Mansfield People

Helen Lacey’s research interests centre on later medieval political culture, the social context of the law and the political engagement of marginalised groups. She is currently Co-Investigator on the major AHRC-funded project, The People of 1381.

As McBain Access Officer, Sarah works with schools and colleges to encourage students from under-represented backgrounds to apply to Oxford. She works with students, parents and teachers across the country with a particular focus on Mansfield’s link regions in Yorkshire & the Humber and Greater London. 

Sarah works in the College Office, which can be found on the ground floor of Staircase B. For regular access and outreach updates from Sarah and Helen, follow our twitter @MansfieldAccess!

The College Office is usually open on weekdays between 9:30am-5:30pm, apart from during our lunch break which is taken at 12:30pm-1:15pm.

Ayoush Lazikani is a SEDA-accredited tutor, teaching and lecturing in Old English and Middle English. As a researcher, Ayoush specializes in the Global Middle Ages, the history of emotions, and the natural world, and she has published widely in these areas.

In her early work, she focused on devotional writing of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, particularly for solitary contemplatives in the Christian tradition. She has since undertaken substantial work in comparative literary studies: her research considers English, Arabic, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and Persian texts, among other languages, and in her most recent work she has been writing on medieval ideas about the moon from around the world.

Ayoush’s first book, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (University of Wales Press, 2015), studies the languages of feeling—especially the interrelated affections of compassion, love, and sorrow—in texts and church wall paintings.

Her second book, Cry of the Turtledove: Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, c. 1100-1250 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), is situated within the growing emphasis on 'globalization' in medieval studies, and it offers close comparative analyses of affect in medieval Arabic and English contemplative texts. In this book, Ayoush develops a framework for comparative work on affect which she calls ‘avian emotion’. An approach of ‘avian emotion’ invites us to gaze across cultures as well as within them, migrating from one to the other with sensitivity. Just as a bird flies across continents and nations, a comparative study seeks to become a kind of flight, moving across regions while remaining sensitive to the specific rhythms of the surrounding environment.

Ayoush's third book, Moons that Haunt and Bless: Lunar Imaginings in Literature and Art, 700-1600, is forthcoming and tells the story of how medieval people around the world perceived the moon, that ‘supremely prized image for poets’ according to poet Carol Ann Duffy (Duffy 2009: xvii). This book is written for those who may be unfamiliar with the medieval world and its literatures and arts. The sources come from an expansive global range: from Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mayan, Norse, Persian, Polynesian, and Welsh traditions, among others. All these sources reveal the complex ways people around the world who lived from c. 700-1600 interpreted and interacted with the moon.

She has also published numerous essays in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, the Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Leeds Studies in English, and various edited collections; and she is an Associate Editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

David's research interests are in ancient Greek and Latin philosophy, particularly Plato, the Presocratics, Aristotle, Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics. He teaches all the ancient philosophy papers (in the original and in translation) and also Ethics, Political Theory, Early Modern Philosophy, Kant, Philosophy of Maths, and all the Logic papers. He has written specialist articles on Plato and Socrates, and on other philosophical topics for more general audiences.

David Leopold has interests in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. His work in the latter area has focused on nineteenth century thinkers (including G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and William Morris) and movements (including socialism, utopianism, and anarchism).

Paul's main research interests are 17th Century Philosophy (with a special focus on the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz). He is the editor of Leibniz and His Correspondents (CUP, 2004), Locke and Leibniz on Substance (Routledge, 2015 - with Tom Stoneham) and Leibniz Key Philosophical Writings: A Guide (OUP 2020 – with Lloyd Strickland); and editor and translator of The Leibniz-De Volder Correspondence (Yale, 2013), and G.W. Leibniz: Journal Articles on Philosophy (OUP, 2025 – with Richard Francks, Antonia LoLordo, and Roger Woolhouse). Paul has also published numerous articles on the philosophy of Leibniz, and, as someone with bipolar and autism spectrum condition diagnoses, his most recent work includes articles on the philosophy of neurodiversity and madness.

Paul also combines his interests in philosophy with his interests in music. He debuted his album of settings of Wordsworth’s poems Preludes To Wordsworth at the poet’s house, Rydal Mount in 2022 and regularly performs songs from this and Cantat Ergo Sumus (settings of poems by philosophers) in and around Oxford.

For more of Paul’s work and music see www.paullodge.com

Dr John Lynch is an environmental scientist with particular interests in the role of human land use in climate change, and different visions for a ‘sustainable’ food system. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Department of Biology, where he develops and deploys environmental and climate modelling approaches to establish the environmental impacts of agriculture and provide practical and policy guidance for sustainable land management.

At Mansfield, John teaches across the core physical and environmental components of the BA Geography degree. He has a background in agricultural science and environmental impact assessment, with a BA in Natural Sciences, MSc in Applied Ecology and Conservation, and Life Sciences PhD. He has held previous doctoral positions at the University of Nottingham, Teagasc (Ireland), and the Department of Physics at Oxford.

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.

As an Academic Officer, Anna has responsibility for academic events such as Graduation and Matriculation ceremonies, as well as college Collections and Public Exams. She also monitors student’s academic progress and student feedback.

Anna works in the Academic Office, which can be found on the ground floor of Staircase B.

The Academic Office is usually open on weekdays between 9:30am-5:30pm, apart from during our lunch break which is taken around 12:30pm-1:15pm.