and landscape across a vast chronological range, from the Iron Age to the 13th century AD.　He has also made very substantial contributions to the epigraphy of Asia Minor, and to broader public engagement, not least through his Birth of Classical Europe (co-authored with the late Simon Price). With two substantial edited volumes (on Attalid Asia Minor and on Roman Phrygia), and a major new monograph on the rural societies of Anatolia under way, his stellar research career is well set.　 
http://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/fellows-staff/academics/dr-peter-thonemann.html
http://mama.csad.ox.ac.uk/

Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos
Department of Classics, University of Nottingham
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos is a historian of the ancient Greek world, whose work is notable for asking bold new questions of well-worn topics.　Few would have the ambition or the intellectual range to attempt the topic of his first book: a wide-ranging critique of Eurocentric approaches to Greek history, Unthinking the Polis.　 Dr Vlassopoulos has followed this up with a more broadly accessible work on the legacy of ancient political thought, an ambitious new history of the interactions of Greeks and Barbarians, and more recently he has turned his attention to the subject of Greek slavery, conceiving slavery as a relationship of domination rather than emphasising the slave’s status as property.　His work is notable for the depth of his familiarity with historical writing on Greece - in a range of languages and traditions and over a long time period – and for his willingness to relate ancient history to contemporary political issues.　
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/people/konstantinos.vlassopoulos

Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

Dr Matt Friedman
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Matt Friedman is an exceptional young vertebrate palaeontologist who uses a deep knowledge of fish taxonomy and their geological record to answer a wide range of highly topical evolutionary, functional biological and ecological issues. These include the solution of the longstanding controversy on the evolution of flat fishes with the description of a fossil with eye and skull characters intermediate between those of flat and 'normal' fishes. His reconstruction of the evolutionary history of fishes using a number of statistical and phylogenetic models particularly as it relates to mass extinction and recovery in the Upper Cretaceous and succeeding Cenozoic has overturned a number of earlier hypotheses. Thus for example it emphasises that prior to the extinction event, and contrary to prior beliefs, large planktivorous fishes were widely distributed in both Jurassic and Cretaceous oceans and became extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. His detailed analysis of the spiny-finned fishes has demonstrated their explosive diversification following the extinction event and sets the standard for any future phylogenetic and ecological studies.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/academic/mattf

Dr Richard Katz
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Richard Katz is a leading early career mathematical geophysicist whose work is making significant contributions to our understanding of processes involved in the extraction and transportation of melt from deep in the mantle to the surface.  
His work to combine physical and chemical parameterizations of melt extraction and flow is having a wide impact as is his establishment of a mathematical framework for two-phase flow in magma migration. The European Geosciences Union has recognized him with an outstanding young scientist award and the European Research Council has awarded him a Starter Grant to investigate coupling of climate with magmatism at mid-ocean ridges.
http://foalab.earth.ox.ac.uk/

Dr Kirsty Penkman
Department of Chemistry, University of York
Understanding past environmental change requires accurate appreciation of when events occurred, which requires reliable dating techniques. Amino acid dating, has long been regarded as being too unreliable yet its appeal in being able to assign the age of death in living organisms has driven Kirsty Penkman to investigate how reliability may be improved. Working with geologists, biologists and chemists, to comprehend and quantify the factors introducing inaccuracies, Penkman has led a major breakthrough in reducing the amino acid dating error. As amino acids are common in many sedimentary sequences since the last ice age, Penkman has used the improved technique to form a new appreciation of stratigraphic sequences within the UK, an impressive feat that has given her significant international visibility. Now established as the world leader in this field, Penkman can look to applying amino acid dating in a variety of key palaeo-environmental problems across the globe.
http://www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/academic/o-s/kpenkman/

Dr Laura Robinson
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Laura Robinson has made leading contributions using a variety of techniques to enable reconstruction of past climate changes over recent glaciations. Key to understanding the mechanisms of climate change is accurately constraining when changes occur, so that the changes can be seen in their correct sequence, and she has used radioactive isotope signals to provide such dating information for major changes in the biological and chemical cycling of nutrients and carbon in the oceans that accompanied the glaciations. Most recently, her study of the radiocarbon signals in Southern Ocean carbonates has provided good evidence for the Southern Ocean as the source of the rising atmospheric CO2 that helped end the last ice age, ushering in the Holocene period of warm climates, during which modern agriculture and civilizations have developed.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/laura-f-robinson/index.html

Dr Paul Williams
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
An innovative and highly original researcher in geophysical fluid dynamics, Dr Paul Williams has made significant contributions to dynamical meteorology and oceanography. In the former field Dr Williams developed an improved numerical time stepping scheme for numerical weather prediction models that has been widely adopted by meteorological agencies around the world, and the scheme has become known as the Robert-Asselin-Williams filter. He has also pioneered the development of a new algorithm for forecasting clear-air turbulence which is a major hazard for the commercial airline industry, injuring hundreds of passengers annually and causing structural damage to aircraft.  The turbulence is caused by breaking gravity waves, a phenomenon that Dr Williams has studied both in the laboratory and theoretically. In the oceans gravity waves play an important role in global circulation but they are generally too small to be explicitly represented in ocean circulation models. In recognition of this fact, Dr Williams is also carrying out research on novel stochastic parameterisations to represent these waves, and other small scale dynamical processes, in atmospheric and ocean circulation models.
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~williams/

History of Art

Dr Jo Applin
Department of History of Art, University of York
Dr Jo Applin is an outstanding scholar with a distinctive and strong reputation in sculpture studies.  She has already established herself internationally in the field of American & British art post 1960 with her enterprising and insightful style, culminating in the recent publication of her book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960’s America (Yale 2012). In this invigorating study she explores the work of Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H.C. Westermann and Bruce Nauman opening new and exciting pathways into imagery of the three dimensional object in that period. Her forthcoming monograph on Yayoi Kusame will be the first on the Japanese artist’s period in America in the 1960’s, due to be published in December.  Her future plans include a further monograph looking afresh at the artist Lee Lozano and the co-curation of an innovative major international loan exhibition entitled ‘Flesh’ at the newly refurbished York City Art Gallery in 2016, focusing on representations of flesh in the 20th and 21st centuries. This will bring cutting edge art historical scholarship to a wider contemporary public.
http://www.york.ac.uk/history-of-art/staff/applin/

