Our Research

  • Stephanie Solywoda

    Director

    Stephanie double-majored in Russian Language and Politics at Smith College, MA before working at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington DC and the UK Houses of Parliament. These experiences drove her back to academic life! She went on to earn both her M.Phil and D.Phil from Oxford. A former Max Hayward Fellow of Russian Culture at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and current member of the Oxford history faculty, she has published on Russian religious philosophy and semiotics, including The Life and Work of
    Semen L. Frank: A Study of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ibidem-Verlag 2008). She has taught a wide range of twentieth century history to Oxford undergraduates and graduate students. She lives in central Oxford and enjoys café culture, rowing, and Eliot-- her cat.

  • Kimberly Marsh

    Student and Academic Services Administrator

    Kimberly Marsh received her DPhil (PhD) in English Literature from the University of Oxford. Prior to that she wrote “Reading the Body in Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray” and graduated with an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Leeds having taken a BA (Hons) in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. There her honours project focused on the fluid representations of Victorian identity in Wilkie Collins’ novels.
    Her research interests include travel writing, Romantic and Victorian literature, the Gothic, colonialism, and the intersections between literature and the visual arts. She is currently working on transforming her DPhil thesis, “Paintings and Palanquins: The Language of Aesthetics and the Picturesque in Accounts of British Women’s Travels in India from 1822 to 1846” into a monograph and intends to conduct a further research on travel writing in India during and after the Indian Mutiny.

  • Ethan Friederich

    Junior Dean

    My doctoral research focuses on the history of malaria within the province of Assam in British India. Over the roughly seventy years of Assam’s existence as an independent province, and its extended history under colonial rule, no disease claimed as many lives as the vector-borne parasite. In some of the worst years, roughly 30% of the population suffered from malaria and 2% perished. As a disease, malaria is intimately connected to many different facets of life, extending far beyond medical research labs and offices of public health. While firmly rooted in the discipline of medical history, my research also heavily involves colonial, ecological, and even entomological history. Tensions plagued the province of Assam; between tea plantation owners (the dominant economy) and public health officials, between indigenous cultures and western colonists, and between the inhabitants and the environment itself. While these forces shaped the social and physical landscape of Assam, each maintained both direct and indirect relationships with the pathways of malaria. The purpose of my research is to bring the story of malaria in Assam to the forefront of the province’s history, to highlight a pivotal actor that has largely been underemphasized and understudied.

  • Laura Stewart

    Junior Dean

    My Doctoral research assesses national elections outcomes in the UK, USA, France and South Africa (1990-2017), to identify patterns in voter behavior and their associated causes. It is specifically concerned with explaining increases in right of center voting outcomes during national elections based on three variables; (1) population demographics i.e. differential health outcomes and mortality (2) privatization (capital in neoliberal markets) and; (3) trade. The research is primarily quantitative; using a positivist lens, descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis to infer causes of voter behaviour. I have published through the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, The International Journal of Sustainability Policy and Practice and Dialogue (King’s College London - School of Political Science). This research is supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations (Civil Society Scholar Award) and the Eldred Scholarship at Linacre College, University of Oxford.

  • Olivia Reilly

    Lecturer

    My doctoral research concerned the relationship between music and the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and has led to my current research into aural space and the concept of music in long 19th century poetry. The linking of music and morality in the period has led to my most recent work on ethics and literature, particularly in relation to literature and law, including human rights law. I am currently working on a joint, interdisciplinary article considering the relationship between the law and Coleridgean concepts of imagination. I have published in Romanticism and Paul Douglass and Frederick Burwick, eds. Romantic Era Songs (online).

  • Sabine Parrish

    Lecturer

    Sabine Parrish is a postdoctoral researcher at the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity (UBVO), a research unit of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. Her postdoctoral project on concealed pregnancy and witchcraft is part of a wider Medical Research Council-funded study on culturally appropriate interventions to combat gestational diabetes in The Gambia. Alongside this work she is part of a UBVO team looking at changes in food provisioning, eating habits, and physical activity during England’s Covid-19 pandemic lockdown measures and associated implications for long-term health outcomes.

  • Thomas Crook

    Lecturer

    Thomas is senior Treasury adviser and policy and strategy lead at a research unit in UK Parliament, where he also heads the economics team. He has previously worked in corporate intelligence, leading a Chinese language investigations team at KPMG in London, and has diplomatic experience from his time working at the EU’s embassy in Beijing.
    Thomas’s doctoral research in engineering management at Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing focuses on the complex and dynamic interaction between innovation and industrial systems, and he has previously completed MPhil research into open innovation systems at Oxford’s Technology and Management Centre for Development.
    Thomas has been lecturer in economic policy and tutor of business and innovation for Stanford, he is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a keen squash player.

