• The College was honoured to host a conversation with Univ Honorary Fellow, The Rt Hon. The Lord Mance PC (1961, Law), Former Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court, on 21 November, on “The Judiciary and the Role of Law in a Changing World.” Read more…

• The College invites submissions for the inaugural annual Dr Michael Nicholson Prize. The winning submission will be awarded £1,500 to support an innovative student-led project which promotes community at Univ. Read more…

• Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology), the College’s Poet Laureate, discusses how the reading of poems within Univ’s landscape helps us see the space and time-span of the College eco-system with fresh eyes. Read more…

• Pireeni has also written an account of the recent inaugural Shelley Dinner at Univ. Read more…

Read all of Univ’s College news or explore Univ’s Treasures.

• Enjoy the latest round-up of publications by Old Members.

• Univ Old Members and friends, current students, academics and staff attended the 775 Univ Society London Dinner, held on the 23 November 2024 at the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), Pall Mall. This year’s guest speaker was Univ Old Member, Ambassador Uran Ferizi (2003, MMaths), the Albanian Ambassador to the UK and Ireland. Dr Sylvana Hassanieh (2018, DPhil Cancer Genomics) kindly provided a report. Read more…

Read all of Univ’s Alumni news.

Read all of our Univ North news or visit our Univ North Page.

Explore all of our Profile Features.

• Niyati Sharma, a first year undergraduate student at Univ, has been honoured with the prestigious Diana Award for her contributions to social action or humanitarian efforts. Read more…

• Hanxi Wang (2021, DPhil Astrophysics) has written a report on their trip to the Exploring Dense Stellar Systems Across Cosmic Time conference in Warsaw, Poland, supported by the Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund. Read more…

Discover student-led Reviews.

Please note some of these items link to external sites.

Old Members

• Peter Bond (1965, Literae Humaniores) has published several pantomimes online by Lazy Bees, with all royalties going to charity. Read more…

• Robert Cioffi (2005, Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literatures) wrote about a new Euripides papyrus for the London Review of Books.

• Tim Coates (1967, Engineering) is the author of various Freckle Report surveys, which help the public understand how libraries in the US and UK contribute to reading and literacy. Through a series of public-facing surveys, project lead Tim Coates has been able to track the habits of reading – and the evolution of format changes – before, during, and after the COVID pandemic. Read more…

• Viscount Andrew Dunrossil (1972, Greats) received the National Tartan Day Award 2024. National Tartan Day recognises the outstanding achievements and contributions made by Scottish Americans to the United States.

• Shomit Dutta (1989, Classics) won the Award for Best Scriptwriter for his original play Stumped, at the Eastern Eye Arts, Culture and Theatre Awards (ACTAS). Stumped was about a cricket match and an imaginary conversation between two great writers – playwright Sir Harold Pinter, and novelist and dramatist Samuel Beckett.

• Dr Joseph Hewlett (2005, Physics), a senior dynamics developer working at CM Labs Simulations in Montreal, Canada, was joint winner of the ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics Best Paper Award 2024 with Chantal Hutchison and József Kövecses. Read more…

• Aleksy Kwiatkowski (2017, Chemistry) has been awarded an Industrial Fellowship by The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 for his project “Closing the Loop: A Computational-Experimental Feedback Approach for Predicting Macrocycle Closure”, which aims to leverage advances in computation and data science to understand the factors influencing ring-closing reactions and develop tools to predict their success. Read more…

• Professor Julian Lindley-French (1976, History) was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS). Founded in 1868, the RHS is a learned society that promotes history and historians in the UK. Read more…

• News we missed previously: Professor Roderick McTurk (1960, English) was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland in 2007.

• Holger Nehring (2000, Modern History) was awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship to work on the history of Wilton Park, the executive agency of the FCDO and the role of sub-national diplomacy in British foreign policy.

• Nadia Odunayo (2010, PPE), Founder and CEO of The Storygraph (a fully-featured Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads), was featured on the front page of Apple’s UK App Store as part of their “Black, British and brilliant” Black History Month campaign. Nadia also took part in a live ‘Ask Me Anything’ session, hosted by DiscoLink, on 17 September.

