Ambrose College

A full member of Woolf, a Higher Education Institution in Europe.

Ambrose College provides students with an education in the tutorial tradition. The College's tutors come from some of the world's best institutions. Faculty at Ambrose are drawn from universities with a tradition of tutorial teaching, especially Oxford and Cambridge, among others.

Degrees

Postgraduate Certificate in Mediterranean and European Studies

Postgraduate Certificate in Mediterranean and European Studies

Postgraduate Diploma in Mediterranean and European Studies

Postgraduate Diploma in Mediterranean and European Studies

Master of Arts in Mediterranean and European Studies

Master of Arts in Mediterranean and European Studies

Dean

Joshua Broggi

I am an academic and the founder of Woolf. Previously, at Oxford, I was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, a member of Wolfson College, and a member of the governing Congregation of the University. I also held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Institut für Philosophie, HU Berlin, during which I worked on the definition and measure of human progress. I was especially interested in how modern universities were created to support progress.

Academic board members

Georgiana Hedesan

Tutor, Ambrose College



I am a postdoctoral associate of University of Oxford, in the History Faculty and a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities there. My current research is at the crossroads between history of medicine, history of alchemy and chemistry, and history of technology. At Oxford I have been lecturing and tutoring in the Art and Nature in the Renaissance and Scientific Movements of the 17th Century undergraduate courses. I have previously taught in the distance course MA in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter. I published a monograph entitled An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) (London: Routledge, 2016). I have a keen interest in Digital Humanities and IT applied to the Education sector, and have most recently been editor of the Cabinet online learning platform at University of Oxford.



University of Oxford

Courtney Nimura

Tutor, Ambrose College



Research Interests:

Later prehistoric rock art and portable art in Europe; Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology in Northern and Northwestern Europe; coastal and intertidal archaeology; human responses to environmental change.



I am currently a Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I manage the Celtic Coin Index Digital project and also run fieldwork on rock art sites in Sweden. I am also the Assistant Editor of Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Previously I was a Research Fellow at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit at Griffith University (Australia) on the Australian Research Council Laureate project: Australian Rock Art History, Conservation and Indigenous Wellbeing. Prior to that, I was a researcher on the Leverhulme-funded project European Celtic Art in Context at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College.



I completed my PhD in Archaeology at the University of Reading, for which I created a Scandinavian-wide GIS survey of prehistoric rock art and used this to discuss maritime rock art and human responses to environmental change. The monograph of this research was published in 2015 link. I have an MA Distinction in Maritime Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Prior to my settlement in the UK, I worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA) in Conservation and Collections Management. I completed my BFA (University of California, Santa Cruz) and MFA (Tufts University, SMFA) in fine art, art history and museum studies.



University of Oxford

Sarmila Bose

Sarmila is an academic, journalist and lawyer specializing in South Asia. Her interests span history, politics, public policy and law. Her current research interest is political trials in or related to India/South Asia. Sarmila received her AB in History from Bryn Mawr College, MPA and PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, Graduate Diploma in Law from the City Law School and LLM from Columbia University Law School. She is admitted to the New York bar and as a solicitor in England & Wales. Sarmila has held academic positions in the US, UK and India. At Oxford she was Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, inaugural Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the Department and Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies. She taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students at the Department of Politics and International Relations and graduate students from the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Sarmila was a political journalist in India for several years covering elections, economic reform and civil conflicts.



Harvard University

Joshua Broggi

I am an academic and the founder of Woolf. Previously, at Oxford, I was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, a member of Wolfson College, and a member of the governing Congregation of the University. I also held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Institut für Philosophie, HU Berlin, during which I worked on the definition and measure of human progress. I was especially interested in how modern universities were created to support progress.

Faculty, Instructors and Professional Experts

Steven DeLay

Biography

Steven DeLay is a writer and philosopher living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An Old Member of Christ Church, Oxford, he is the author of a number of recent books: Elijah Newman Died Today (2022), Everything (2022), Faint Not (2022), In the Spirit (2021), Before God (2020), and Phenomenology in France (2019). He is also the editor of Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick (2023) and the editor of Finding Meaning: Philosophy in Crisis (2023) based on the series of online essays, “Finding Meaning,” at 3:16 AM. He teaches in post-Kantian philosophy, with a focus in the phenomenological and existential traditions.

Martin Parnov Reichhardt

I am originally from Denmark where I did a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Biomedicine. I subsequently did my PhD at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and am currently working as a postdoc at the University of Oxford, UK. My research has focused on various aspects of immunology and microbiology, and included a multitude of approaches. These range from basic immunological techniques, to stem cell culturing, handling of human in vitro fertilised embryos, and finally protein expression, X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. I have a long and solid experience with teaching. At the University of Oxford I have lectured, taught seminars, tutorials and demonstrated in lab courses for medical students. I have furthermore planned and executed courses for PhD students in immunology at the University of Helsinki. These contributions to teaching at various universities led to me receiving a student-nominated teaching award. I am the current Chair of the international society of young researchers in the field of complement research: "Young Complement Investigators".