Dr Matthew Potter
Department of Arts, Northumbria University
Dr Matthew Potter’s innovative research resonates across art history and cultural studies and has received international recognition.  His contribution to a largely neglected field, the cultural influence of Germany upon British art in the post- Romantic period, is given a clear voice in his most recent book: The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850-1939 (MUP 2012).  This study is of major significance, not least in reshaping our understanding of British art during the period, its historiography and cultural identities.  His earlier research when he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and at the Menzies Centre, focused upon hybridised identities of British and Australian Anglo-German settlers where he challenged, as he continues to do, core and periphery models. His current research project investigates the construction of national identities in visual culture of the British world. This is effected by an analysis of the afterlife of political prints from the Georgian period over a hundred years of upheaval, stretching from the battle of Waterloo to the First World War and will involve a major re-evaluation of material building upon recent reception studies.   
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/arts/staff/M_Potter/

Dr Richard Taws
Department of History of Art, University College London
Richard Taws has built upon a strong existing tradition with regard to the visual culture of the French revolutionary period. His own contribution is, however, brilliantly original. He seizes upon apparently marginal materials like assignats and caricatures to develop searching analyses of the social and political developments of the period. There is a genuine intellectual excitement that characterises all his writing, and his forthcoming book will undoubtedly enhance his already well attested international reputation.      
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-history/about_us/academic_staff/richard_taws

Dr Tamara Trodd
Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh
In her work on "Art after Photography" and in her studies on the projected image in contemporary art, Dr Trodd seeks to recover what she refers to as "avantgarde technological enthusiasm", that is, exploring how the visual arts are not be understood as oppositional to technology but as legitimate exploiters of any and every technological advance that becomes accessible to the artist.  This is, of course, not a uniquely innovative issue for art history: one thinks of the ancient application of the drill to sculpted stone and the Renaissance linkage of oil paint with canvas and the contemporary development of mass-produced prints.  By working on the advent of new means of visual expression through new technologies in our own time Tamara Trodd is by no means claiming that such issues are irrelevant to the art of the past.  In fact, her work precisely circumvents that kind of rigid compartmentalising by concentrating not only on media-specific works in photography and film but also on the interactions of those media with more traditional forms such as painting, drawing and sculpture.  On the basis of an exhaustive exploration of the prinmary material and a sophisticated understanding of the relevant theorteical frameworks, her work has the potential to make a really significant impact in the field; to move the discipline of art history forward and by building a body of publication focussed on those issues, to develop methodological possibilities that other scholars and students will be able to consider and apply.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/history-ar...

Dr Leon Wainwright
Department of Art History, Open University
Leon Wainwright has a distinguished record of ground-breaking publications which seek to expand the geographical imagination of art history while also ensuring that our histories of the twentieth century are inclusive of the many sites and practices of art making. This does not involve merely adding in artists from the Caribbean or the Subcontinent. The detailed exploration of the artists and their migrations, conversations and transformations of the issues of the modern which clearly and fundamentally include colonial and postcolonial negations is undertaken from hitherto under examined positions and perspectives. In 2011 Leon Wainwright published Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press) on modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire, using the Caribbean as point of shifted perspective on modernism itself. He has written many articles on modernists from both India and the Caribbean, providing the detailed studies of individual careers necessary to avoid the problem of geo-ethnicism. In addition to this specialist area, Leon Wainwright has published extensively and probingly on the challenges facing art history in the current pressure to internationalize and globalise. He has equally made a contribution to art theory and to reshaping the curriculum. The distinction of his work lies in the many forms from detailed cutting edge-scholarship to curriculum initiatives through which Leon Wainwright has challenged the Eurocentrism of the discipline by substantive demonstrations of ways of writing art histories that are sensitive to specificities and expand our conceptions of the world of art.  His is a contribution to art made in and in relation to Britain and its imperial histories as well as to the larger picture and process of changing the geographies of the discipline.
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/arthistory/wainwright.shtml

Law

Dr Kimberley Brownlee
Warwick Law School, University of Warwick
Dr Kimberley Brownlee’s work on a broad range of issues in legal, moral, and political philosophy is extremely well regarded, and her distinctive and coherent approach will ensure that she remains a leading figure in this area of study for many years to come.  Dr Brownlee has informed her thinking about crucial legal problems by drawing on moral and political ideals and principles in novel and interesting ways, producing cutting edge, highly relevant, and deeply thought out jurisprudential scholarship.  Her major project to date has been her book, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in their prestigious Oxford Legal Philosophy series.  In this work, Dr Brownlee develops a sustained and compelling case for civil disobedience, and, importantly, provides a careful account of how civil disobedience should be understood and should be distinguished from related attitudes and actions. Conscience and Conviction will surely be a central reference point for any future work done on civil disobedience.  Dr Brownlee’s next major project will develop her interesting and novel idea that there is a human right against severe social deprivation, which will have significant implications for the use of quarantine and solitary confinement. Her preliminary work in this area has already been widely discussed: no doubt, her next book, like the one that she has completed, will generate enormous interest.  Dr Brownlee’s work is highly significant, and has engaged and stimulated the research of others in a way that is impressive for a young scholar. 
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/staff/academic/brownlee/