• Jane Price-Stephens (1996, Experimental Psychology) was shortlisted for the Chalet Award in The International Design and Architecture Awards 2023. Read more…

• Isla Ratcliff (2014, Music) is working on her second album, The Scottish Four Seasons, the follow-up to The Castalia (2021). She performed at Festival Interceltique de Lorient in August 2024.

• Professor Alessandro Sisto (2010, Mathematics) of Heriot-Watt University was awarded a Whitehead Prize for his outstanding contributions to geometric group theory, particularly his groundbreaking work on hierarchically hyperbolic spaces. Read more…

• Rachel Skokowski (2015, Modern Languages) is Director of Galleries and Curator at the Janet Turner Print Museum, which was recently awarded a California Superintendent’s Award for Excellence in Museum Education for their Kids@TheTurner programme. Read more…

• Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology), College Poet Laureate, was interviewed for Danish National Television about the neuroscience of resilience and innovation in September 2024; she was also interviewed about her poetry and work as a behaviour change scientist, by BBC’s Lyse Doucet on stage at the South Bank Centre, as part of the London Literature Festival in October; she published the following book chapters: “The Narrative Machine: Profits, Brains, & the Reshaping of our Public Space” in the book New Narratives on the Peopling of America edited by A. Aleinikoff & A. Alsonso (Johns Hopkins Press, 2024); “Designing with the Brain in Mind: Implementing neuroscience-based design principles” in the book Cultivating Futures Thinking in Museums edited by Kristin Alford, (Routledge 2024); Pireeni gave several keynote addresses in 2024, including “Cognitive Barriers to Change” in the Rothskilde Festival of ideas in Denmark (September 2024) and “Financial investments & Cognitive Blind-spots” for the Silicon Valley investment conference “Gratitude Railroad”. Channel 4 international Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, featured Pireeni’s poetry in her new memoir: I Brought the War With Me (Chatto & Windus, 2024).

• Marko Supronyuk (2017, MSc Russian and East European Studies) has been named a 2024 NextGen Fellow by Business Executives for National Security.

• Harry Wallop (1993, Modern History) won the Foreign Press Association financial/economic story of the year award 2023 for a feature he wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine on the banana industry. Read more… (Times Subscribers only)

• Ben Williams (1996, Experimental Psychology) was awarded Honorary Membership of The Association for Business Psychology.

• Michael Williams (1957, History) was selected for the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) Annual Open 171 (14 September 2024 – Sunday 5 January 2025).

• Wils Wilson (1989, English Language and Literature) recently directed Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the world premiere of David Greig’s Two Sisters at Malmö Stadsteater and Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre (Guardian review).

• Fitzbillies, the 100-year-old Cambridge bakery owned by Alison Wright (1986, PPE), was one of three finalists for Online Business of the Year at the 2024 Baking Industry Awards, hosted by DJ Scott Mills! Read more…

• Dr Sam Zager (1997, MPhil Economic and Social History) was named 2024 Legislator of the Year (Maine Chapter American Academy of Pediatrics; Committee Award Maine Council on Aging).

Fellows

• Professor Katharine Ellis (1982, Music), Honorary Fellow, won the 2023 Otto Kinkeldey Prize, awarded by the American Musicological Society, for the book French Musical Life: Local Dynamics in the Century to World War II (Oxford University Press).

• Between 20 January and 10 February, Professor Nicholas Halmi, Margaret Candfield Tutorial Fellow in English, will be convening an online seminar series, “Historical Anxiety”, sponsored by the College and hosted by The Philosopher (the journal of the Philosophical Society of England). It is free and open to all. Professor Halmi will be discussing contemporary anxiety about history with four distinguished academics, including the historian François Hartog and the sociologist Hartmut Rosa.

• Dr Ine Jacobs, Univ Supernumerary Fellow in Byzantine Archaeology, has been interviewed for the Impact Stories series on the University’s Development Office website. Read more…

• Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves by Professor Tamsin Mather FRS, Supernumerary Fellow in Earth Sciences, has been named in the Best Non-Fiction 2024 list in the Library Journal. Read more…

For more news from our academics, please see the 2024 issue of The Record.