Our people

Professor Dora is a Fellow in Physiological Sciences (Pharmacology) and her research interests focus on cell-cell communication in resistance arteries. Predominantly focusing on signalling pathways within the endothelium, she uses sophisticated and novel techniques to monitor rapid changes in intracellular Ca2+ and how they link to the activation of dilator pathways.

View all publications on the Department of Pharmacology website

Dr Michael Drolet is Senior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought, Worcester College. He is an intellectual historian with interests in 18th, 19th, and 20th century French philosophy, and French political, social, and economic thought. He has written widely on French liberalism, French Romantic Socialism, and contemporary French thought. He is author of Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (2003), The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (2004), and, with Ludovic Frobert (CNRS-ENS-Lyon), is writing a book on the economic thought of Jules Leroux (1805-1883) and a book on the political, social, and philosophical thought of Pierre Leroux (1797-1871). He is also writing a book on the Saint-Simonian and statesman, Michel Chevalier (1805-1879).

Michael’s interest in 18th and 19th century French thought extends to a wide range of topics including the interface between science, technology, and political, social and economic thought. He is a member of Writing Technology/The Technology of Writing: An interdisciplinary early modern network and is co-organiser with Ludovic Frobert (CNRS-ENS-Lyon), Thomas Bouchet (Centre Walras, Université de Lausanne) and Marie Thebaud-Sorger (CNRS-CentreAlexandre Koyré, EHESS) of the Encyclopédie Nouvelle project, an interdisciplinary project that examines the relationship between knowledge, science, and political and social practices, exploring how the locus of knowledge is a politically contested domain.

Michael is also interested in competing conceptions of humanity’s relationship with/to nature, and is animated by questions pertaining to how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists, inventors, engineers, economists, and political and social thinkers understood humanity’s relationship to nature, and engaged with issues around industrialisation and its impact on the natural environment.

I am the Ben Delo Fellow in Mathematics at Worcester College and a Departmental Lecturer in the Mathematical Institute. I grew up in West Yorkshire but have been entirely in Oxford since 1988 when I arrived as an undergraduate studying mathematics. In the College I have done various other roles: Tutor for Admissions, Tutor for Graduates, SCR Steward and Vice-Provost. In the Department I was the Outreach Officer and Admissions Coordinator for a decade and then the Director of Undergraduate Studies for a further decade. During 2022/23 I was Worcester’s choice to act as the University Assessor.

I have been with the College since 1999 and teach a range of topics across pure and applied mathematics. Ben Delo – who has endowed two fellowships in the college – was in fact one of my earliest students at the College. My first interests were in geometry and topology, but whilst being the Outreach Officer I broadened my interests so as to represent the Department as widely as possible and now teach across much of mathematics. A lot of my work has focused on the transition from school/college to higher education and I used to run a bridging course for new mathematics students who had not taken Further Mathematics A-level. For over twenty years I have been involved with Sutton Trust summer schools, UNIQ summer schools and more recently Opportunity Oxford.

Dr Earl’s research interests were originally in geometry and topology but, during his time as the admissions co-ordinator and schools liaison officer in the department, his teaching interests have broadened and he now promotes mathematics at access events across a wide range of topics.

• Towards Higher Mathematics (CUP, 2017)
• Topology: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2019)
• Concise Oxford Dictionary in Mathematics 6ed (OUP, 2021)
• Mathematical Analysis: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2023)

I read law as an undergraduate at Cambridge, before moving to Oxford for postgraduate study. I was brought up just outside York, where I attended my local comprehensive school. Though I worried that the surroundings would be too alien, and the courses too difficult, my student years – in both Cambridge and Oxford – were some of the best of my life. I made great friends, learnt a tremendous amount and fell in love with my subject. I strongly believe that Oxford needs more students from a wide range of different backgrounds. If you’re intellectually curious and hard working, I urge you to apply for a place. Our Admissions Office will happily answer any questions you may have.

At Worcester I teach Criminal Law and Jurisprudence to undergraduate students. I teach Jurisprudence and Political Theory, and Philosophical Foundations of the Common Law, to graduate students on the BCL/MJur.

I’m interested in legal, moral and political philosophy, with a particular interest in the philosophical foundations of the criminal law.

I am a Departmental Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. I teach a variety of courses related to Moral and Political Philosophy. My research primarily concerns questions related to equality and freedom of expression.

Much of my research concerns equality and agency. In that vein a part of my work involves exploring and defending a form of egalitarianism which judges all inequalities in some respect unfair unless they are appropriately related to the choices persons make. Some of this has consisted in reflecting on the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold persons responsible for their choices; more specifically, asking when the responsible choices persons make justify their being worse off than others. Another closely related part of my work involves considering different ways of conceptualising the value of equality and exploring how they related to one another.
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My most recent research concerns freedom of expression. I am especially interested in the ways in which freedom of expression can be threatened by sources other than state regulation. At present I am developing an account of the freedom-restricting effects of social penalties on expression. Part of this involves thinking about the responsibilities we may have to refrain from imposing expression-related social penalties and countering the impact they can have on freedom of expression.

View all publications on Gideon’s personal website

I am a condensed matter theorist working on low dimensional quantum many-body systems. I also have long-standing interests in quantum integrable models and classical driven diffusive systems. I have co-authored a monograph on the exact solution of the one dimensional Hubbard model. Some of my current research interests are non-equilibrium evolution in quantum many-body systems, finite-temperature dynamical response in integrable models and stochastic quantum dynamics.

I was an elected member of the Council of Oxford University from 2018 to 2022 and chaired the University USS pensions working group from 2019-2022.

View all publications on the Department of Physics website

Image credit: ChancellorsPO (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Peta Fowler is Worcester’s Fellow Lecturer in Latin.

Dr Polytimi Frangou is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Stagg Group at the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit and collaborating with the Tan Group. Polytimi’s fellowship looks at the neurochemical origins and oscillatory signatures of abnormal visual processing and visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease. She uses magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), pharmacological interventions, non-invasive brain stimulation, magnetoencephalography (MEG) and intracranial recordings.

Polytimi studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (2012), before completing her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience with Zoe Kourtzi at the University of Cambridge (2018). Her doctoral work looked at the role of neurotransmitter GABA in visual plasticity during training, using multi-modal brain imaging (MRS, fMRI) and transcranial direct current stimulation.

I am Professor of Global History and have been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester since 2000. I have been Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research since it was founded in 2010. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Anthropological Institute. I am also President of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs.

I mainly teach Master’s students on the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies or Global and Imperial History Courses. Current and recent DPhil students include those working on frontier lands in late antiquity; on chronicles of Salerno; and on European colonisations of the Maldives. For undergraduate courses, I teach the Crusades Further Subject, Justinian and Muhammad, Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus and his world, and General History 4.

I work on the histories of exchange, with a primary focus on the peoples, cultures and geographies of Russia/Ukraine, Central and South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and China in the past and present. I am interested in the histories of religions, literatures and linguistics, trade, technology and infrastructure, colonisations and identities. I work too on the histories of disease as well as on those of the natural world, including climatic change.

My main publications are The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012); The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015); The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018); The Silk Roads: An Illustrated Edition (2018); The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023). I also translated The Alexiad of Anna Komene for Penguin Classics (2008). I have published almost fifty academic papers, ranging from Byzantine literature to the Belt and Road initiative, to the point and purposes of global history.

Dr Neli Frost received a dual Bachelor degree in Law and in East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University Magna Cum Laude; graduated from her LLM degree at Tel Aviv University as a Valedictorian; was then awarded her doctoral degree in April 2022 from the University of Cambridge; followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in the highly competitive Hauser Global Fellows Program at NYU School of Law. Her research plan for the Massada JRF traverses the fields of public and international law with a strong thematic focus on the intersections between law and technology, employing legal and political theory to critically examine how novel technologies challenge democratic principles and long-standing international legal dogmas such as the public-private divide.

I am a scholar of the political, religious and intellectual life of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England. My first monograph explored the interface between politics and ideas in sixteenth-century England by examining the impact of the career of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex on late Elizabethan political culture. My current research is centred on the relationship between the religious and constitutional history of the Reformation in the British Isles: I am writing a history of Parliament and the Reformation in sixteenth century England and Wales, and various articles on the relationship of church and state in the sixteenth century.

My research also focuses on early modern historiography and historical thought, and I am engaged in a series of studies of William Camden’s Annals of the Reign of Elizabeth I, the first history of Queen Elizabeth, which continues to shape the narrative of the Queen’s reign to this day. With Henry Woudhuysen, I am editing the letters of the poet and statesman Fulke Greville for the forthcoming edition of Greville’s Complete Works for OUP.

I am currently working on two main projects: the first addresses ideas about the antiquity and authority of Parliament as expressed in polemical debates about the legitimacy of the Protestant Church; the second is a study of travel and the political education of English gentlemen in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. I am also interested in ideas of statecraft and reason of state in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website