2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

New Fellows
James Purdon grew up just outside Glasgow, and first came to
Cambridge in 2001 to read English at Emmanuel where he was
involved in amateur dramatics and edited the May Anthologies
of new writing. After winning a Herschel Smith Scholarship to
study at Harvard University, he spent a year exploring academic
areas of the humanities outside of English, and first became
interested in the cultural history of technology, which has since
become one of his main academic interests. Returning to
Cambridge in 2005, he studied for an MPhil in Criticism and
Culture, then went to work in London for two years, writing
reviews for The Observer. He is also a contributor to the Times
Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, and more recently, with some of his Cambridge
contemporaries set up an online quarterly magazine The Junket, which has just celebrated
its first full year of publication. He also worked part-time as a committee reporter for
Hansard, the official report of the House of Commons. He started his PhD in the autumn
of 2008, writing about the relationship between early twentieth-century literature and
film and the development of new information management technologies – such as the
law governing official secrets, the documentation of identity in passports, and the
collection of surveillance data in government intelligence dossiers.
Michael Waibel did compulsory military service in the Austrian
army followed by studies in law at the University of Vienna
which he completed in two years, followed by an “Erasmus
Year”. He then enrolled at the LSE for graduate studies in
economics, hoping to write his doctoral thesis in international
economic law. The first year of the transition from law to
economics was difficult. He chose as his PhD topic:
restructuring sovereign debt. While doing his research he
worked for a year at the IMF and the World Bank. In
Washington DC he met his wife Darshini. In the final phase of
his PhD, Michael spent three months in Cambridge as a
Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre. He then rounded off his legal education with
an LLM degree at Harvard Law School where he again served as a teaching fellow in
economics and confirmed his desire to become an academic. A postdoc at the
Lauterpacht was the ideal way of making the dream of an academic career become a
reality. After getting married in 2010, Darshini and Michael escaped for a year to
Switzerland (where Michael taught at St Gallen), before returning to Cambridge in early
2012.
Simone Schnall grew up in Bavaria in the Southern part of
Germany. She did her undergraduate studies at the University
of Trier and then went to Clark University for what was
intended to be a one-year research visit. Rather than returning
to Germany she stayed in the United States for 10 years, first
receiving her PhD in psychology, and then serving as Research
Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. After a
lectureship at the University of Plymouth, Schnall joined the
University of Cambridge in 2009, where she is currently a
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology. Her research
COLLEGE NEWS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 63