University of Oxford

Georgiana Hedesan

Tutor, Ambrose College



I am a postdoctoral associate of University of Oxford, in the History Faculty and a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities there. My current research is at the crossroads between history of medicine, history of alchemy and chemistry, and history of technology. At Oxford I have been lecturing and tutoring in the Art and Nature in the Renaissance and Scientific Movements of the 17th Century undergraduate courses. I have previously taught in the distance course MA in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter. I published a monograph entitled An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) (London: Routledge, 2016). I have a keen interest in Digital Humanities and IT applied to the Education sector, and have most recently been editor of the Cabinet online learning platform at University of Oxford.



University of Oxford

David Mathers

I received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford in 2016 for a thesis in the philosophy of mind, specifically on the metaphysics of perceptual consciousness. My doctoral supervisor was Prof. John Hawthorne. Since receiving my DPhil I have been a teaching assistant at the University of Stirling and have had two academics papers accepted for publication. Copies of my papers and doctoral thesis can be found at https://oxford.academia.edu/DavidMathers



University of Oxford

Lianbin Dai

Lianbin Dai is a Sinologist by training with a D. Phil degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. His area of specialization is the cultural and social history of late imperial China (1368 – 1911). His research encompasses issues of traditional Chinese knowledge culture (especially history of the Chinese humanities as a whole). He has undertaken extensive studies ranging from textual scholarship to material culture. Before relocating to Victoria, BC, Canada with his family, he has held a series of teaching and research positions in York University (Toronto, Canada), University of Alberta (Edmonton), University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Harvard University, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany), and University of Oxford. For more information, please visit his personal website.

Dr. Dai enjoys working with students interested in East Asian cultures and civilizations, particularly Chinese history, philosophy and culture by intensively reading core texts and other primary verbal and visual materials (in English and/or Chinese).

Philipp Kruger

𝑺𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒕 𝒃𝒚 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒐𝒗𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓 𝒃𝒚 𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆



I always thought being a scientist meant conducting elegant experiments and publishing the results.



University of Oxford

Kerrie Thornhill

University of Oxford

Diana Rodríguez Pérez

Tutor, Ambrose College



I am the Junior Research Fellow Mougins Museum in Classical Art and Material Culture at Wolfson College, and was previously the Research Assistant for the Beazley Archive Pottery Database at the Classical Art Research Centre.



Before moving to Oxford, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh funded by the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT). I received my PhD (Doctor Europaea) from the University of León, Spain, with the dissertation The Snake in the Ancient Greek World: Myth, Rite and Image (2010). I have an MPhil in History of Art from the University of León (2008) and an MPhil in Archaeology and Heritage from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2011).



In 2010-2011, I worked as a translator at the European Parliament in Luxemburg, and in 2008-2009 I was an Academic Visitor and DAAD Fellow at the Institut für klassische Archäologie of the University of Heidelberg. I have been a Tytus Scholar at the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Cincinnati (US) in the summer 2017.



My research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, with an emphasis on vase-painting, animal symbolism, the contextual study of Athenian pottery, and funerary customs from the Archaic to the Late Classical periods. I am most interested in the regions of Attica, Macedonia and Boeotia, and I currently work on Greek material from the Iberian Peninsula.



Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Bryan Reece

University of Chicago

Kaitlin Staudt

Visiting Assistant Professor of English. Areas of expertise: Global Modernist Literature, World Literature.

Antonia Ruppel

I am a Classicist, Indo-Europeanist and Indologist whose main practical interest is ancient-language teaching. After finishing my PhD on a topic in Indo-European syntax at the University of Cambridge, I was the Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages at Cornell University for nine years. Wanting a different challenge, I then taught those three languages at a secondary school in the UK (ages 11-18). I am currently working as a researcher on the Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax project at the University of Oxford. I am the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, and have been teaching large online Sanskrit courses based on this book and the various electronic resources I created to complement it. I am currently working on a Sanskrit Reader intended to offer those with basic Sanskrit an easy and painfree path towards reading fluency.



University of Oxford

Mike Barnkob

University of Oxford

Courtney Nimura

Tutor, Ambrose College



Research Interests:

Later prehistoric rock art and portable art in Europe; Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology in Northern and Northwestern Europe; coastal and intertidal archaeology; human responses to environmental change.



I am currently a Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I manage the Celtic Coin Index Digital project and also run fieldwork on rock art sites in Sweden. I am also the Assistant Editor of Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Previously I was a Research Fellow at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit at Griffith University (Australia) on the Australian Research Council Laureate project: Australian Rock Art History, Conservation and Indigenous Wellbeing. Prior to that, I was a researcher on the Leverhulme-funded project European Celtic Art in Context at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College.



