St John's academics recognised in 2024 Recognition of Distinction awards

Katherine Southwood becomes Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Elizabeth Wonnacott becomes Professor of Language Science.

Professor Katherine Southwood is Tutorial Fellow in Theology & Religion, is known for her interdisciplinary research that bridges Biblical texts and the Social Sciences. Her research interests include Job, pain, the body, death, Judges, Ezra-Nehemiah, Ahiqar, Tobit, exile, and gender.

Professor Southwood has published five books including a recent monograph, Job’s Body and the Dramatized Comedy of “Moralising” (Routledge: Oxford and New York, 2021) and two recent articles: ‘Trauma, brokenness, and pain in the Book of Lamentations: Empathetic attention as a hermeneutic for thinking about rehabilitation of health’ in Jews and Health: History, Tradition, and Practice, ed. Catherine Hezser (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023); and with James W. Southwood (Clinical Psychologist, NHS England) ‘Job as a work of laughtears and learning: comedy, pain, and audience empathy’, Bible and Critical Theory. 18/2 (2022).

Professor Elizabeth Wonnacott is a Supernumerary Fellow at St John’s. Her research focuses on language learning in children and adults, statistical learning approaches, and literacy development. Her research explores the extent to which this rests on input-driven, statistical learning processes, both in the context of learning a first native language, and in learning further languages in later childhood or adulthood. She is interested in learning that occurs both in naturalistic contexts and in input-limited contexts (such as the classroom), as well in the educational implications of statistical learning approaches for modern foreign language instruction. She also has an interest in the development of literacy and in language processing. From a theoretical perspective, she has become interested in whether human language may be understood in terms of discriminative learning — a well-understood theory of learning developed in the study of animal learning.

Recognition of Distinction Awards are assessed using three criteria:

• An ongoing research record which is characterised by a significant influence on the field of study and is of a high order of excellence and of international standing, and the quality of which in terms of research distinction is at least equal to that expected of those appointed to full professorships at other leading international research universities.
• A record of effective teaching for the University and for colleges, concomitant with the duties of the University post and the college fellowship, where one is held.
• A record of involvement in University and/or college administration and demonstrable competence in such administration.