Fellowship Registrar's Report

Five new Official Fellows have joined the College during the year. Sarah Lockwood comes from Columbia University to be a tutor and to teach in the HSPS tripos. She brings useful expertise on political protests, democratic accountability and caring for lions. Anna Berman, an expert on nineteenth-century Russian novels, has arrived from McGill to strengthen the College’s teaching resources in MML. David Ball joined the College as Bursar, for one year, after retiring as Bursar at Christ’s College. His deep knowledge of Cambridge and College finances have kept the College running smoothly over the year. Sean Hartnoll, a former Research Fellow, returns to Cambridge from Stanford University as the 1967 Professorship of Mathematical Physics. He is an expert on holographic quantum matter and will be teaching mathematics. Rosana Collepardo-Guevara, who has a joint appointment in the chemistry and the genetics departments, is a Winton Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Physics, is highly skilled at packing DNA with computers and will be teaching natural sciences.

Louis Klee and Damian Pollard have both been elected to Research Fellowships. Louis works in the Faculty of English, focussing on aesthetics, political philosophy, and theories of the novel. Damian is also interested in aesthetics, but in the context of films. He is based in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, where there the university’s Centre for Film and Screen is located, and has a special interest in Italian giallo cinema.

Toby Wilkinson has become Fellow for Development, moving from his bye-Fellowship and his leadership roles in other universities to a Governing Body Fellowship at Clare. He succeeds Paul McCarthy in the Development Office. Polly O’Hanlon also moves from a bye-Fellowship on her return from a distant institution. She is now an Emeritus Fellow at Clare and an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of History, as well as retired Professor in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford.

A number of Fellows have moved on during the year. Phil Allmendinger has left the key College role of Chair of the Estates Committee in order to become Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bath. Giancarlo Corsetti is now the Pierre Werner Chair at the European University Institute in Fiesole. Tianyi Zhang is continues his philosophical investigations. Sam Wimpenny is now studying earthquakes in Leeds, where he is a Research Fellow in Geophysics.

Peter Knewstubb, Life Fellow and former editor of the Clare Association Annual, died at the beginning of the academic year at the age of 91. His expertise in mass spectrometry and kinetics was passed on to generations of Clare chemists, and the College benefitted for many decades from his exhaustive knowledge of the College Statutes and silver. Jonathan Spence, Honorary Fellow and Emeritus Sterling Professor of History at Yale, died on Christmas Day.

Two of our Honorary Fellows, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Anthony Appiah, received honorary degrees from the University of Cambridge this year. Ottoline Leyser has been awarded the Croonian Medal by the Royal Society. Previous winners include Tim Hunt and Harry Godwin, as well as various non-Clare Nobel Prize winners.

The University changed its structure of academic titles this year, so University Lecturers are now Assistant or Associate Professors, and Readers are now professors. The research and teaching achievements of Fellows have been acknowledged this year using this new and more complicated process. David Chambers becomes Professor of Financial History (Grade 12). Julia Wolf is now Professor of Pure Mathematics, Ed Turner is Professor of Insect Ecology, Ioannis Lestas is Professor of Control Engineering, Rosana Collepardo-Guevara is Professor of Computational and Molecular Biophysics, and Sam Stranks is Professor of Optoelectronics. Ruth Watson and Charlie Weiss have been promoted to be University Associate Professors. Jocelyn Wyburd, who is the Director of the Language Centre, is now Professor of Language Learning, in recognition of her teaching and scholarship. Congratulations to them all!