I completed my PhD in Archaeology at the University of Reading, for which I created a Scandinavian-wide GIS survey of prehistoric rock art and used this to discuss maritime rock art and human responses to environmental change. The monograph of this research was published in 2015 link. I have an MA Distinction in Maritime Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Prior to my settlement in the UK, I worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA) in Conservation and Collections Management. I completed my BFA (University of California, Santa Cruz) and MFA (Tufts University, SMFA) in fine art, art history and museum studies.



University of Oxford

Kate Kelley

I am a specialist in early Mesopotamian and Iranian writing and culture, with a focus on advancing decipherment of the proto-cuneiform and Proto-Elamite scripts– two of the earliest writing systems in the world. My research explores how writing was used as a tool to help organize resources and labour in the early cities and towns of southern Mesopotamia and Iran, as well as exploring issues of gender and class within the workforce.



University of British Columbia

Dr L de Arrizabalaga y Prado

Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado holds a PhD from Cambridge University, England, in History, and another from Tsukuba University, Japan, in Literature. He is author of a book on Roman history: The Emperor Elagabalus, Fact or Fiction?, published by Cambridge University Press. An undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated with First Class Honours in English, and was Lector in Spanish for the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University.



Cambridge University

Sarmila Bose

Sarmila is an academic, journalist and lawyer specializing in South Asia. Her interests span history, politics, public policy and law. Her current research interest is political trials in or related to India/South Asia. Sarmila received her AB in History from Bryn Mawr College, MPA and PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, Graduate Diploma in Law from the City Law School and LLM from Columbia University Law School. She is admitted to the New York bar and as a solicitor in England & Wales. Sarmila has held academic positions in the US, UK and India. At Oxford she was Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, inaugural Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the Department and Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies. She taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students at the Department of Politics and International Relations and graduate students from the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Sarmila was a political journalist in India for several years covering elections, economic reform and civil conflicts.



Harvard University

Jonathan Duquette

I am a scholar of South Asian religions whose work concentrates primarily on the history of late medieval and early modern Sanskrit intellectual traditions in India. After completing my Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Montreal (2011), I was a postdoctoral researcher in Hamburg (2012-13), Leiden (2013-14), Kyoto (2014-15) and Oxford (2015-2019), where I researched - first as a Newton International Fellow and then as a Marie-Curie Fellow - on the history of Śivādvaita Vedānta, a poorly understood tradition of philosophical theology that rose to prominence in early modern South India. I am currently Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and an Affiliated Lecturer in Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge. Trained initially as a physicist, I also nourish an interest for the dialogue between natural sciences and religions as well as for recent developments in philosophy of science and comparative philosophy. I have published articles in Religions of South Asia, Journal of Indological Studies, Numen, Philosophy East and West and the Journal of Indian Philosophy, of which I am currently the Assistant Editor.



University of Cambridge

A. M. Shapan Adnan

I work in the broad terrain of the social sciences, interweaving political economy, sociology and politics, with a focus on South Asian Studies. My PhD is in Social and Political Sciences (SPS) from the University of Cambridge (1984, Churchill College), following a B.A. Honours with major in Economics from the School of African and Asian Studies (AFRAS), University of Sussex (1971). At the University of Oxford, I have been a Visiting Scholar (1995-96), Visiting Research Fellow (2011), and Associate of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP) (2011-18). I have taught in the South Asian Studies Programme (SASP) of the National University of Singapore (NUS) (2000-09), involving undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as PhD supervision. Earlier, I had taught at the Universities of Dhaka (1972-78) and Chittagong (1978-91). Since 2008, I have served as a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Peasant Studies. My research and publications include theoretical analysis and empirical studies based on fieldwork, as well as their application to practical issues of policy and development. The specific topics on which I have worked include agrarian structure, capitalist development, land grabs, primitive accumulation/accumulation by dispossession, peasant economy and society, village studies, resistance and mobilization, religious and ethnic conflicts, forced migration and displacement in the South Asian borderlands (e.g. the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar). My work experience extends into commissioned research and policy analysis of concrete development programmes for various national and international organizations including, most recently, research on food security and livelihoods for the UN World Food Programme (WFP).



Universities of Cambridge and Sussex

Ibon Santiago

Dr Ibon Santiago (Bilbao) received a DPhil in Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Oxford and a MSc in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the Technical University of Munich, he has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford and the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. His early experimental work at the Research Laboratory of Electronics focused on laser cooling and trapping of quantum mixtures of ultracold atoms. He later specialised in Biophysics, which is his current research focus. Ibon has taught at MIT and Oxford and has been Physics tutor at Wadham and Hertford Colleges for 3 academic years.



University of Oxford

Russell Jones

University of Oklahoma