Fellows and Academics

Farhana Yamin grew up in London and came to Somerville in 1983 to study PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). After graduation, Yamin qualified as a solicitor and worked as an environmental lawyer, becoming a climate change and development policy expert. In 2001, she helped to deliver the Marrakech Accords, the international rules needed to complete the Kyoto Protocol and she has been advising leaders and countries on climate change and development policy for 30 years.

Yamin has taught in UK universities since 1995, including as a Visiting Professor at University College London. She stepped back from the world of academia and UN negotiations in 2018 to focus on non-violent civil disobedience and social justice movements challenging capitalism. As a Political Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion for a year, Yamin played a key role in the XR April 2019 protests, gluing herself to the Shell HQ offices in London, alongside thousands of other activists. She is a champion of community-based action and co-founded Camden Think & Do, where she is experimenting with radical inclusion & concepts of spatial justice by supporting communities create pop-up action hubs in high streets and public spaces. She also sits as an expert on various Commissions including Camden Renewal Commission and IPPR’s Commission on Environmental Justice.

Farhana serves as trustee or adviser to a number of organisations working on the intersection of social, racial and ecological justice, including Greenpeace UK, WWF-UK and Julie’s Bicycle, an organisation working to support artists and the cultural sector in tackling climate and sustainability. Yamin is currently a Senior Associate at the UK think thank company Systemiq and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College in 2022.

Did you know? Farhana first broke the law in the name of climate justice in 2019, when she glued herself to the ground outside the Shell headquarters in London. Her protest formed a central part of the 2021 film Rebellion, which relates the inside story of XR from grassroots activism to international impact. 

I am a DPhil student in the Faculty of Law. My research explores the intersections between intellectual property, medical AI, data protection, and ethics. I grew up in Wales and in my spare time I enjoy playing tennis, puzzling, and watching TV (mostly Dragon’s Den and Made in Chelsea). As IT Officer, I’ll be helping to set up and maintain the MCR website, making it a useful resource for everyone in the college community. If you ever spot anything on the site that needs fixing or if you have ideas for improvements, feel free to get in touch!

Professor Julia Yeomans (1973, Physics) is a British theoretical physicist active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics.

After her completing her undergraduate degree at Somerville, Professor Yeomans conducted doctoral research on critical phenomena in spin models at Wolfson College. She spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University with Michael E. Fisher, before returning to the UK as lecturer in Physics at the University of Southampton. In 1983, she moved to the University of Oxford where she became a professor in 2002.

Yeomans is a professor at the Rudolf Peierls centre for theoretical physics. Her research investigates theoretical modelling of processes in complex fluids including liquid crystals, drops on hydrophobic surfaces, microchannels, as well as bacteria. In 2012, Professor Yeomans was awarded a European Research Council advanced research grant for her research proposal Microflow in complex environments.

Professor Yeomans was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013, and in 2021 she received the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics, for her contributions to soft and active matter, statistical physics and biophysics. 

She was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville in College in April 2022. 

Jackie is Somerville’s Regular Giving and Alumni Relations Executive. She joined Somerville in 2023 from Cardiff University, where she worked in development and alumni relations following a year as President of the Student’s Union. 

As Regular Giving and Alumni Relations Executive, Jackie organises the Somerville College telethon and other exciting fundraising campaigns within the alumni community. She is also responsible for the Cedar Circle, Somerville’s new initiative to recognise those who make a regular gift to the College.

In her Alumni Relations role, Jackie leads our young alumni events, helping recent graduates and leavers stay connected to their College community.

Lucy is Somerville’s Academic Registrar.

She runs the day to day operations of the Academic Office, including the coordination of undergraduate admissions.

Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College.

Professor Zaman has two main areas of research. The first concerns Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth-century British India. Here, Prof Zaman explores the ways in which Muslim thought developed within the context of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline. Her work on this subject has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, South Asia, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. It will form the subject of her first monograph, The Young Muhammadans.

Prof Zaman’s second area of research concerns the relationship between the British left, imperialism and Islam in the twentieth century. Her first publication on this subject explored the place of sovereignty in socialist thought and appeared in Twentieth Century British History in 2022. To date, Prof Zaman’s work has also engaged with heritage and imperial visual culture, memory and nostalgia, travel and internationalism, and Muslim historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has written for a wider audience via the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, the Fabian Review, and History Today.

Prof Zaman is broadly interested in supervising research projects that develop our understanding of Britain and its relationship to the wider world since 1750, particularly concerning the history of ideas.

Research Interests

• Political and intellectual history in global and imperial contexts
• The role of religion in the history of ideas
• The development of concepts around history and temporality
• Pan-Islamism and socialist internationalism

Academic Biography:

2015-2018 Dorothy and Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Chicago

2010-2014 PhD in History, University of Cambridge

2009-2010 MPhil in Historical Studies, University of Cambridge

2006-2009 BA in History, University of Cambridge

I am a postdoctoral research assistant at the theoretical physics department of the University of Oxford. I work in the field of theoretical particle physics, the aim of which is understanding the final fundamental law of nature. In particular, my research is focussed on precision phenomenology for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

I am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). At Somerville College, I teach French Language, Translation, Orals and Essay.

I have been teaching French ‘language cafés’ and French ‘research-based language tutorials’ at the University of Birmingham since 2020. I have also been an English academic language tutor at AWAS (Academic Writing Advisory Service) for the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham since 2021. 

Research

My research interests revolve around colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa and the literary productions that emanate from these encounters. My PhD in French and Francophone Studies reads Algerian identity from the prism of the Sahara. It posits the Sahara Desert as an accurate analytical prism through which we can understand complex paradigms related to cultural identities in Algeria, and North Africa in general. I am interested in researching how colonial encounters in spaces like the Sahara shape and make visible, but also invisible different memories, histories and identities. More broadly, I am interested in 20^th and 21^st-century French and Algerian literatures, and I am currently researching the imprint of imperial legacies on postcolonial societies and how the latter resist but also perpetuate the colonial tropes in literary writing.

Rocco is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics and at the Oxford Martin School.

He completed his DPhil at the Oxford Department of International Development. His research focuses on social protection and labour markets. In his current work, he is using experimental and quasi-experimental methods to study the potential to leverage innovations in the design and delivery of social protection systems to increase household resilience to poverty in the context of extreme climate events such as floods and droughts. In the past, he has researched labour markets, inequality, poverty alleviation, poverty dynamics, and social stratification, using a variety of methods, including longitudinal surveys, field experiments, qualitative studies, and behavioural lab experiments.