Our Newest Fellows

Michael Angerer

I joined Clare in October 2025 as the Newby Trust Junior Research Fellow. Having grown up in Austria, I came to the UK for a BA in English and French at Oriel College, Oxford, as part of which I spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. I then stayed at Oxford for an MSt in English at St Hilda’s College and a DPhil in English at Corpus Christi College, where I also taught linguistics and medieval literature as a College Lecturer in English.

I am a literary historian and translation theorist, and I work on medieval English literature and its place in the multilingual literary landscape around the North Sea. My research combines approaches from literary history, translation theory, and manuscript studies to explore how literary traditions were shaped by cross-language interactions. I have also published more widely on the comparative medieval literature of Northwestern Europe. Accordingly, I work across Old and Middle English, Latin, Old French, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old and Middle Dutch and Middle High German.

At Clare, I am working towards a new literary history of the medieval North Sea. By moving beyond national approaches to literature, this project will focus on the role of cultural exchange in shaping literary history. Additionally, I am a coordinator for the Pillar ‘Humans and Their Literatures’ of the Global Humanities Initiative at MIT.

Clare has been especially warm and welcoming, and I am excited to join its exceptional scholarly community.

Eleanor Bladon

I joined Clare as the Pathway to Independence Fellow in Ecology and Conservation Biology in October 2025. I was previously a postdoc in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge, having completed both my MPhil and PhD there too.

I am an evolutionary and behavioural ecologist and my work focuses mostly on insects. I investigate how environmental change affects insects' social behaviour, and how their social behaviour can adapt and evolve to ameliorate the effects of environmental change. The behaviours that particularly interest me are parental care, sibling interactions, and antagonistic interactions between unrelated members of the same species. Insects are brilliant for studying these kinds of questions because not only do they show a range of fascinating social behaviours, they are also vital to the health of our ecosystems but vulnerable to environmental change.

I am also passionate about using science communication and outreach to share my and others’ research with the wider world, through radio, writing, public speaking, and leading sessions for school students. Clare is particularly strong on outreach and widening participation, and I’m excited to get more involved in these programmes as a Fellow.

Another way that I enjoy sharing my love of ecology, evolution and conservation is through teaching. I’m excited to continue this by getting stuck in with undergraduate teaching at Clare.

Erin Nelson

I joined Clare this autumn after leading international advancement for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (US). It’s especially exciting to be joining Clare as we approach the 700th anniversary.

I was born and raised in the “Buckeye State” of Ohio. But I’ve lived in various places (Japan for 10 years, Israel for two years, and in the US, I’ve lived in Virginia, Washington DC, Indiana, Maine, and most recently, Florida). It has been a longtime goal to work in Cambridge (my husband is a Selwyn alum, stepdaughter is a Newnham alumna) and I feel very fortunate to have been welcomed to Clare!

My BA and MA degrees were in East Asian Languages and Literatures (Japanese) from Washington and Lee University and Ohio State University respectively. My first career was as a Japanese linguist with the US federal government. I later made the shift to higher education and my first role in development was Director of Parent Giving at Bates College in Maine, USA. I find development incredibly rewarding because it enables me to be part of alumni and donors’ journeys with an institution (in this case, Clare!) over the course of many years.

In my free time, I enjoy traveling with my husband, spending time with family and friends both in the UK and US, walking or riding a bike, classical music, and visiting museums.

I look forward to meeting many members of the Clare community in the days and months ahead and working together as we embark on an exciting chapter in the College’s history.

Conner Wood

I’ve just arrived at Clare for a three-year Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Classics, moving a few doors down the road after finishing my PhD at Trinity College. My work concerns how ancient Greek readers interpret and teach poetry. The Greeks held to a fairly rigid canon of texts that meant the most to them across the centuries, but new audiences brought new values, assumptions, and methods of interpretation. My doctoral thesis at Cambridge examined how the poet Hesiod, almost always seen as the ‘other’ epic poet after Homer, was read in different ways across 800 years. Building on this, my fellowship work here at Clare will focus on late antiquity (roughly the third through sixth centuries AD) but broaden out to a comparative history of poetic exegesis between Greek pagans and Christians.

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia but have lived in the UK for five years, between a master’s course at Oxford and the PhD in Cambridge, and I hope to stay permanently. Having been a schoolteacher before leaving the U.S., I’m excited to run seminars for the Classics Faculty on the Odyssey this term and to supervise for Clare later in the year. My undergraduate education was at Yale University, where I took a BA and MA in classics, chaired a debating society, and sang Slavic and Georgian a cappella. At Trinity I learned to cox rowing boats, and I have already begun coxing and coaching for the Clare Boat Club, who look set to have a great year. I’m delighted to be staying in Cambridge among friends but joining a new community at Clare, which has welcomed me with open arms.

Yu Zhang

I joined the Department of Architecture as an Assistant Professor in December 2024 and became a Fellow of Clare College in 2025. My research explores how digital technologies can help us design and build more sustainable and regenerative structures.

I’m fascinated by how architecture, engineering, and computation come together to shape the built environment. My work looks at sustainability from multiple angles — ecological, economic, and social — across the whole life cycle of a structure. Ultimately, I aim to develop design approaches that enable creative, high-performing, and responsible structures, supporting a more sustainable future for the building industry.

Before coming to Cambridge, I was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, where I focused on fabrication-aware design and optimization for discrete architectural assemblies. I also worked on an industrial project developing low-cost, sustainable compressed earth block dwellings for refugee camps in Africa — an experience that deeply influenced how I think about the social impact of design.

I hold a master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT, where I specialised in structural optimization, and a PhD from ETH Zurich, completed in 2023, where my research explored digital and sustainable construction methods in low-resource settings.

Through my work, I hope to bring together innovative technologies and creative design thinking to help move the construction sector — in the UK and beyond — towards a net-zero future.