Professor James Chalmers
School of Law, University of Glasgow
James Chalmers is an outstanding young Scots lawyer and one of the strongest criminal lawyers of his age in the UK. He is a brilliant and versatile scholar who writes for audiences at all levels ranging from the first year student to appellate judges. His work is extensive, wide-ranging and influential.  He is a prolific doctrinal author with three monographs and three jointly authored articles in the Modern Law Review. These have made a significant impact on law reform and he also has a strong track record in funded research. Despite his Scots Law focus he has nonetheless achieved international recognition. There are few Regius chairs in law in the UK and even fewer held by 36 year olds. James Chalmers has huge potential and a stimulating and innovative project on ‘overcriminalisation’ which will be greatly assisted by the award of a Philip Leverhulme prize.
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/law/staff/jameschalmers/

Dr Ioannis Lianos
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Ioannis Lianos is one of the leading and most respected antitrust/competition law scholars working in the UK today, with a well-established international reputation. His work is interdisciplinary and encompasses both the empirical and theoretical. He works particularly at the interface of competition law and economics, where he employs to formidable effect his expertise and training in microeconomics and sociology as well as law to make a distinctive contribution to a number of important debates. His rigorous publications span a wide area of competition law and include important pieces on the integration of economic concepts in law and of the problems involved in the use of economic expertise in competition litigation, and he has an equal facility in both the substantive and enforcement/procedural fields. He is remarkably active: inter alia he has established two research centres at his university (UCL); is the co-founder of the prestigious Global Competition Law and Economics research conference series; has presented his work at a large number of academic institutions and regulatory authorities around the world; and been appointed to a research chair at the Ecole National d’Administration to lead and manage an interdisciplinary team of researchers studying the impact of the practice of impact assessment in Europe. His current and projected research is highly relevant to policy-making and is having, and should continue to have, significant effects on practice. The Leverhulme prize will enable him to progress his project on the evaluation of economic evidence in the legal framework and its effect on change in economic theory.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?lianos

Dr Marc Moore
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Marc Moore works in the field of Anglo-American corporate law and governance and capital markets. His scholarship is interdisciplinary and sits at the interface of law, economics and social policy. His Leverhulme grant will be used to support research which addresses the issue of whether Anglo-American equity markets are socially relevant today. The panel was impressed by the depth and range of Dr Moore’s existing scholarship and the contemporary relevance of his work.  His work undoubtedly offers new insights in the field and his ability and willingness to discuss corporate governance and company law outside of the usual contractarian paradigm is particularly impressive. Dr Moore’s work is highly respected within his home discipline of law as well as outside of it and the Trust was delighted to be able to support work which makes us reconsider and reimagine established academic models.  
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?moore

Ms Anthea Roberts
Department of Law, London School of Economics
Anthea Roberts is an international lawyer who researches and teaches across an unusually wide range of fields in her subject.  She has researched and published on fundamental, general aspects of international law, such as changing approaches to customary international law and the role of national courts in international law, and also more specialized topics such as the interpretation of investment treaties and universal civil jurisdiction.  Even when examining relatively narrow, technical fields, she uses general principles as powerful analytical tools, and draws out significant implications for general international law from her studies of particular aspects of it.  Across the full range of her work, Ms Roberts maintains a very high quality of research and writing; she is the only sole author to have been twice awarded the Deak Prize for the year’s best article by a scholar under the age of 40 to be published in the prestigious American Journal of International Law.  It is noteworthy that the two articles were on very different subjects, demonstrating Ms Roberts’s versatility as well as the consistently high quality of her work.  She has already made varied and important contributions to scholarship in international law, and has the potential to continue to do so.  For these reasons, Ms Roberts is recognized as one of the leading international lawyers of her generation.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/staff/anthea-roberts.htm

Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Toby Gee
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr. Toby Gee is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in Number Theory. This centres on connections between automorphic forms and Galois Representations, as envisaged by the Langlands Program. His achievements include a complete treatment of companion forms, the proof of the Sato-Tate Conjecture (with Barnet-Lamb and Geraghty), and a substantial contribution to the Buzzard-Diamond-Jarvis conjecture. His solutions of these major outstanding problems use new methods of much wider applicability. They have subsequently driven the subject forward at surprising speed. The new ideas have been synthesized (with Buzzard) into a clear and precise family of general conjectures concerning the fundamental connections of the global Langlands Program. 
http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~tsg/

Dr Jonathan Marchini
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
The explosion of genetic science since the first draft sequence of the human genome in 2001 has been accompanied by an explosion in the quantity and complexity of genetic data. At the same time there has been an explosion in the variety and realism of the scientific problems attacked. Traditional statistical methods are quite unsuited to these tasks, and entirely new approaches to statistical modelling, analysis and interpretation are required. Jonathan Marchini has led the way by constructing powerful and ingenious novel statistical methodology for population and medical genetics, together with associated fast computational algorithms and software. The advances he has made in developing this essential statistical theory have been crucial in enabling important new genetic understandings and discoveries.
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~marchini/

Dr Andre Neves
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr Andre Neves is a Reader in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College, London. His field is geometric analysis, an area in which techniques from the analysis of partial differential equations are applied to geometric problems. He has made deep and original contributions to our understanding of the geometry of manifolds in two ways:  First, by studying parabolic flows on manifolds. In particular, he studied singularity formation in Lagrangian mean curvature flow and found, in collaboration with Bray, the Yamabe invariant of 3-dimensional real projective space and a counterexample to the weaker version of the Thomas-Yau conjecture on the long term existence and convergence of Lagrangian flows. Second, by studying minimal surfaces on the manifold, in collaboration with Brendle and Marques, he disproved the Min-Oo conjecture, a characterisation of hemispheres of round spheres, which prior to his discovery was widely believed to be true. Recently, with Marques, he made the spectacular announcement of a proof of the Willmore conjecture, one of the big open problems in the field. This conjecture gives a lower bound on the amount of bending energy needed to immerse a torus in three-dimensional space. Its proof, and the powerful min-max  theory it uses, has created a lot of excitement and is expected to give a handle to several other hard open problems in the field in the area of geometric analysis.
http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~aneves/

