Stephanie Solywoda

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

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

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

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.

Timothy Bourns

My primary field of research is Old Norse-Icelandic, but I am also fascinated by literature throughout the medieval period, especially Old English and Arthurian Romance. I am interested in animal studies, environmental approaches to literature, and wilderness writing.

In my DPhil Thesis, I demonstrated how animals and humans are interconnected in the Icelandic sagas and Norse myths; how the boundary between these two categories is constructed and deconstructed; and how these literary representations reflect medieval Norse-Icelandic ideas, values, and beliefs about animals.

My approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary, placing a particular emphasis on ecocriticism: the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment. Reading medieval texts with attention to the environment allows for new readings and interpretations, while simultaneously introducing more nuance to modern views of the environment and our understanding of how historical contexts have led to the current crisis.

I am now beginning a new research project, ‘The Nature of Arthurian Legend’. I intend to study the environmental themes and ideologies that are at the heart of medieval Arthurian literature in its various cultural contexts, providing an innovative, comparative, ecocritical exploration.

Olivia Reilly

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).