The College Record 2022

NEWS FROM THE FELLOWSHIP
Links to full lists of Fellows’ publications can be found on their profile pages on the
College’s website.
Josu Aurrekoetxea (Physics)
In my first year as Beecroft and extraordinary Junior
Research Fellow, I have been pioneering the use of
numerical techniques to explore Einstein’s theory of general
relativity in regimes where the gravitational force is strong:
at early times in the universe’s history and near black holes.
We have computed the observable signatures expected
from theories that go beyond the current standard model of
cosmology and aim to explain the exotic forms of matter and energy that we usually
refer to as “dark”. Our work has set the groundwork for the (very exciting) upcoming
academic year, when gravitational-wave detectors are restarting after an upgrade
in sensitivity, and we thus expect to detect many more black hole collisions and
hopefully, some signals that cannot be explained without the use of new physics,
going beyond our current understanding of the universe.
Reports and College Activities
This year I have also had the pleasure to engage in the vibrant College life, teaching
special and general relativity tutorials to third-year physics students, as well as taking
part as a panellist in one of the Queen’s College Symposium discussions.
Rebecca Beasley (English)
With two terms of research leave, I’ve been able to
undertake substantial work on two books I began
last year: a co-edited anthology of modernist art and
literature by the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ and their
circle (Whitechapel Moderns: An Anthology of Modernist
Culture in London’s Jewish East End, forthcoming from
Edinburgh University Press), and a scholarly edition
of Wyndham Lewis’s Men Without Art for the Oxford University Press edition of
Lewis’s writings. I was awarded British Academy funding for the latter project,
which enabled me to visit the archives of Lewis’s papers held at Buffalo and Cornell
in the spring. Earlier in the year, I spent some time in the research collections at
New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, where I was looking at
the papers of influential ornithologists for my long-range project on ornithology in
modern literature and culture. On my return from research leave in Trinity, I began
work on two collaborative projects funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the
College Record 2022 | The Queen’s College 13