Dr Christoph Ortner
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Dr Ortner works on some of the central problems in solid mechanics and materials science, in particular on issues relating to atomistic and continuum theories of fracture.  He has already established a significant reputation within the area of computational applied mathematics for his work on atomistic models of coarse grained materials.  Dr Ortner’s work has created a clear framework to approach the huge mathematical challenges of the field.  His development of the theory of atomistic/continuum coupling methods for simulating material defects has filled a crucial gap in knowledge in materials science.  However, his work is also distinguished by the way it points forward to the analysis of higher dimensional problems and by its breadth: he has also made important contributions in areas such as the Lavrentiev phenomenon in the Calculus of Variations.  Dr Ortner intends to build on this previous research in a number of ways, including project on extensions to surface effects and electronic structure models.
http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/staff/C.Ortner/

Professor Lasse Rempe-Gillen
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool
Professor Rempe-Gillen works in complex dynamics, specializing in the dynamics of transcendental holomorphic functions, a field in which he has made a number of very important contributions. In particular, Prof. Rempe-Gillen has been recognized for his achievements relating to Eremenko’s conjecture.  In 2010 he was awarded the London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize for this work. Other significant achievements are the proof (with van Strien) of the density of hyperbolicity for many classes of real transcendental entire functions and circle maps, including the Arnold family, and his demonstration that the escaping set of the exponential map is connected.
Prof. Rempe-Gillen’s current research continues to focus on Eremenko’s Conjecture. His recent work on the topology of Julia sets of transcendental entire functions is directed towards developing a new strategy to construct potential counterexamples. He also aims to pursue further work in measurable transcendental dynamics.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/mathematical-sciences/staff/lasse-rempe/

Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History

Dr Duncan Bell
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Duncan Bell’s writing and research exhibits an unusual range, having made significant contributions to debates in imperial history, intellectual history and International Relations. His first monograph provided a re-appraisal of the idea ‘of Greater Britain’ in which the metropole and the white dominions would be united in some form of federation. The study brought together a discussion of the technologies of empire with an analysis of the role of federation in the thinking of luminaries like J.A. Froude. He has since gone on to explore the role of empire in liberal political thought, including the writings of J.S. Mill, and has completed a second monograph on this subject. The role of the United States in British thinking about federation and empire has been a strand in his earlier research, and he now seeks to tease out the British-American relationship in greater detail.
http://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/contacts/staff/bell-duncan.html

Dr Alexander Morrison
School of History, University of Liverpool
Dr Alexander Morrison is a pioneering young historian of the Russian Empire, whose work on Russia’s expansion into Central Asia in the nineteenth century, based on substantial work in archives in Russia and Central Asia, mounts a serious challenge to standard pictures of Russian imperialism. Dr Morrison, by adopting a rigorously comparative method, steps outside the often inward-looking world of Russian history, to demonstrate clearly that Russia, far from following an imperial Sonderweg, as has routinely been claimed, is directly comparable to other imperial powers, in particular to Great Britain. His project, to write a comprehensive history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia promises to provide the definitive account of a major transformation in global history that was of considerable economic and political significance.
http://liverpool.academia.edu/AlexanderMorrison

Dr Sadiah Qureshi
Department of History, University of Birmingham
Dr Sadiah Qureshi is an outstanding historian of science, trained in both the Natural Sciences (BA) and in the History and Philosophy of Science (MPhil) at Cambridge. She completed her PhD on ‘Human ethnological exhibitions in London, 1800-1855’ at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded interdisciplinary project on Victorian notions of the past: ‘Past and Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, 2006-2010. She won the ‘Best Scholarly illustrated’ award for her book Peoples on parade: Exhibition, empire and anthropology in nineteenth-century Britain (Chicago University  Press 2011) from the Association of American University Presses. Dr Qureshi’s work on the commercial exhibition of foreign peoples has made significant contributions to the cultural history of Victorian Britain, studies of race and ethnicity, and the history of science. In her imaginative, subtle and precise analysis, she has overturned assumptions about the lasting importance of such exhibitions and recast them as crucial opportunities for intercultural contact and scientific research in their contemporary context, as well as with lasting relevance for modern notions of race. Her future work will include further investigation of the interaction of conceptions of race, empire and science in relation to endangered peoples, with a particular focus issues of genocide, humanitarianism and modern settler colonial societies in Africa, North America and Oceania.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/history/qureshi-sadiah.aspx

Dr Sujit Sivasundaram
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Sujit Sivasundaram is an outstanding scholar of remarkable creativity, productivity, and novelty. His research spans a considerable range of connected but also distinct sub-disciplines: the history of empire, knowledge, religion, science, medicine, and the environment.  He joins a recent intellectual movement which maps imperialism through examining colonies as laboratories for scientific discovery. In doing so, he makes links with indigenous science, and construes empire partly in terms of mastery of environments as well as of peoples.  Dr Sivasundaram’s first book, Nature and the Godly Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) was the first account of the relationship between nineteenth-century science and Christianity in the non-Western world, and has recently been issued in paperback.  His forthcoming work, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (University of Chicago Press, 2013) opens up a new perspective on the history of empire by focussing on oceans, islands, and coastlands.  
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/sps20@cam.ac.uk

Dr David Todd
Department of History, King’s College London
Dr David Todd has made fundamental contributions to two areas of historical enquiry: the history of economic thought and French imperial history. In his Identité Économique de la France, and a series of important essays on the history of political economy, he shows how economic ideas were translated, resisted, and indigenised as they moved across the nineteenth-century world. He argues, in particular, that in France, unlike in Britain, economic and political liberalism were at odds, and the response to Smith and Ricardo was conditioned by local politics, by the persistence of early modern forms of mercantilist ideology, and by France's predicament as a latecomer to the industrial revolution. Todd is at work now on a second major book on the structure of French imperialism between the collapse of Napoleon and the Third Republic, from which he has already published influential synoptic essays and an article on fiscal policy in colonial Algeria. Writing extensively in both English and French, Todd is emerging as an important bridge between the historical worlds of Britain and France.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/history/people/staff/academic/todd/i...