  • Harry McCarthy

    Lecturer

    Dr Harry R. McCarthy holds a BA in English and French from the University of Exeter, an MSt in English Literature (1550-1700) from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in early modern English drama from the University of Exeter. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College (University of Cambridge), where he specialises in early modern drama in performance. He is the author of Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward's Boys (Cambridge UP, 2020), and has published on early modern boy actors and theatre history in journals such as Early Theatre, English Literary History, and Shakespeare Survey. He is currently writing a book titled Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre, and has a developing interest in how premodern critical race studies can productively be brought to bear on studies of early modern childhood.

  • Olivia Durand

    Lecturer

    Olivia Durand completed a doctoral degree in history on the creation of settler societies and continental empires in the nineteenth century – with a particular focus on the United States and Russia. She is on the advisory committee of the Centre for Global and Imperial History of the University of Oxford, and has contributed to the creation of the ‘Oxford and Empire’ research network, which investigates the ties between the University and the complex history of colonial ventures. Olivia is the co-founder and director of Uncomfortable Oxford, a public engagement with research organization which has been running public lectures, walking tours, and workshops since 2018, with partnerships as far as New York and Kolkata. This work was featured in The Times (UK) and The Washington Post, and has led to collaborations with museums of art and archaeology, anthropology, with theatre companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, and with nation-wide festivals. Olivia has also worked for the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR), researching and writing case-studies for EuroClio’s ‘Contested Histories’ project. She is on the steering committee of the ‘Colonial Ports and Global History’ network, an interdisciplinary initiative which brings together an international group of researchers from the Humanities through a series of conferences. A Fulbright alumna (2015), Olivia has received funding from the Santander Bank, the Beit Fund for Imperial or Commonwealth History, and from the Rothermere American Institute (Oxford), and was highly commended for her work on Social Impact by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

  • Samuel Ritholtz

    Lecturer

    Samuel Ritholtz is retaining-fee lecturer at Somerville College and a doctoral candidate in the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, where they study queer and trans experiences of conflict, crisis, and displacement. Sam’s broader research interests includes political violence, forced migration, gender, sexuality, and epistemology. Outside of academia, Sam has worked on human rights and gender issues for a range of institutions, including the United Nations’ Executive Office of the Secretary General as well as human rights organizations in Washington DC and Buenos Aires. Sam’s work has been featured in Migration Studies, Politics & Gender, Slate, the New Humanitarian, and Newsweek and the Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation. Originally from New York, Sam has an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BSc in International Agriculture and Rural Development from Cornell University.

  • Chelsea Haith

    Summer Programme Lead

    Chelsea Haith is completing her DPhil in Contemporary Literature at the University of Oxford, with a focus on speculative fiction and urban inequality. As a Mandela Rhodes Scholar she studied literature, French, journalism and gender studies at Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town in South Africa before moving to the UK for her MA in Culture and Thought After 1945 at the University of York. She is currently an access programme consultant, host of the Narrative Futures podcast, and the Principal Investigator on the AI, narrative and music composition research project The Sound of Contagion.

Our Team

Mrs Sharon Scott

Bursar

I joined Stanford University in 2012 after many years working for multinational corporate organisations. Principally, I am responsible for all the financial matters relating to the Stanford University in Oxford Centre. I also manage the relationships between the Centre and our local neighbours.
You can reach me at: sharon2@stanford.edu

Mrs Autumn Tull

Facilities Manager

As Facilities Manager for the Stanford programme in Oxford, my primary responsibility is to ensure the proper maintenance of the historic building our program calls “home.” From health and safety to event coordination and student services, I partner with the centre’s maintenance coordinator, as well as numerous vendors, to ensure the Stanford House runs smoothly on a day-to-day basis. I also oversee the administration of the Kathleen Lavidge Bursary offered to first year students in Stanford’s partner colleges in Oxford University.
You can reach me at: autumn.tull@stanford.edu

Mr Tom Cooper

Maintenance Coordinator

I am the Maintenance Coordinator for Stanford University’s Montag Centre for Overseas Study. I look after the buildings and grounds at Stanford House while liaising with local vendors and traders to meet the centre’s needs. I work closely with the Facilities Manager and help set up for events at the house, and look after the IT/AV needs for the visiting lecturers.
You can reach me at: tcooper1@stanford.edu