Somerville College Report 09|10 - University of Oxford

16 | Fellows’ Activities
English
The Somerville English Day in March was a wonderful opportunity for the English
tutors to meet former students, discuss research and hear about the different post-
Somerville lives of some of those who read English here.
FIONA STAFFORD’s main research project this year has been the completion of
Local Attachments, a book on poetry and places, and the place of poetry in society,
which will be published by Oxford University Press in September. She has
participated in a symposium relating to Gayle Kwan’s contemporary art project on
the forgotten places of Scotland in Glasgow, which is leading to an exhibition next
year. She also gave a plenary lecture at the Wordsworth Summer conference in
Grasmere and is continuing to work on Romantic poetry. In addition to research,
she has acted as an external examiner in Cambridge and Glasgow.
ANNIE SUTHERLAND has continued to work on the Psalms this year. Her
particular focus has been the seven Penitential Psalms, on the subject of which she
contributed a chapter to the Somerville Medievalists’ essay collection Aspects of
the Performative in Medieval Culture (De Gruyter, 2010). She has also had an essay
published in A Companion to the Doctrine of the Hert (University of Exeter Press,
2009). In July, she gave a paper on Wycliffite Psalter manuscripts at the University
of Edinburgh’s Centre for the History of the Book. Annie’s graduate teaching has
centred on early medieval women’s spirituality, an area which is providing some
productive links with her Psalm-based research.
History
During the past academic year, college history tutors published two books:
in Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
JOANNA INNES pulled together three decades of her work on eighteenth-century
British social policy;
GEORGE SOUTHCOMBE (our British Academy postdoctoral fellow) published a
book co-authored with Grant Tapsell under the title Restoration Politics, Religion and
Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660-1714. In another co-authored piece (with Anna
Bayman), George considered the representation of early modern gender relations
in, among other things, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; he has also published