Dr Arwen Deuss
University of Cambridge
Geophysics and seismology

Dr Daniel Lunt
University of Bristol
Palaeoclimate modelling

Dr Tamsin Mather
University of Oxford
Volcanology

Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato
University of Southampton
Physical oceanography

Dr Nicholas Teanby
University of Bristol
Planetary atmospheres

Dr Patricia Allmer
Manchester Metropolitan University
Surrealism

Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier
University of Nottingham
African American art

Dr Grace Brockington
University of Bristol
Art in Britain

Dr Alain George
University of Edinburgh
Islamic art

Dr Tara Hamling
University of Birmingham
British art

Dr Sylvie Delacroix
University College London
Jurisprudence

Mr Ben McFarlane
University of Oxford
Property law and trusts

Professor Vanessa Munro
University of Nottingham
Socio-legal studies / feminist legal theory

Professor Mathias Siems
University of East Anglia
Comparative law

Dr Ralph Wilde
University College London
International law

Dr Caucher Birkar
University of Cambridge
Pure mathematics (algebraic geometry)

Dr Timothy Browning
University of Bristol
Number theory

Dr Tom Coates
Imperial College London
Pure mathematics

Dr Radek Erban
University of Oxford
Applied mathematics

Dr Nicolai Meinshausen
University of Oxford
Statistics

Dr Angus Gowland
University College London
Intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe

Dr Julia Lovell
Birkbeck, University of London
Modern Chinese history

Dr Giorgio Riello
University of Warwick
Global history

Dr Alice Rio
King’s College London
Medieval history

Dr Alan Strathern
University of Cambridge
World history

Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

Dr Arwen Deuss
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Dr Arwen Deuss is already recognised as one of the international stars of her generation in the subject of seismology – the study of the structure of the Earth gleaned from its response to earthquakes and large underground explosions. As an undergraduate she was the first to determine from seismological data that shear waves (for which the direction of motion of the elastic solid is perpendicular to the motion of the wave) were transmitted through the Earth’s solid inner core, of radius 1221 km, believed to consist of almost pure iron. Dr Deuss has gone on to work on the structure of the inner core, showing recently that it can be considered at four different segments, akin to a four-slice orange for example. Each segment has different iron crystal structure and anisotropy, related to the deduced strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the boundary between the liquid outer core and the solid mantle at a radius of approximately 3500 km (i.e. a depth of approximately 2900 km from the surface of the Earth). Dr Deuss has also used seismological techniques to analyse heterogeneity in the Earth’s mantle, linking these with descriptions in terms of mineral physics.
http://bullard.esc.cam.ac.uk/~deuss/

Dr Daniel Lunt
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Dan Lunt uses high-performance computer modelling to understand the processes involved in past climate change. Collating geological data to build hypotheses, which models can be used to test, he is able to add important quantification to the results of fieldwork from numerous sources. His work has highlighted the impact vegetation has made on the development of Pliocene ice sheets and the likely influence it will have on future climates. His model results also provide crucial information on the potential risks associated with proposals to ‘geoengineer’ Earth’s climate, i.e. deliberately manipulating the Earth’s climate to counteract the effects of global warming. He has pioneered new studies in this controversial area, showing the considerable problems with some of the proposed schemes. Dr Lunt has published in the world’s leading scientific literature, and his findings have made fundamental contributions across a range of different subject areas.
http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff_lunt.html

Dr Tamsin Mather
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Tamsin Mather is a leading young scientist whose work is having a wide impact on the volcanological community. She studies the gases emitted by volcanoes, their chemical composition and interactions in the volcanic plume as well as wider issues such as environmental and health impacts, and the role of volcanic plume gases in the evolution of the atmosphere. She pioneered the concept of ‘reaction crucibles’ recognising that mixing air with volcanic gases catalyses atmospheric processes leading to the formation of unexpected chemical compounds in the plume with important chemical and environmental consequences. She is active in both public outreach and policy and has received a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and the UNESCO/L’Oreal UK and Ireland Women in Science Award. 
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~tamsinm

Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato
School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Southampton
Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato is a physical oceanographer who specialises in the Southern Ocean and he has made several fundamental contributions to its study. His chosen region is one of the most important and least understood parts of the ocean for the global climate: for example, it is the place where much of the deep water in the world ocean is formed, and it plays a critical role in the oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Dr Naveira Garabato has used new observational techniques to show that vertical mixing is intense in regions of the Southern Ocean where there are seabed mountain ranges, to describe the circulation there, and to study its influence both on plankton and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Oceanography is ‘big science’ that requires highly organised collaboration among scientists, and he has in recent years become a leader of the ocean science community, spearheading major international shipboard expeditions and experiments that are helping to define our understanding of this remote and fascinating ocean.
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/soes/staff/acng/

Dr Nicholas Teanby
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Nicholas Teanby has made significant advances in three very different fields. He compiled a remarkable history of the Earth’s magnetic field over the last 50,000 years from a drill hole into the lavas of a Hawaiian volcano, showing how the Earth’s field oscillated before it temporarily reversed direction. He then developed an automatic method to use minute earthquakes in a subterranean oil reservoir to document the changing stresses as the oil was extracted. This method has been applied to earthquakes beneath volcanoes and below oceanic trenches. More recently he has been interpreting the results from the Cassini space mission to Saturn and its moons. He has been able to discover the detailed structure of the atmosphere of the moon Titan, and how it changes during the Titan year that lasts for 29 Earth years. He is currently involved in the development of a broadband microseismometer for application to Solar System bodies, such as Mars and the Moon, and he plans to continue to work in the area of planetary seismology and atmospheres.
http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/people/teanby.html

