Mansfield People

Alex is a Departmental Lecture in Human Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment and a tutor at Mansfield College. He is a political and historical geographer who engages with South Asian studies. Alex’s research concerns how subaltern, minority, and Indigenous communities have engaged in practices of internationalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Alex studied for a DPhil in Geography at the University of Oxford and holds an MSc with distinction in Geopolitics and Security from Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to his MSc, Alex completed a BA degree in Geography from the University of Oxford.

Before studying for his DPhil, Alex worked in education research and policy at The Behavioural Insights Team (a social purpose company part owned by HMG Cabinet Office). Alex has also worked in widening participation and access, delivering programmes to raise aspiration and attainment among students in East London.

Alex teaches human geography at Mansfield College and gives lectures on political geography topics for undergraduate students at the School of Geography and the Environment.

Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford. She is based in the multi-disciplinary department the Oxford Internet Institute, of which she was Director, 2011-8. From 2018, she has also been Director of the Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, which develops data science and AI to improve government and policymaking. Before Oxford, she was UCL's first Professor of Political Science & Director of the School of Public Policy (2000-4). She has degrees in Mathematics (BSc), Politics and Public Policy (MSc, LSE) and Government (PhD, LSE).

Her research and writing focuses on the relationship between technology, government, and public policy, including books Political Turbulence (Princeton, which won the Political Studies Association prize for the best politics book, 2017); Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008); Paradoxes of Modernization (OUP, 2010) and The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2007). Prizes and awards include the Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Schiedel prize (2018) for research and research leadership in social and political science; the OBE for services to Social and Political Science (2019); the Kluge Senior Chair in Technology & Society in the Library of Congress (2019); a Fellow of the British Academy (2019); and the Meyer-Struckmann Prize for Digitization and Democracy research from Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf (2020). She is currently working on two books: How Democracy can Work in a Digital World? and the Third Wave of Digital Era Governance: the Data-intensive Digital State.

Professor James Marrow is the James Martin Chair in Energy Materials at Oxford University. His research is concerned with microstructural fracture mechanics and the application of in-situ methods to study damage and crack fields, for which he received the Fellowship of the European Structural Integrity Society in 2014. He is particularly interested in the application of high resolution x-ray tomography to validate multi-scale modelling in quasi-brittle materials, using strain measurement by digital volume correlation and X-ray and neutron diffraction. He obtained his degree (Natural Sciences) and PhD at Cambridge University in 1988 and 1991, with postdoctoral studies at Oxford and Birmingham Universities, before taking a lecturership at Manchester. He moved to Oxford in 2010. He is a Council member of the UK Forum for Engineering Structural Integrity (FESI), UK representative for the European Energy Research Alliance Joint Programme on Nuclear Materials, member (ex-chair) of the OECD-NEA Expert Group on Innovative Structural Materials, independent advisor to the UK Office of Nuclear Regulation on materials/structural integrity and UK representative on Graphite for BEIS to the Generation IV International Forum.

I studied civil engineering at the University of Sydney, and did my doctorate here at Oxford. Before deciding to embark on an academic career, I spent several years in industry, designing offshore structures for the consulting engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners. After three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, I returned to Oxford as a University Lecturer (and Fellow of Mansfield) in 2000. My main research interests are in the theory of plastic material behaviour, as used in the analysis and design of geotechnical structures (foundations, retaining walls, tunnels) and steel and concrete structures (portal frames, plates, slabs). I also have interests in soil-structure interaction, particularly offshore problems such as the stability of mobile drilling platforms and wind turbines, and thermally-induced buckling of subsea pipelines. I am a member of the Civil Engineering Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science, and my homepage is here.

Professor Derek McCormack is Tutor and Fellow in Geography. He has a PhD from the University of Bristol, an MSc from Virginia Tech, and a BA from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Derek has been at Mansfield since September 2009, having been a Tutor and Fellow at Hertford College for three years prior to that. Before arriving in Oxford in 2006 he held a lectureship in the School of Geography at the University of Southampton.

Broadly speaking, Derek's interests lie in the area of cultural geography - i.e. he is interested in the many ways people experience and make sense of spaces. His work focuses in particular on the affective/emotional dimensions of this process. To this end he has written about the affective experience of spaces in a range of contexts including arctic exploration, to air travel, to art and performance, to cities.

At Mansfield Derek tutors across the core human geography papers, as well as supervising a range of human geography dissertations topics. He also provides tutorials for his Final Honours School Special subject, Spaces of Politics.

Tess has overall responsibility for Development, alumni relations, College communications and fundraising at Mansfield; she leads the team and oversees all of its activities.

