College Record 2019

INTRODUCTION
specialist in Migration, and John Lowe will be
Jim Benson’s successor in Sanskrit.
We have said farewell to some well-known
staff, among them Karl Davies, Angela Jones,
Margit Kail, John Kirby, Victor Martinez,
Darren McMahon, Juliet Montgomery, Louise
Gordon and Jan Scriven. And we have
welcomed several new faces in their place,
who are now active around the College.
Achievements by Fellows,
students and staff
May I pay tribute to the outstanding
academic work of our Fellows.
Matthew Rushworth became a Fellow
of the Royal Society; Elleke Boehmer a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and recipient of a British Academy Senior
Research Fellowship for 2020. Matt Costa
was made an NIHR Senior Investigator.
Frances Gardner won the Vice-Chancellor’s
Innovation Award for ‘Parenting for Life Long
Health’. Bettina Lange has benefited from a
UNISA award to travel to South Africa next
spring to discuss her research on governing
water scarcity; Jonathan Pila gave the
Hermann Weyl Lecture at Princeton; Ruben
Andersson was one of several Fellows to
publish this year – his book was ‘No Go
World; how fear is redrawing our maps
and infecting our politics.’ Huw David, our
Development Director, published his first
book, ‘Trade, Politics and Revolution: South
Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce’,
and we look to him to continue the flow
of funds from the USA towards this part of
the world. I should also mention the former
Head Gardener and Chair of the Grounds
Committee, Walter Sawyer, who this year
was awarded an Honorary MA by the
University.
There have this year been building works
which have changed the face of the College.
The most important is the new Buttery,
which has created a remarkable spacious
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and light-filled environment. Do please visit if
you haven’t yet. And we will also soon have
a new Family Room for parents and children
– especially important for those who live
off-site and have families. This time last week
we had our first, and very successful, formal
dinner in Hall which included children.
Tony and his kitchen staff have continued
to offer us remarkable gastronomic events
this year. I would mention in particular
the Thai guest night, in collaboration with
former Graduate Student and Master Chef
finalist Nawamin Pinpathomrat; the Japanese
Washoku dinner with chef Hayashi; and
the Chinese New Year dinner, complete
with fortune cookies. I was also pleased
to see that the College organised an iftar
dinner in June, especially for those students
fasting during Ramadan. And the Tibetan and
Himalayan cluster had about 400 people
attend their Tibetan New Year event in
February.
Our students have as always been very
impressive this year. As of May we had
621 students here at Wolfson, born in 79
different countries, 41 of them on Wolfson
scholarships, active across all the divisions
of the University. So let me turn to the
intellectual life of the College.
Intellectual life of college, including
lectures, seminars, cluster work
It’s often said in Oxford that the problem
isn’t finding the speakers, it’s finding the
audiences. We have done extremely well
this year in finding both, at very different
scales. On the more modest end, I would
point to the President’s Seminar in Trinity
Term, where Matthew Rushworth spoke
about how the brain takes decisions; Junior
Research Fellow Naoya Iwata spoke about
ideas of willpower in Plato and Socrates;
and Graduate Student Alexis Toumi spoke
about how laziness can create efficiency
in machine learning. There have been too
COLLEGE RECORD 2019