History of Art

Dr Patricia Allmer
Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr Patricia Allmer’s research in the comparatively under-explored areas of Belgian Surrealism, the second largest national concentration of the movement, and women artists and Surrealism, is transformational. In 2009 major outcomes of her research came into the public domain; her monograph, Rene Magritte – Beyond Painting (MUP) focusing upon philosophical implications and other neglected and marginalised aspects of his works, redefined his artistic practice. Her curation of the exhibition Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery introduced over 60,000 visitors to the work of three generations of artists from the US, UK, Mexico, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The exhibition and its accompanying edited catalogue challenged the existing canon and received widespread critical acclaim. Her current project Lee Miller: Beyond Frontiers questions national, gender and artistic boundaries and will focus on her war, fashion and Surrealist photography, as well as her collaborations with other women Surrealists.
http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/profile/pallmer

Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier
School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier’s outstanding work in the field of African American art is both original and transformative. Her recent publications include African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present which traces artistic and political developments over a two hundred year period by examining daguerreotypes, photographs, paintings, ceramics, quilts, sculpture and murals. Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery (co-edited with Judie Newman) gathers together scholars, museum and gallery curators and public historians to address major issues regarding memorialising, representing and narrating histories of slavery in the public domain. While Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination provides the first interdisciplinary study of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century mixed-media representations of black heroism. A future project will be a critical edition of Horace Pippin’s war diaries and letters, and this will add considerably to our understanding of this most important American visual artist. .
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/american/people/celeste-marie.bernier

Dr Grace Brockington
Department of History of Art, University of Bristol
Dr Grace Brockington has an impressive record of academic achievement. She has published articles where she shed new light on the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group and portrayed the Omega workshops as ideologically sustained by war through the determination to remain creative, despite the terrible destruction of war. In 2009 she contributed an important essay in the groundbreaking catalogue for the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury; Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913 - 19 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, entitled The Omega and the End of Civilization: Pacifism, Publishing and Performance in the First World War.  She was also sole editor of a key collection of essays entitled Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fine de Siècle, also published last year. Her monograph Above the Battlefield: British Modernism and the Peace Movement, 1900 – 1918 was a radical revision of the relationship between modernism and the peace movement drawing upon new archival research and based upon her doctoral thesis. She is already engaged in an exciting new project revaluating the 'experimental' work of Vanessa Bell which will result in the co-curation of an exhibition (with Barnaby Wright) at the Courtauld Gallery planned for 2014. 
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arthistory/staff/brockington.html
 
Dr Alain George
History of Art, University of Edinburgh
Dr Alain George’s publications over the past three years have offered remarkable new insights into the field of Islamic art. His discussion of the calligraphy and design of early manuscripts of the Qur’an is conducted methodically, and with an eye that is invariably alert to the slightest detail. At the same time, each of these individual studies constitutes a highly imaginative exploration of the particular material, which may be appreciated by specialists and non-specialists alike. The extension of his research into performance studies, with reference to Arabic illustrated books, is another testimony to his liveliness and originality. Results from his current work on the social and intellectual context for the building of the Great Mosque of Damascus will be eagerly awaited, not least since he intends to show how the emerging civilisation of Islam was closely intertwined with the world of late Antiquity. The breadth of his scholarship is also demonstrated by another new project on the artistic exchange between Islam and China in the 8th and 9th centuries, adding further to our understanding of how Islamic art is at the crossroads of world culture.
www.ed.ac.uk/ace/history-art/staff/alain-george

Dr Tara Hamling
Department of History, University of Birmingham
One of the most familiar stories in the history of British art has been about the disastrous impact of the Reformation, resulting in the destruction of church art in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries. Generations of art historians, critics and more recently even television presenters have presented these long drawn-out historical changes as a disaster for the visual arts, strangling the Renaissance at birth, isolating England from continental sources of inspiration and setting back the development of refined taste. Without denying the impact of the Reformation on a number of important traditional forms of visual art, Dr Hamling's work on the post-Reformation period radically revises this traditional view by showing how the aims and purposes of religious art were transferred from the more public spaces of the church to the more private spaces of the domestic sphere. The visual arts were not solely the business of aristocratic elites but also of the middle orders of the gentry. In her analysis of the location, form and subject-matter of visual signs found in figured plaster ceilings and overmantels, woodcuts in devotional books and embroidered into samplers and other textiles, Dr Hamling has shown how spiritual questions were explored for laypeople through what she calls ‘everyday objects’. Her work requires us to re-think ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as categories applied to the visual arts and to re-assess the significance of large numbers of fascinating, surviving works previously condemned merely as works of ‘applied’ or ‘decorative’ art. Her work is both radical and accessible.
http://www.shakespeare.bham.ac.uk/academic/tarahamling.shtml

Law

Dr Sylvie Delacroix
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Sylvie Delacroix is a legal philosopher who brings her deep understanding of the French and German traditions to bear on her engagement with Anglo-Saxon analytical jurisprudence. She has made an original and illuminating contribution to our understanding of law’s binding quality. It would be hard to over-estimate Dr Delacroix’s achievement in spanning philosophical methods which are almost always divided in contemporary legal theory, but her achievements are by no means limited to jurisprudence. Her interest in the ethics of risk led her to take a leading role in the establishment of the new Faculty Centre for Ethics and Law at UCL: an exceptional achievement. Her conviction that legal normativity is brought about on a daily basis through social interaction in particular contexts implies a commitment to bridging the gap between theory and practice. This is reflected in her current research on the values which underlie and animate the Palestinian constitution-making project. 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?delacroix
 
Mr Ben McFarlane
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Ben McFarlane has taken a major step towards providing a unified conception of property law, bringing together rights in land, rights in things, equitable property rights and restitution within a single, theoretical framework and explaining their inter-relationships systematically. He is unusual in being a specialist in property law who deals with all kinds of rights in property and approaches the subject in a way that brings together theory, doctrine and practice. In his justly admired book The Structure of Property Law he explained how property law answers fundamental questions about the use and ownership of property. In a lucid, clear and analytically rigorous manner he reassessed the relationships between different kinds of rights in and relating to property and argued that equitable property rights can best be conceived as rights to be asserted against other, legal, rights in property. He tested his model by examining the reasoning of judges when deciding cases on property law. This gives his theory explanatory as well as normative power. Coupled with his accessible style, it allows him to influence judges, legal practitioners and students as well as policy-makers, law reformers and legal philosophers. He now aims to see whether it is possible to extend his ‘right against a right’ theory to other European systems of property law. 
http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/profile/mcfarlaneb

