Visiting Scholars, Summer 2025
This year, St John's has awarded six scholarships to senior academics working on a range of interdisciplinary projects encompassing Art, Classics, Philosophy, Sociology and Theology. We are delighted to be joined by Katarzna Andrejuk, Sebastian De Haro, Bernd Goebel, Jinjoon Lee, Jeffrey Murray and Sławomir Sztajer, and look forward to their contributions to College life over the summer.
Details of their respective research interests can be found below.
" 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 " Professor Lady Sue Black, President of St John's College
Katarzyna Andrejuk is sociologist and lawyer, Professor of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include: international migration, ethnic minorities and diasporas, migrants’ adaptation on the labour market, migrant activism, Europeanisation and functioning of the European Union.
Her PhD dissertation examined educational migrations from Poland to the United Kingdom after 2004. Her habilitation monograph explored entrepreneurship of Ukrainian migrants in Poland. She has been a principal investigator or co-investigator in several national and international research projects dedicated to: migrant entrepreneurship in Poland and in the UK, migrants’ platform work, European welfare systems from migrants’ perspective, migration in Central Europe after the Second World War, European and American Single Markets in comparative perspective. Her research has been published in multiple journals, including “Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies”, “Population Space and Place”, “Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies”, “Anthropological Notebooks”, “Polish Sociological Review”, “ASK. Research & Methods”. Her current main research project examines Ukrainian diaspora mobilization in response to Russia’s war.
The aim of the visiting scholarship at the University of Oxford is to strengthen the theoretical foundations of research on diaspora mobilization. The study will seek to trace the theoretical nuances of the ‘ethnicity paradox’, which shows that migrants who engage with their own ethnic communities can be better integrated into their host society at the same time. The library search will be an opportunity to study different theories on social activism in the context of multiculturalism. University of Oxford has a rich body of literature on the origins and functioning of civil society under conditions of ethno-cultural diversity.
Sebastian De Haro is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at QuSoft.
He is also a member of the Directorate of the Public Methodology Centre at the University of Amsterdam. His research focusses on the philosophy of contemporary physical theories and their implications for philosophical questions such as theoretical equivalence, theory succession, explanation, and scientific realism. He also works on broader topics in the philosophy of science and philosophy of technology, including emergence and scientific and technological understanding. De Haro is the author of the joint monograph with Jeremy Butterfield, The Philosophy of Physics and Duality (Oxford University Press, 2025). After obtaining his PhD in theoretical physics at Utrecht University, he worked as a research associate at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam; and King’s College, London. While teaching physics and philosophy at the Amsterdam University College, he obtained his PhD in philosophy of science at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Bernd Goebel, who holds a Ph.D. from the EPHE Paris and the University of Bonn, is Professor of Philosophy and History of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology in Fulda/Marburg.
As director of the Anselm Institute in Fulda, he is particularly interested in the philosophical theology of St Anselm and the lives and works of the theologians, historiographers, and poets in his circle at a time when Canterbury, under Archbishops Lanfranc and Anselm, was one of the outstanding centres of learning in Europe.
He has recently completed two books, an annotated edition and new translation of Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God and the Debate with his Critic Gaunilo (with C. Tapp), and an edition of Ralph of Battle's dialogue 'De peccatore et ratione' (with J. Dörfel), a work inspired by Anselm's 'Cur deus homo' and Boethius' 'Consolatio philosophiae'.
The writings of the Norman Abbot of Battle, Ralph (1040-1124), a fellow student and theological rival of Anselm, were first attributed in modern scholarship by the eminent medievalist Richard Southern, President of St John's College from 1969 to 1981. During his time at St John's, Professor Goebel will edit several of Ralph's previously unpublished short treatises and establish their place in the history of ideas. The manuscripts of these texts are held in the Bodleian Library, the British Library and the library of St John's College itself.
Prof Goebel's research has also focused on 20th-century British moral philosophy. In 2014 and 2020 he published annotated German translations of A.C. Ewing's 'Ethics' and (with P. Schwind) W.D. Ross's 'The Right and the Good', after researching the lives and works of these thinkers in English archives.
Dr Jinjoon Lee FRSA is an artist-scholar working at the intersection of art, science, technology, and the humanities, with a focus on practice-based research and interdisciplinary experimentation. He is currently Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Culture Technology and Director of the Art & Technology Centre at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).
Dr Lee has spent over a decade exploring themes of liminality. Drawing on principles from East Asian classical philosophy, his research-driven artistic practice investigates the boundaries between nature and artifice, analogue and digital, material and immaterial—prompting audiences to reflect on contemporary challenges in new and thought-provoking ways.
He holds a DPhil in Fine Art from the University of Oxford (St Hugh’s College), where his doctoral thesis, Empty Garden: A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere, was presented as a 10-metre Korean traditional paper scroll combining poetry, autoethnography, and East Asian spatial philosophy. He also holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London, as well as BFA and MFA degrees in Sculpture and a BBA in Business from Seoul National University.
An internationally active media artist, since making his solo debut at ARKO Art Centre in 2007, Lee has exhibited widely at venues including MMCA Korea, the Seoul Museum of Art, India International Centre, Prague National Gallery, the National Foreign Art Museum of Bulgaria, and the Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music in London. Most recently, he was invited as a guest artist at ZKM, supported by the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and awarded a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, USA.
Jeffrey Murray is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cape Town.
Before joining UCT he was Lecturer in Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has held fellowships at the Fondation Hardt, Harvard, and St John’s College, Cambridge. His publications to date have been mostly in the areas of Latin prose (especially the Roman author Valerius Maximus) and the history of classical scholarship and education (particularly in Africa). While holding a Visiting Scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford, he will continue to work on one of his current research projects: Mabel Palmer: An Intellectual Biography. Fabianism, Feminism, Education.
Slawomir Sztajer is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Religious and Comparative Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy (2007) and his habilitation in Cognitive and Communication Sciences (2019) from Adam Mickiewicz University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (2007-2008) and the University of Oxford (2011), and participated in numerous international academic collaborations and guest lectures across Europe. His work explores the intersections of cognition, language and religion, with a particular focus on how religious beliefs and practices are shaped and transmitted in modern societies. Slawomir Sztajer's current research focuses on the cognitive functions of religious artefacts, including how material objects mediate religious ideas and practices.
Slawomir Sztajer is the author and editor of several books and over 100 scholarly articles, contributing to journals such as Religion, Religious Studies Review and Humaniora. His recent monographs include The Conceptual Construction of the Religious World: Religious Beliefs and Cognitive Processes (2018, in Polish) and Changing Trajectories of Religion and Popular Culture (2018, co-authored with Jarema Drozdowicz). In addition to his academic activities, Professor Sztajer serves on the editorial boards of several journals and has played a key role in the organisation of many conferences. He is a member of several professional societies, including the International Association for the History of Religions, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion.