Research Roundup

Her publications this year include:

Coats, K. and Papazian, G. (Eds.) (2023). Emotions in texts for children and young adults: Moving stories. John Benjamins Publishing.

Coats, K. (2023). 'Afterword: New materialist insights for the text-based scholar'. in Children's Cultures After Childhood. Edited by Justyna  and Macarena Gonzales, John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 201-217.

Coats, K. (2023). 'Poetics and pedagogy.' in The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture. Edited by Claudia Nelson, Elizabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, Routledge. pp. 21-32.

Keynote lecture:

Coats, K. 'World-Building through Sound in Children's Poetry.' Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 29 March 2023.

Conference presentations:

Coats, K. 'Staying with The Discarded Image'. paper presented at C. S. Lewis—The Re-Enchanted Academic, 6^th International Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Iasi, Romania, 10 November, 2023.

Coats, K. 'The functions of children's poetry, from nursery rhymes to Spoken Word'. paper presented at The Functions of Criticism conference, University of Cambridge, 30 May 2023.

Images:

Fourth graders at the EuroEd Primary School in Iasi, Romania were enchanted to talk with Professor Karen Coats about The Chronicles of Narnia

Professor Karen Coats and her former student Dr Melody Green (Urbana Theological Seminary) shared insights about children's literature with 7th grade students at a public school in Iasi, Romania.'

The new site, dating to the 9^th-11^th century CE, now adds to the three originally discovered sites (Igbo Richard, Igbo Jonah, and Igbo Isaiah) at Igbo-Ukwu investigated by Thurstan Shaw in the early 1960s. The new site is characterized by multiple charcoal-laden pit features similar to Shaw’s observation at Igbo Jonah. From the 2023 excavations there has been recovered a lizard figurine, highly decorated potsherds, miniature vessels, glass beads, and unidentified metal objects. The Igbo-Ukwu archaeological project began its first season in 2019, six decades after Thurstan Shaw’s pioneering investigation.

The project is aimed at expanding the horizon of archaeology beyond the three compounds earlier investigated by Shaw and to provide answers to fundamental research questions that have been left unanswered since the 1960s. These questions border on human-environment interactions, territorial extent of the Igbo-Ukwu culture, landscape transformation and environmental history, amongst others. The project adopts a community archaeology approach to benefit the local community through various public engagement strategies.

He co-develops the Canrisk project, which has developed a tool for predicting an individual’s risk of breast, ovarian or prostate cancer using data on genetic, lifestyle and imaging information; Canrisk now used worldwide in counselling and patient management. He also directs the Breast Cancer Association Consortium, a worldwide collaboration of more than 100 research groups studying breast cancer genetics. He co-leads the EMBRACE study, a prospective study of more than 10,000 men and women in the UK carrying mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

Last year he led a study identifying several new breast cancer risk genes. This study (published in Nature Genetics¹) involved the analysis of DNA sequence data from more than 26,000 cancer cases and 217,000 women without cancer and identified at least 4 novel risk genes.

One of the major ongoing programmes of work is to improve risk prediction in individuals of non-European ancestry. A new multi-ancestry version of Canrisk is due to be released in 2024.

Last year Professor Easton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Jakob Herz Prize from the University of Erlangen.

https://doi.org:10.1038/s41588-023-01466-z

https://bcac.ccge.medschl.cam.ac.uk/

https://www.canrisk.org/

 In 2023 I have also published an essay on The United States of Europe and the ‘East(s)’: Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Cattaneo, and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso (Routledge 2023), which investigates nineteenth-century Italian republican thought and connections between national and European political projects and the experience of exile.

My second monograph Hegel and Italian Political Thought: the Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 has been approved by Cambridge University Press in the series Ideas in Context and it is now in production. This book traces the story of nineteenth century Italian reception of Hegel highlighting a practical dimension of ideas in a twofold meaning. Firstly, Hegel’s ideas are turned into political practices by those Italians who had participated in the 1848 revolution, who then would lead the new Italian State after unification, and who finally would continue to play a central role in Italian political life until the end of the century. Secondly, the practical dimension of ideas refers to the peculiarities of Italian Hegelianism, which serve to distinguish it from the broader European reception of Hegel: it insisted on the historical and political dimension of Hegel’s idealism, by presenting a critical Hegelianism closer to practice than to ideas, to history then to metaphysics. This is the story of a generation of intellectuals born at the start of the nineteenth century, the majority of them from Southern Italy, who experienced the collapse of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the dissolution of that common cultural and political space, and who helped to forge modern Italian political thought.

In the summer 2023 I organised with Professor Richard Bourke an international conference on Hegel and the Hegelian Tradition of Political Thought, funded by the British Academy, the DAAD Cambridge Hub, the Faculty of History and the Centre for Political thought in Cambridge. I have attained funding for setting up and running the Mediterranean History Research Cluster at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and I was awarded funding for the international networking project on Spazidentita: Material and Immaterial Spaces of Italianita’, 1796-1948 supported by the École française de Rome.

Over the last eighteen months, Nick has built up his research group, securing a Marsden Fast Start grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand. The group perform synthetic and analytical chemistry aimed at better understanding the origin of molecules like nucleic acids and peptides, how life emerged from these molecules, and how they may be synthesised and redesigned as biological and medicinal tools and probes. At last count, there are now six people in the lab, and we published our first paper in Journal of the American Chemical Society this year. It was also great to return to Cambridge and catch up with Homertonians last summer, as an add-on to speaking at a conference in the Netherlands. This year featured a trip to present at a conference celebrating the discoveries of Charles Darwin in Ecuador, which featured an excursion to the Galapagos islands (pictured). Nick is looking forward to his next visit to Homerton, and encourages visitors to Dunedin!

A simple example of such a problem is understanding the shortest curve between two points in a curved space, or (more interestingly) the shapes which form when a surface minimises its surface area with respect to some constraint, such as enclosing a fixed volume (like a soap bubble) or a fixed boundary (like a soap film spanning a closed wire). The understanding of such objects has applications to numerous fields, such as geometry, general relativity, and partial differential equations.

Together with Camillo De Lellis (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and Anna Skorobogatova (Princeton University), they were able to show that the singularities within certain surfaces minimising area are not random, but have some geometric structure. In technical terms, they showed that the singular set - which was known by previous work to be of two dimensions lower than the surface itself - is always countably rectifiable, regardless of the dimension of the surface. He also independently established other results understanding the complete topological structure of certain singularities. Subsequently, he has been invited to speak about his work in July 2024 during an international workshop at Peking University, China, as well as at numerous research seminars at various universities.

In January 2023, he was also awarded a Clay Research Fellowship by the Clay Mathematics Institute. This fellowship will last 4 years, funding his research and helping him travel to conferences, research seminars, and continue collaborations.

She is a graduate of the Lebanese Public University and the University of Cambridge. As a sociologist of education, her research centres on educational inequalities and their impact on marginalized groups. She has delved into education reform and development within conflict-affected societies, particularly focusing on the education of refugee children over the last decade.

Leading a research centre with a presence in both the Global North and South, Maha developed a keen interest in equitable research partnerships, knowledge generation, and research ethics among academic institutions and scholars across these global regions. Her ongoing research initiatives encompass an exploration of the roles played by civil society organizations and unions in education reform. Additionally, she is actively involved in studying the decolonization of knowledge production and reshaping the research landscape within forced migration studies.

Education officials from the government and locally based international organisations attended the event. Linked to this, Dawit co-authored a blog entitled ‘Closing the gender gap in STEM teaching and learning: what does the evidence say?’ At the UKFIET Conference 2023 in Oxford, Dawit presented a joint research work entitled ‘Improving teaching quality in Rwandan secondary schools.’ 

It explores Labour's exercise of power as a continuum, setting Attlee's administration in long-term historical context between the first Labour Government of 1924 and the current party under Keir Starmer. Within this context he shows why the Attlee administration matters so much and how successive Labour governments have fashioned it in their own image.

He recently published his second monograph, The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant City, Catholic Music, which appeared with the Boydell Press in May 2023. It tells the story of 28 sacred Latin choral works assembled in the mid-16th-century by a Flemish composer based in Milan, Hermann Matthias Werrecore, and sent to the publisher Peter Schöffer in Strasbourg. In travelling from staunchly Catholic Milan to newly-converted Protestant Strasbourg – a city in which Latin choral singing no longer took place – the repertoire in these partbooks therefore became cross-confessional. The book is divided into two parts: the first three chapters consider the historical and religious context and how the music may have found its way to Strasbourg; the final three chapters consider the motets themselves, the concordant printed and manuscript sources in which they appear, and biographical details about their composers, some of whom, such as Johannes Sarton and Simon Ferrariensis, are barely known at all.

Alongside the book, Daniel edited all 28 motets and produced an edition of Schöffer’s, Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimæ, available for free download at www.imprimis.uk/cantiones1539. A selection of these motets were recorded by the early music choral ensemble Siglo de Oro, directed by Patrick Allies, on The Mysterious Motet Book (Delphian, 2022). This disc was critically acclaimed for its blend of academic research and performance by Gramophone, Operalogue, and Music Web International, among others.

As a member of Oracy Cambridge, Paul continues to work with schools on developing the speaking and listening skills of students.

Publications in 2022/23

Amodia-Bidakowska, A., Hennessy, S. & Warwick, P. (2023) Disciplinary dialogues: Exploring the association between classroom dialogue and learning outcomes within and between subjects in English primary schools, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Volume 43

Vermunt, J.D., Vrikki, M., Dudley, P. & Warwick, P. (2023) Relations between teacher learning patterns, personal and contextual factors, and learning outcomes in the context of Lesson Study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2023.104295

Amundrud, A., Rasmussen, I. & Warwick, P. (2022) - Teaching talk for learning during co-located microblogging activities. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Volume 34 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2022.100618

Major, L., Smørdal, O., Warwick, P., Rasmussen, I., Cook, V., & Vrikki, M. (2022). Investigating digital technology’s role in supporting classroom dialogue: Integrating enacted affordance into analysis across a complex dataset. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 0(0), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2022.2032632

Teacher alumni make a difference to children's learning in schools  throughout the UK and also in many international contexts. For example in 2022, Douglas Walker was awarded the New Zealand prime minister's science teaching award.

Several Fellows have worked with colleagues in Kazakhstan to support the reform of teacher education. We now have a steady stream of young PhD students in the college who are supported through Bolashak scholarships and go back to Kazakhstan to support the development of education at all levels throughout the country.

More recently we have supported the development of teacher educators at the Abai Kazakh National University. In May 2023 Professor Aiman Berikkhanova visited the college with her  research colleagues. We supported her to prepare a paper for publication, which we submitted in June and are delighted to share a link to the recently published work here https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/13/10/1034

How can stakeholder theory contribute to opportunity theory? We suggest that stakeholder theory affords appropriate theoretical lenses for grounding the opportunity-actualization perspective more firmly within the real-world constraints of business venturing. Actualization departs from a strong focus on entrepreneurial agency to conceptualize how pre-existing environmental conditions determine what entrepreneurial action can achieve. We explain that stakeholder theory can strengthen the outward-looking orientation of actualization by (1) bringing the entirety of stakeholders centre-stage, beyond a narrow focus on market stakeholders, and (2) stressing the importance of noneconomic considerations for the actualization of economic opportunities. Our theorization culminates in the concept of ‘strategic opportunity thinking’ (SOT). We conceptualize SOT as a way of protecting entrepreneurs from the blind-to-stakeholders mindset that either sleepwalks them into the territory of non-opportunity or prevents them from the actualization of real yet difficult-to-actualize opportunities in the absence of stakeholder-centric thinking.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10422587211043354