Dafydd is the McDonald Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the University of Oxford. His research and teaching concerns the history of ethics, moral theology and moral philosophy, and contemporary debates in political, medical, and sexual ethics. As a BBC and AHRC New Generation Thinker, Dafydd wrote and presented the BBC Radio 3 documentaries, 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'Sir Isaac Newton and the Philosophers' Stone'. He has also appeared on the National Geographic Channel's The Story of God with Morgan Freeman. His latest book, on theories of moral conscience in the British Enlightenment, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, and he is co-author of Briefly: 25 Great Philosophers; Briefly: Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil; and, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, all with SCM Press.

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Emily is a doctoral student in Classics at Corpus Christi college. She investigates how different artists in Classical Athens approached the challenge of communicating death’s mystery (the ‘Great Unknown’) to their audiences. Central to her thesis is that there is a connection between the difficulty of showing or narrating someone’s death and the difficulty of imagining what death is, and what it is like, from the outside - from the perspective of the living.

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Jordan is a DPhil candidate in Egyptology at the University of Oxford. His research explores how ‘composite’ figures, such as multi-headed or mixed human–animal forms of deities, were used and understood in various pictorial contexts. Three categories of religious material from the early second millennium BCE form the core of his current work: the cosmographic Book of the Hidden Chamber, the collection of mortuary spells known as the Book of Two Ways, and decorated ivory ‘wands’ used in rituals of birth and protection.

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Karen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a History and Politics Tutor at the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. She is a political historian of the 20th and 21st century United States. So far, Karen has focussed mainly on federal arts policymaking, but she is currently conceptualising a new book on NASA and the politics of work.

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Katherine Backler is finishing a DPhil in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University; she works on women’s social relationships in classical Athens. This involves coaxing out women’s stories from evidence that doesn’t want to tell those stories! Within and beyond her academic work, Katherine is interested in different ways of ‘doing’ family; she volunteers with Big Brothers Big Sisters Oxfordshire, a mentoring and befriending programme for children in and on the edge of care.

Naveen is a DPhil student at the Faculty of History interested in studying nostalgia, emotions, and history writing. Her thesis looks at these themes within Urdu, Hindi, and English language histories of Lucknow written during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Naveen holds a BA in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan and a MA in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also interested in public history practices and has been a part of archival and oral history projects in Pakistan and the United States.

Rachel Coombes is a second-year DPhil candidate in the History of Art, studying the interrelationship of music and the visual arts in French culture towards the end of the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the work and life of the decorative painter Maurice Denis (1870 - 1943). Central to her topic is the aesthetic character of, and contingent emotional response to, what was achieved from the combination of the two art forms within the contexts of different social milieux. Rachel has an undergraduate degree in Music from the University of Oxford, and an MA in History of Art from the University of Birmingham. Before resuming her academic studies in 2018 she pursued work in journalism and public relations at the Barbican Centre in London.

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Ranjamrittika is a third year DPhil student in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on a diachronic study of esoteric yoga traditions in north-eastern India, through a common lineage of Buddhism and Hinduism. Her work explores mysticism and language, politics of alternative social imaginaries through religious movements, notions of the subtle body, foregrounding pluralist literature of dissent and its artistic and political implications through performance. In her current research, she analyses language and practice, combining literary criticism with ethnography. As part of this project, she aims to explore the development of Tantric esoteric iconography through complex forms of deities in the Buddhist art collection of Himalayan Art: Nepal and Tibet and Eastern India, focusing on the emotion of “Compassion.”

Sabine Parrish is a DPhil candidate in anthropology. Broadly interested in food studies in its many forms, her current research focuses on specialty coffee consumption in producing countries, with an emphasis on Brazil. She is exploring how legacies of colonial extractivism are negotiated in the present, and how the meanings of 'exotic' foodstuffs—such as coffee—are experienced when consumed locally instead of at the end of a global-reaching supply chain.

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