Professor Vanessa Munro
School of Law, University of Nottingham
In the last ten years Professor Vanessa Munro has produced an impressive portfolio of publications which combine high quality scholarship with hard-hitting practical and policy impact. Her academic excellence is evidenced in an outstanding academic record, extraordinary success in securing external research funding, and a rich and prolific assortment of publications, including a monograph, three edited collections and a number of high impact journal articles. Professor Munro’s work is distinctive in that it deploys such a wide range of different research methods so effectively. She is as at home with qualitative empirical work as she is with legal doctrine and analysis and all of her work is strongly informed by socio-legal theoretical approaches. The substantive content of her scholarship – broadly in the field of criminal justice - also ranges to encompass rape law, the regulation of prostitution and human trafficking in which context her scholarship rightly transcends jurisdictional boundaries to embrace international perspectives and debates. Perhaps most widely acknowledged is the work she carried out examining jurors’ deliberative processes by means of mock jury techniques. Professor Munro is also one of a handful of scholars exploring the theoretical possibilities of a rehabilitated liberalism for feminist legal studies in the monograph, Law and Politics at the Perimeter: Re-Evaluating Key Debates in Feminist Legal Theory. 
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Law/Staff-Lookup/vanessa.munro

Professor Mathias Siems
The Law School, University of East Anglia
Professor Mathias Siems works mainly in the fields of comparative company and related commercial law and in law and economics. He has made an impressive and innovatory contribution to scholarship in these areas. His work has both advanced the theoretical understanding of comparative company law and played a pivotal role in developing systematic quantitative methodologies by which to measure the impact of the rules in different jurisdictions regarding aspects of corporate governance. His output is therefore at the cutting-edge of both theoretical and empirical research, and the work he does is of great value to scholars and policy-makers internationally in an area of global significance. In addition to this he has published original ideas on the methodology of legal research and the concept of ‘originality’ in such research, thereby contributing significantly to an increasingly urgent question for the academic legal community. 
http://www.uea.ac.uk/law/msiems
 
Dr Ralph Wilde
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Ralph Wilde is one of the leading younger scholars in international law in the UK today working in two key areas: the administration of territory by international organisations, and extraterritorial application of human rights law. His book entitled International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away, published by OUP has received widespread acclaim, winning, for example, the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law in 2009. This prestigious prize has only rarely been awarded to a British scholar. Dr Wilde has also embarked upon a monograph on the extraterritorial application of human rights law and has published some leading articles in this area, most notably in the Michigan Journal of International Law. In addition, he is working with Dame Rosalyn Higgins and others towards a monograph on the law of the UN for OUP. He is also playing an increasing important role in international law life in the UK and elsewhere, being appointed a member of the Executive Councils of both the American Society of International Law and the International Law Association. 
www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/wilde

Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Caucher Birkar
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Dr Caucher Birkar is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his outstanding contributions to fundamental research in algebraic geometry. His work on the Termination of Flips conjecture and the Log Minimal Model Programme has had great impact on the field. His best known work to date is published in a joint paper with Cascini, Hacon and McKernan which, in part, grew out of his independent investigations. It has attracted wide attention and admiration. It proves the main conjectures of the Minimal Model Programme in all dimensions and essentially implies a complete classification of algebraic varieties up to bi-rational equivalence. Results of such power had been regarded, for some time, as virtually out of reach. Their new-found accessibility has spawned a revival of interest in this classical area. While undoubtedly a break-through, this joint paper is only one step in a programme that Dr Birkar continues to pursue. In earlier work, he reduced the general Termination of Flips Conjecture to an apparently more accessible conjecture of Shokurov, so providing a way further forward into this subject. On the basis of these achievements, Dr Birkar already ranks with the world’s leaders in the field. 
http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~cb496/

Dr Timothy Browning
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
Dr Timothy Browning works at the interface of analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry; his primary focus is the distribution of rational points on varieties, a topic of central importance in mathematics. One famous open problem is Manin's conjecture, which predicts the density of rational points on algebraic varieties in terms of the geometry of the varieties in a deep and beautiful way. Dr Browning has introduced novel and powerful marriages of techniques from analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry; and in work both alone and jointly he has resolved Manin's conjecture for several families of varieties. He is already a leader internationally in the area which applies analytical methods to the investigation of rational points on higher dimensional values. His work takes known analytic methods beyond the boundary of what was previously possible, and opens uncharted territory.
http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~matdb/

Dr Tom Coates
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr Tom Coates has made outstanding contributions to enumerative algebraic geometry. His work lies in an area called Gromov-Witten theory (the science of counting holomorphic curves on algebraic and symplectic manifolds) that is an important and widely studied field on the boundary of mathematics and theoretical physics. On the one hand ideas from string theory are used to solve problems in geometry and topology while on the other hand the computations serve as tests for the physical theory by verifying the mathematical predictions in string theory. Dr Coates has changed the field of Gromov-Witten theory with the introduction of the Langrangian cone formalism (with Givental) and with his work on the Crepant Resolution Conjecture (in parts with others). The former has lead to a greater understanding of the mathematical physical theory of mirror symmetry while the latter greatly clarified the relationship between Gromov-Witten theory and the more classical theory of birational geometry. In addition to these far-reaching ideas, he has also provided some of the best and most difficult explicit computations in the field. 
http://coates.ma.ic.ac.uk/

