The heart of the Oxford Summer Seminar is the teaching and learning involved in small classes led by the Seminar's distinguished staff. The following brief biographies provide some indication of the outstanding academic or artistic achievements of the Seminar's faculty.
Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley completed her first degrees at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied British, American, and European literatures. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Mysore University, India, where she wrote a dissertation on Sylvia Plath. Now a lecturer in modern literature at Balliol College, Oxford, she has also been a tutor in English at Wadham College.
Andrew Beaumont
Andrew Beaumont is currently Domestic Bursar of Hertford College, Oxford. He completed a doctoral thesis at Lincoln College on British colonial administrators in pre-revolutionary North America, in which he examined crown and proprietary governors in the mainland colonies from the late 1740s to the mid 1760s. In his research he has continued to explore the role of the Board of Trade in forming imperial policy and the pressures incumbent on individual governors when asserting the crown's prerogative there.
Helena Chance
Helena Chance is a graduate of the Universities of Reading and Oxford and a lecturer in European art, architecture, and design history at Stanford University in Oxford, the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, and Buckinghamshire University. Her doctoral thesis, which she wrote at Kellogg College, Oxford, examines the industrial support for green space in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research considers the relationship of buildings to landscape in the making of place, and the potential for designed landscapes to enhance the quality of life and to shape a corporate identity.
Richard Coggins
Currently a lecturer at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Richard Coggins has taught not only at several other Oxford colleges but has also been a research associate at the University of Zimbabwe. His prime fields of interest are British political history in the era of decolonisation, especially the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) Democratization, failed democratic transitions in Africa, and the influence of external mediators, and non-governmental actors, on democratic transition
Valentine Cunningham
A Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Valentine Cunningham, M.A., D. Phil., is also University Professor of English at Oxford. He is the author of Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975); The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. (1980); Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War, ed. (1986); British Writers of the Thirties (1988); In the Reading Gaol: Texts, Postmodernity and History (1994); and Adam Bede, ed. (1996). He reviews widely in British and American periodicals, and broadcasts frequently for BBC Radio on literary and cultural topics.
Elizabeth Ferguson
Elizabeth Ferguson wrote her doctoral thesis at Christ Church, Oxford.
Ralph Hanna
A Fellow of Keble College and University Professor of Paleography, Ralph Hanna holds degrees from Amherst College and Oxford and Yale universities. His recent publications include Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (1996), an edition of Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves, (1997), "Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England," in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (1996), and "Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, ca. 1390-1440," in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (1996).
Simon Horobin
Simon Horobin is University Lecturer in Medieval English Language and Tutorial Fellow in Medieval English, Magdalen College Oxford. He has published widely on the history of English, with a particular focus on the medieval period. His publications include Introduction to Middle English (2002), The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (2003) and Chaucer’s Language (2006).
Tom MacFaul
Tom MacFaul is Fellow and Departmental Lecturer at Merton College, University of Oxford, where he teaches English literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism. His books include Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2007), Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England (2010), and a forthcoming study of fathers in Renaissance drama. He completed his BA at Cambridge University, and his doctorate at Oxford University.
Clare Morgan
Clare Morgan gained her M.Phil. in twentieth-century English literature from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, before taking an M.A. in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She then completed her D.Phil. at Oxford with a thesis on post-World War II literature and art. Currently director of Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing and a fellow of Kellogg College, her most recent academic publication is What Poetry Brings to Business (University of Michigan Press 2010), while her new novel, A Book for All and None, will be published in June 2011 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
Martins Paparinskis
Martins Paparinskis, LLB (University of Latvia), MJur (Dist, Clifford Chance Prize), MPhil (Dist), DPhil, MA (Oxon), is a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. He was recently a Hauser Research Scholar at the New York University (2009-2010), and before that tutored as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Oxford. Martins has varied research interests in the field of general international law. His recent and forthcoming publications mainly address the place of investment protection law and international economic law in the international legal order, including in the International Minimum Standard and Fair and Equitable Treatment (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012).
Sarah Poynting
Sarah Poynting earned double first honours in English and Drama for her B.A. at London University and earned her M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in English from Oxford. Her edition of Walter Montague's The Shepherds Paradise was published by the Malone Society in 1997. She has held a lectureship at Lady Margaret Hall, where she taught Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and has also taught at Mansfield and Wadham colleges. She is currently a Research Fellow at Keele University.
Robert Wainwright
Robert Wainwright wrote his doctoral thesis at Christ Church, Oxford.
Madeleine Wood
Madeleine Wood is a Sessional lecturer at the University of Warwick, and a member of the Oxford Department of Continuing Education tutor panel. Her publications include a chapter entitled ‘Enclosing Fantasies: Jane Eyre’ in an important new volume, Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” After 30 Years (ed. Annette Federico, 2009, University of Missouri Press); a collection of essays reassessing Gilbert and Gubar’s study in the context of third-wave feminism. Her research interests include nineteenth-century and Modernist fiction; the novel; comparative literature; women and gender; and psychoanalysis and critical theory.
SEMINAR STAFF
Brian W. Ogilvie – Seminar Director
Brian Ogilvie, Associate Professor of History, received a Ph.D. and M.A. in History, and a B.A. in History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine, from the University of Chicago. He teaches courses on intellectual history, religious history, and the history of science and technology. His research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of science and scholarship from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He has published articles and chapters in several journals and books. His book The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press) was published in 2006.
Jennifer N. Heuer – Associate Director
Jennifer Heuer, Associate Professor of History, received a Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. in History from the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Family and The Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2005). She has published articles on topics including the role of clothing as a symbol of competing visions of national identity and a ban on interracial marriages in early nineteenth-century France. She is currently working on a book on love and war in the age of Napoleon.
Jenny Adams - Past Director
Jenny Adams, Associate Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is the Past Director of the Oxford Summer Seminar. During the 2011-12 academic year, she is handling the Amherst side of Seminar recruiting and administration.
Alexandra Foley – Junior Dean
Alexandra Foley is an English major at UMass Amherst. Alex attended the Oxford Summer Seminar in 2010.
