The Queen's College Record 2020

In January I gave a plenary outreach talk at the ‘It all adds up’ conference at the
Mathematical Institute in Oxford: an event for 250 school girls, which aims to
encourage their mathematical interests. More recently, many conferences and visits
were cancelled but I gave virtual seminar talks at the Chennai Mathematical Institute
and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, as well as a
colloquium talk at the University of Amsterdam.
Macs Smith (French)
Reports and College Activities
In December I signed a contract with MIT Press for my
first book, Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and
Politics in the Media City, which will be published in May,
2021. That was an extremely exciting milestone. One
of the central themes of the book is how public health
and sanitation intersect with hospitality; I completed the
manuscript at my partner’s family home at the height
of the lockdown in April, and it was an uncanny feeling
to send the book off to the editor in those circumstances. This year also saw the
publication in Modern Language Notes of an article I wrote on the obscure French
poet-philosopher, Jules Romains. This summer I’ll start work in earnest on a book
chapter discussing representations of Dante Alighieri in Italian street art and graffiti.
That will be published in an edited volume of scholarship on Dante in contemporary
society celebrating the poet’s 700 th birthday. This was my second year as the Hamilton
Junior Research Fellow and, it turns out, my last, as I’ve been appointed to a Career
Development Fellowship in French at Queen’s and will be taking on new teaching
duties in Michaelmas. I had my first opportunity to teach Queen’s students this year
and I’m looking forward to doing much more of it.
Robert Taylor (Physics)
I have been working on two major projects this year.
The first related to the way nanostructures couple to
each other and to optical cavities based on InGaAs
quantum dots, and GaAs coupled quantum dots.
The second involves the emission properties of
nanostructures based on perovskite materials, where we
have measured lasing and stimulated emission in these
systems. This work will continue in the coming year. I
published seven research articles in various journals. I was also Chair of Physics Finals
this year, which proved somewhat challenging given the coronavirus epidemic!
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 27