Visiting Scholars, Summer 2024
This year, College has awarded five scholarships to senior academics in History, Comparative Literature, Law, Mathematics, and Engineering. We are delighted to be joined by Wendy Ugolini, Anne Duprat, Francesco Bono, Katerina Kaouri, and Russell Cummings, and look forward to their contributions to College life over the summer.
Professor Lady Sue Black, President of St John’s, said:
‘We are delighted to welcome this year’s Visiting Scholars to the College. They come from a diverse range of subject areas and from institutions around the world, and we very much look forward to engaging with them to learn from their expertise and to broaden our own thinking'.
Details of their respective research interests can be found below.
Dr Wendy Ugolini is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Ugolini is currently the Principal Investigator for an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Beyond Borders: The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK. With colleagues at the University of Swansea and the Imperial War Museum, Dr Ugolini is seeking to recover how British people conceptualised their national identity during the Second World War, whether as imperial, multinational or singular and the extent to which this shifted as people moved across the Empire. Her project examines military and civilian migration within the UK, then moves in concentric circles outwards to address imperial encounters, amongst service personnel and transnational workforces, in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. It then traces the post-war migratory movement of colonial and Commonwealth veterans into the UK. Through adopting a global history approach, and moving away from a purely nation-state framework, her project aims to analyse the meanings attached to the experiences of those who moved through British imperial landscapes in wartime.
As a Visiting Scholar, Dr Ugolini will be making use of key datasets held at Oxford including the King’s African Rifles Papers at the Bodleian Library and several sets of private papers, such as the Norman Lewis Collection at the Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony’s College.
Anne Duprat is Professor of Comparative Literature at Université de Picardie–Jules Verne. She is also currently a Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France.
A specialist in the theory of fiction, Professor Duprat has published several monographs and multi-authored essays on Early Modern European Literature and Travel Literature, as well as translations from Italian, Latin, English and Spanish literature, and novels (Grasset). She is Principal Investigator of ALEA Project "Figures of Chance I & II" (2020–2024) and of IUF-Project "Discordances of Time" (2023–2028). She is also a member of Academia Europaea since 2020.
At St John's, Professor Duprat will be conducting research at the crossroads between two broader studies. The first, entitled ‘Weather Fictions/Météorologies du Roman’, is devoted to the evolving relationship between the novel and the weather in Western literature, during the latter part of the 'Little Ice Age' (16th–19th centuries). The second focuses on the status of the event and of eventfulness in the novella genre in Italy, England, France and Spain between the 14th and 18th centuries. Professor Duprat's scholarship at St John's will facilitate liaison with eco-criticism specialists in the Department of Medieval and Modern Literature at St John's, and collaboration with literature and art scholars at Magdalen College. She will also be studying several collections of archives held at the College Library and at the Bodleian, feeding into the analyses developed in four of the main chapters of her projected essay, Fictional Meteorologies (2026).
Francesco Bono is a Professor of Roman Law at the Department of Law, Political and International Studies of the University of Parma.
Professor Bono's research re-evaluates ancient literary and legal sources concerning the use and exploitation of forest resources. His work considers how legal works, such as Hadrian's Definitio Silvarum, as well as late antique imperial provisions dedicated to forests (CTh. 10.1.2; C. 11.78.1; C. 11.78.2), indirectly protected the environment. Although emperors did not intend to prohibit logging in general, but rather to preserve certain forest areas or genus of trees from over-exploitation, the limits they imposed placed a curb on human action and helped protect the natural environment. Furthermore, to meet the economic needs of these constitutions, the use of forests was carefully managed to ensure the future viability of their natural resources. Professor Bono's research thus encourages a new perspective of analysis, what we could call environmental sustainability (Nachhaltigkeit/durabilité/sostenibilità).
The validity of the concept of sustainability applied to law was suggested by Soentgen, who reflected on the right of 'usufruct'. In fact, whilst the idea of sustainability might seem relatively modern, adopting a historical approach makes it possible to reconstruct the earliest development of the idea. Professor Bono's historical–legal research thus makes it possible to clarify the meaning of the word 'sustainability' and to develop its application for contemporary need.
Katerina Kaouri is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Applied Mathematics and the departmental Director for Impact and Engagement at the School of Mathematics, Cardiff University. Professor Kaouri is an Oxford alumna; she holds an MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing (top Distinction) and a DPhil in Applied Mathematics. She is delighted to be given this opportunity to spend more time in Oxford and at St John's College.
Professor Kaouri will be visiting the Oxford Mathematical Institute to engage in collaborative research with Professor Philip Maini, Director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology (WCMB) and Professorial Fellow of SJC, and with Professor Ruth Baker (WCMB). She also aims to initiate collaborations with other world-leading Oxford researchers.
Professor Kaouri's interdisciplinary research is underpinned by the mathematical modelling of complex physical and biological systems, in collaboration with companies, governments and society. She has developed an international research programme on Mathematical and Computational Biology, addressing challenges in fertilization, embryogenesis, and viral transmission in indoor spaces.
A key theme of Professor Kaouri's research is the interplay of calcium signalling with mechanics in cells and tissues which plays a key role in the development of embryo malformations, such as Spina Bifida and anencephaly. She, along with her collaborators in Cardiff and at other institutions, has developed novel mathematical models that can accurately track the behaviour of individual embryonic cells during neural tube closure. Maini and Baker are collaborators in the latter research project along with experimentalists at the University of Cyprus. Visiting Oxford will allow for enhanced collaboration and working on a related journal paper.
During Professor Kaouri's visit, she also plans to delve deeper into the crucial role of calcium signalling and mechanics in wound healing and in cancer. Both Maini and Baker are leading experts in the modelling of wound healing and have worked in cancer research; other members of the WCMB are cancer modelling experts. Also, the WCMB, as a world-leading centre in Mathematical and Computational Biology, attracts esteemed visitors from across the world, fostering a fertile and collaborative environment.
Additionally, she will work with Professor Ian Griffiths (Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) on viral transmission in indoor spaces, advancing joint work on air purifiers during the pandemic, which has also informed policy. Oxford has been at the forefront of the pandemic response and the visit will be a great opportunity to meet with other leading epidemic modelling experts to explore new collaborations.
During her stay, Professor Kaouri aims to expand her expertise on research impact through engagement with leaders in knowledge exchange in the UK, including her prospective hosts.
Russell Cummings is Professor of Aeronautics and Managing Director of the DoD HPCMP Hypersonic Vehicle Simulation Institute at the US Air Force Academy. He has recently been named a Department of Engineering Science Visiting Fellow for 2024–2027.
Professor Cummings is interested in the challenges of accurately simulating high speed flows around aircraft, especially aircraft flying at hypersonic speeds (where the velocity of the vehicle is more than five times the speed of sound, which is Mach 5). When air flows at these speeds, the extremely high temperatures caused by shock waves can create chemical reactions in the flow field. Typical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) prediction models/methods do not always accurately model these non-equilibrium chemical reactions, but understanding how these reactions change the flow field can often be critical to obtaining good predictions (especially as the Mach number increases). In support of upcoming wind tunnel tests of a double cone geometry at Mach 12 planned by the Oxford Thermofluids Institute, improved CFD simulations will be important to understand the flow fields being tested. Efforts will be aimed at improving the modeling accuracy of the chemical reactions, and once the wind tunnel data is obtained, further validation and improvements to the physical models can take place.