Dr Radek Erban
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Radek Erban is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in Mathematical Biology. With his work on bacterial chemotaxis, Dr Erban has made major contributions towards the understanding of how cell-level decision making translates into population-level behaviour. He has understood how to incorporate cell-level behaviour in a function that characterises the macroscopic response and provided a set of techniques for tackling more general problems. In addition, with I. Kevrekidis, Dr Erban has developed computer-assisted methods for analysing stochastic models of gene regulatory networks, and has applied general multiscale equation-free methodology to them. Most recently, Radek’s papers have significantly clarified some fundamental issues concerning the stochastic analysis of reaction-diffusion systems. This work is having a large impact on the use of stochastic methods for modelling kinetics in biological applications. His future research will continue to focus on real world problems which offer mathematical challenges.
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/erban/

Dr Nicolai Meinshausen
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
Dr Nicolai Meinshausen has a growing international reputation as one of the leading mathematical statisticians of his generation. He is an outstanding scientist both in statistics and in climate research, highly original and with an impressive record of contributions. Over recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the amount of data now available in many scientific disciplines. The challenge is to determine the conditions under which it is possible to identify interesting information hidden in such data, and then to find statistical algorithms to do so. Dr Meinshausen’s research combines important theoretical results and computational implementation for high-dimensional situations. His work on variable selection with the Lasso has been particularly important. In other influential work he has shown the benefit of using resampling techniques in assessing the relevance of variables when the number of variables greatly exceeds the sample size, and addressed the problem of multiple testing when the number of hypotheses is vast (the original work was in an astronomical context but has been extended to other settings). 
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~meinshau/

Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History

Dr Angus Gowland
Department of History, University College London
Dr Angus Gowland is the author of The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in context (2006), a brilliant and highly original first book. Its subject, Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) had previously been studied as a classic of English literature, while historians had neglected it. Dr Gowland’s achievement is, as the book’s sub-title implies, to replace Burton in his historical context or more exactly, contexts in the plural: not only seventeenth-century medicine, in which ‘melancholy’ was a technical term, but contemporary debates on religion and politics as well. Angus Gowland does not ignore the literary aspect of the Anatomy indeed, he has much of interest to say about its rhetoric. Trained as a historian, he shows a remarkable ability to acquire, internalise and use with great effectiveness a battery of techniques normally associated with literature. Since publishing this book, the author has begun to work on dream interpretation in the Renaissance: another area with rich interaction between philosophical, religious, medical and literary currents. 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/about_us/academic_staff/dr_angus

Dr Julia Lovell
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Julia Lovell has conducted research in China in affiliation with both the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the History Department of Beijing University. The author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006) and The Great Wall: China against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000 (Grove Atlantic, 2006), Dr Lovell will be publishing a new study in 2011 of the Sino-British Opium War (1840-42), examining the conflict from both the Chinese and British sides. This will also consider the impact of the war on the subsequent 170 years of China’s relations with the West and uses a range of Chinese language sources little used in previous Western books. Dr Lovell is also a translator of distinction, whose work has attracted considerable attention. She is also a frequent contributor to the academic blog The China Beat (http://www.thechinabeat.org/), and also writes for the Guardian, Times, New Statesman, Prospect and Economist. Her next project focuses on the West’s enthusiasm for Maoism between the 1930s and 1970s, another facet of China’s relationship with the rest of the world.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/dr-julia...

Dr Giorgio Riello
Department of History, University of Warwick
Dr Giorgio Riello has published widely (in English, French, Italian and Russian) on topics that include cultural, economic and global history. He is a scholar of great distinction and breadth, whose key contributions have been in the field of the history of fashion and global history, particularly the history of commodities. His first academic monograph, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (OUP, 2006) was complemented by Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, co-authored with Peter McNeil. More recently, Dr Riello’s research has focused on the global history of textile production and trade. In addition to a succession of articles on this topic in peer-reviewed journals, he has co-edited The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850 (OUP, 2009) and How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Brill, 2009). His new project promises to place fashion, textiles and material culture within the framework of global history.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/griello/

Dr Alice Rio
Department of History, King’s College London
Dr Alice Rio's work makes a fundamental contribution to the understanding of early medieval society as well as to the practice of historical study of the early middle ages. She is outstandingly skilled in the analysis of difficult and ambiguous sources with subtle attention to fine detail and an ability to link that precision to larger problems in political, economic, and social history as well as the technical history of law and legal practice. Her monograph, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages (CUP, 2009) focuses on Merovingian and Carolingian legal formula collections and the light they throw on the lives of ordinary people. This won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize in 2010 for the best first book in any field apart from British history. This book also established the historical importance of these hitherto overlooked sources. She followed up this work with a splendid translation of the most important of these Latin formulary collections. Her current work on freedom and unfreedom has important implications for historians in many periods and parts of the world. It breaks new ground in the study of social practice and builds effectively on her familiarity with the legal sources. Alice Rio's quick, deep and subtle historical intelligence promises to transform larger debates about the transition from Roman to medieval European society as well as the medieval origins of political ideas and institutions of liberty and slavery.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/history/staff/academic/rio...

Dr Alan Strathern
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Alan Strathern's oeuvre is centred on an investigation of the space between religion and politics in the early modern world. In Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka (CUP, 2007) and in a range of influential essays, he examines both how power sought to make itself sacred and how religious change, and in particular conversion, shape and were shaped by power, in particular by Portuguese maritime imperialism. He combines deep and profound work in Southeast Asia, anchored to its west on Sri Lanka, with broad interests which embrace three continents and four major religious traditions, and bring him into particular engagement with the histories of Hawaii, the kingdom of the Kongo, Japan and China. His work exemplifies at the highest level the empirical curiosity of the historian about the precise processes of change in each context, mustering significant linguistic, paleographical, and cultural skills. It is also powerfully comparative and interdisciplinary drawing, as in his exploration of the 'stranger-king' formation, on a range of literatures in anthropology, sociology, political science, political economy, and comparative religion. Dr Strathern is now engaged in completing a major study of how the idea of sacred kingship shaped the expansion of monotheism around the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/strathern.html