She has 20 years' experience of fundraising, both within Oxford's collegiate University and outside it. She has held senior Development roles at the National Gallery, and then Tate in London, and was Head of Development at the University's Ashmolean Museum for 7 years, leading the fundraising for the Museum's capital redevelopment and launching its successful endowment campaign. Most recently Tess has been a fundraising consultant for varied non-profits and charities.

Contact her about current campaigns, big questions, major gifts, or just to say hello.

In his role as Lecturer in Law at Mansfield College, Christopher teaches Jurisprudence to undergraduate law students. He also acts as college advisor to graduate law students reading for the BCL and MJur degrees. Christopher has taught as a Tutor at Brasenose College, Pembroke College, and St Edmund Hall – as well as on the Opportunity Oxford and Oxford Law Springboard programmes. He teaches broadly within the areas of law, politics, and philosophy to visiting Stanford University undergraduates.

Christopher is a DPhil in Law candidate at Brasenose College, Oxford. His research examines our present conceptions of democracy and the role that the combined use of sortition and democratic deliberation may have in future constitutional change. Drawing upon ideas within the fields of deliberative constitutionalism and normative political constructivism, his thesis explores potential methods of enhancing governance through a series of practical political recommendations.

Christopher was previously a Research Assistant, and is currently a Graduate Research Resident, at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, he worked as a Judicial Extern to the Chief Judge of the largest Federal District Court in the United States (California). Christopher has volunteered on a number of initiatives including researching as part of the Cambridge Pro Bono Project, mentoring through Oxford’s Refugee-Led Research Hub, and representing individuals at Law Centre Northern Ireland. He holds an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge, and an LL.B. from Queen's University Belfast.

Michèle Mendelssohn is Professor of English and American Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. She co-convenes the MSt in Victorian Literature. Her research ranges from late 19th century to the present day, and ranges across both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (including American, African American, British and Canadian literatures)

Phenomenology (particularly of the human body), Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Wittgenstein. DPhil thesis was on Freud and Sartre; did a mid-career MPhil in Medical Anthropology, thesis on cosmetic surgery, gender and embodiment. Publications include (with Gordon Baker) 'Descartes' Dualism'; an introductory book on Sartre and a more advanced introduction to Merleau-Ponty; introduced and edited a volume of Baker's articles under the title 'Wittgenstein's Method', and a collection entitled 'Sartre on the Body'; Co-editor of the UK edition of Sartre Studies International.

John studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge, and did his doctorate here at Oxford. After a Lectureship in Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College he moved to the USA, first as a Senior Research Associate at NASA and then as Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. John returned to the UK to become Director of Structural Materials at the Defence Research Agency which was eventually privatised to become QinetiQ where he was Chief Operating Officer of the Future Systems and Technology Division. Following a subsequent appointment as Chief Executive of the Engineering and Technology Board, John returned to Oxford where he now tutors undergraduate engineers.

Helen Mountfield KC joined Mansfield College as Principal in 2018.

Helen is a barrister, specialising constitutional law, human rights and equality law, with particular experience in the education sector. Helen is a founder member of Matrix Chambers, an accredited mediator, a Master of the Bench of Gray’s Inn and is a past and present part-time judge in several jurisdictions including the High Court of England and Wales and the Channel Islands Courts of Appeal. She has appeared over 25 times in the Supreme Court and Privy Council, on hundreds of occasions in the Court of Appeal, European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights, and won many legal awards (including Legal 500 KC of the Year for Public Law in 2022). She features on the ‘First Hundred Years’ website, which celebrates the history of women in law.

Helen has also written and broadcast frequently on legal topics, including contributing to all eight editions of the Blackstone Guide to the Human Rights Act. She edited the White Book on human rights for many years, and is a member of the editorial board of Public Law.

Within Oxford University, she served on the Race Equality Task Force 2020-2021, and is co-Chair of the Joint Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. At Mansfield College, she is Tutor for Racial Inclusion alongside her role as Principal.

Helen also plays an active role in public policy. She has given evidence to Parliamentary committees on human rights, free speech and election and constitutional law issues on a number of occasions, and in 2016-2017 was co-chair, with Lord Watson, of the Independent Commission on the Future of Work in the Digital Economy, and a member of the Royal Society of Arts’ Commission on Drugs Policy. She is currently at trustee of Index on Censorship and has also served as a trustee, director and advisory board member of many other NGOs and charities, in the fields of the arts, human rights and justice, and equality.

She was educated at Crown Woods School (now Stationers’ Crown Woods Academy) in south-east London - by coincidence, one of Mansfield’s partner schools. From there she read Modern History at Magdalen College Oxford, where she obtained a first-class degree, directed plays and was one of the first ‘Target Schools’ officers. In 2023, she became an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen.