Our people

I joined Oxford in 2006, having spent 13 years at the University of Dundee where I held a personal chair in British history.

My research interests are quite diverse, but focus on the political, cultural and social history of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. My early work was on the rise of the newspaper press and the relationships between print culture and politics. This led me to a broader interest in the political culture of the British Isles in the central decades of the eighteenth century. My published work on these themes includes the books Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France 1600-1800 (1996) and Politics and the Nation: Britain in the mid eighteenth century (2002). Whilst in Scotland, I developed a keen interest in Scottish history, notably the impact of the French revolution on Scottish politics and society, and on British political economy in the eighteenth century. My work on this includes the book The Scottish People and the French Revolution (2008). More recently, I have been interested in the growth and development of provincial Scottish towns in the later Georgian period, and the impact and diffusion of enlightenment culture and values. In 2014 the results of this work were published in The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1740-1820, which won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year prize for 2014.  My most recent book is a thematic biography of the radical aristocrat, Lord Daer entitled A Tale of Three Cities: The Life and Times of Lord Daer, 1763-1794 (2015). I am now working on a project on gambling and attitudes towards risk in Britain and the British empire between c.1660 and 1850.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website

Elizabeth is currently PhD student working in biomedical engineering, with a focus on using generative design and ML methods to optimise computational models. She graduated the Oxford MMath in 2021 and joined the Oxford CDT in Sustainable Approaches to Biomedical Sciences.

Elizabeth tutors first-year mathematics courses in geometry, dynamics, analysis and constructive mathematics.

I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, and Linguistics Organising Tutor at Worcester College.

My research interests include language documentation and description; Austronesian linguistics; syntactic typology and information structure. I am currently working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Enggano in the Austronesian family: Historical and typological perspectives’. The project aims to document and describe the Enggano language, spoken by roughly 1,500 speakers on Enggano Island off the South Coast of Sumatra. It will result in a collection of audio & video recordings of Enggano, a descriptive grammar of the language, historical and typological comparison with other Austronesian languages, and literacy materials for the Enggano community.

My previous research focused on the languages of Northern Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. From 2016-2019, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford, researching ‘Information Structure in the Languages of Northern Sarawak’. The project combined documentation of three languages, Kelabit, Lun Bawang and Sa’ban, with analysis of the role that information structure plays in determining syntactic choices. This built on PhD research into the Kelabit language, which sought to establish parameters of variation within Western Austronesian and the implications that these have for ongoing theoretical and historical debates.

I grew up in Kent, and after attending the local state grammar school I read English at Oxford, where I took my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I have taught at Oxford since 1999, and have also worked at the universities of Reading and Southampton.

I teach English literature from the early medieval period up to the sixteenth century. I also teach the history, theory and use of the English language.

My principal research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and sixteenth-century love lyric, and poetics, with an emphasis on how form precedes and generates meaning. I am interested in interrogating the agendas which drive the taxonomy of poetic form, and in challenging the division still made between medieval and early modern literature.

I have recently completed a book on the role of rhyme in late medieval and early Renaissance love lyric. This book, Rhyme and the Construction of Love in English Lyric 1300-1579, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. It shows that decorum in the choice of vocabulary, combined with the limited rhyme resources of English, render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable, particularly in complex poetic forms demanding large rhyme-groups. As a result, the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme comes to generate features of the experience of love in poetry, and the impression of subjectivity in love lyric is a side-effect of the necessities of rhyme.

I am currently working on a new book about anthologies of ‘English verse’ and the fantasies of England they project. This picks up my longstanding interests in poetry anthologies and the agendas which drive the critical framing of texts.

View all publications on the Faculty of English website

As Finance & Estates Bursar, Mike Huggins has overall responsibility for the College’s finances, endowment, estate, information technology, HR, legal and compliance, risk management and domestic operations. Mike qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1988 and was an Audit partner specialising in charities for twenty-one years. He then became the CFO of a national accounting firm and is the Treasurer, and a Trustee, of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

His PA is Emily Sahadeva (emily.sahadeva@worc.ox.ac.uk 01865 278330).

Katie obtained a BSc in Biomedical Science from Sheffield University in 2009 and an MB BCh from Cardiff University in 2013. Upon completion of her Foundation Doctor at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, Katie then was employed as an Academic Clinical Fellow on a three-year academic programme where she managed to complete her Basic Surgical Training one year ahead of schedule.

Currently undertaking her DPhil at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences and a member of Wolfson College, Katie is working towards the crucial understanding of biomarkers within the plaques of peripheral vascular disease.

Katie already has over 30 publications in journals which include those with the highest impact factors in her field. After having won numerous prizes including the Glaxo Fellowship Prize (2016), Oxford University Surgical Tutor of Year (2015, 2016 and 2018), the Sol Cohen Prize of the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland (2015, 2017 and 2018), and the Professor JR Silbert Prize of the Welsh Paediatric Society (2014).

View all publications on the NDS website

Thomas Hyde is a composer and academic. He has taught at City University and held a junior fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music. He combines his role at Worcester College with a lectureship in music at King’s College, London. In 2017 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and in 2023 was appointed a vice-President of the Presteigne Festival. He is chair of the Lucille Graham Trust, a small charity supporting education music projects in the London area.

Dr Hyde teaches analysis, techniques of composition, original composition across all three years of the undergraduate music course. He also tutors on various optional history topics and dissertations relating to British musical modernism.

Thomas Hyde is a composer with a wide number of commissioned works produced over the last twenty years. Recent pieces have included a Symphony for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, choral music and two operas: That Man Stephen Ward (2008) and Aiding and Abetting (2019-22) for Scottish Opera. Dr Hyde also writes about music (see publications tab).

Recent selected publications:

Writings

• ‘Symphonying’, The Cambridge Companion to the British Symphony, ed. Nicholas Jones (forthcoming)
• Stephen Dodgson: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Oliver Chandler & Thomas Hyde, de la Porte Publishing (forthcoming)
• ‘Derek Bourgeois (1941-2017)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2021
• ‘Michael Tippett: The Biography; The Pre-History of ‘The Midsummer Marriage’, Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, Vol 17(2), 2020
• ‘William Mathias: The Student, Real and Imagined’, British Music, Vol.39/40, 2018
• David Matthews: Essays, Tributes and Criticism, ed. Thomas Hyde, Plumbago Books, 2014

Recordings

• Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Geoffrey Paterson (Resonus, 2021)
• Sweet was the Song, ORA, Suzi Digby (Harmonia Mundi, 2018)
• That Man Stephen Ward, Damien Thantrey, Nova Music Opera, George Vass (Resonus, 2017)

After attending King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny, which became a comprehensive when he was in the third form, David went on to read Law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He undertook postgraduate studies in Socio-Legal studies at Wolfson College, Oxford, before qualifying as a solicitor. He was a partner in Pinsent Masons LLP for many years, where he held a number of senior positions. During his career he specialised in advising clients on contract law matters and acted for HM Government and many other FTSE 100 and 250 companies.

Throughout his career David has also been involved in many other activities in the arts, human rights and education. He is the former Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Chair of Stonewall and Chair of Modern Art Oxford. He was also a director of the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, the Human Dignity Trust, the Big Lottery and 14-18 NOW. He is the current Chair of Governors at University of the Arts London and Chair of the Henry Moore Foundation.

David is a passionate supporter of the visual arts, as well as a keen mountain walker, swimmer, gardener, cook and beekeeper.