Mansfield People

• Masonry structures
• Structural health monitoring
• Structural dynamics
• Soil-structure interaction
• Risk and vulnerability

Current Projects

Influence of underground construction on nearby structures

​Underground construction is becoming the preferred method to deliver infrastructure to urban areas. However, ground movements during construction can damage existing structures. Inspired by comprehensive field data, our research develops new analytical assessment techniques which consider salient building features and soil-structure interaction in a simple and effective manner. These models aim to provide a clearer appreciation of risk to existing structures in order to minimise expensive mitigation methods.

Structural response of ageing masonry arch bridges

Masonry arch bridges form an integral part of the European transportation network. These enduring structures are facing new challenges due to modern use and increased flood risks, yet their serviceability response is poorly understood. Our research investigates the fundamental behaviour of masonry bridges with detailed field data and computational modelling.  The objective of this research is to devise new assessment tools which can better describe the serviceability response of damaged masonry bridges and predict their complex degradation processes.

Vision-based remote and distributed sensing techniques

​Vision based remote and distributed sensing technologies provide the ability to remotely quantify the damage condition of the asset and precisely measure displacements and strains in different parts of the structure.  Our research interests in this area include the use of photogrammetry, digital image correlation and laser scanning to describe structural geometry, load, performance and damage, to inform structural assessments.

Dynamics of rocking structures

​During earthquakes, masonry structures exhibit rocking behaviour in different forms. In addition, new generation of earthquake resilient design systems use rocking mechanisms to mitigate damage in structures. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of rocking systems is of fundamental importance for the protection of old and new structures from earthquakes. Our work in this area focuses on the complex interactions between the soil, the rocking mechanisms and the structural vibrations.

• Complete Old English, Teach Yourself Series (Hodder, 2019).
• The Battle of Maldon War and Peace in Tenth-Century England, 2020, Atherton, M, I. B. Tauris.
• ‘“The Whale Road”: A Musical Response to the World of Beowulf’, Atherton, M, in Beowulf in Contemporary Culture, Edited by: Clark, D, 1 February 2020, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp.1 – 345.
• The Making of England: A New History of the Anglo-Saxon World, Atherton, M, 30 January 2017, Tauris Academic Studies.

• Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture, especially fiction and drama
• Oriental fiction
• Women’s writing and feminist theory
• Ideas of cognition and character in literary and theatrical representation.

Professor Ros Ballaster is currently working on a book about the theatre and the novel in eighteenth-century England.

• Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1640-1740 (1992)
• Women’s Worlds: Ideology
• Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (1991)
• Editor of Penguin Classics, Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility (1996)
• Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005 – winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy) and an accompanying anthology Fables of the East (2005)
• The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690 – 1750: Volume Four (History of British Women’s Writing) ed. Ros Ballaster (2010); Fictions of Presence. Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2020)
• Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Boydell & Brewer, 2020).
• ‘Eovaai and the Fiction of Fantasy in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Eliza Haywood, ed T Potter (Modern Language Association, 2020), 155-161.
• “Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind”: Distributed Cognition and Women (Novelist)’s Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England’, Ballaster, R, 2019, Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, eds. Anderson, M, Roussesau, G, Wheeler, M, 30 September 2019, Edinburgh History of Distribution , Edinburgh, pp.170 – 186.
• ‘Dramatic satire’, Ballaster, R, 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. Bullard, P. Oxford University Press, USA.
• Sensible Readers: Experiments in Feeling in Early Prose Fiction by Women, Ballaster, R, 2019, in The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Rivero, A, Cambridge University Press.

Principal area of interest

The astrophysics of neutron stars, pulsars and energetic binary stellar systems through observations at all appropriate wavelengths from radio to gamma-ray. Subsidiary interests include gravitational radiation, plerions (filled supernova remnants) and pulsar-powered or pulsar-wind nebulae, gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy astrophysics.

Latest Working Papers

• “Least Trimmed Squares: Nuisance Parameter Free Asymptotics,” with Bent Nielsen

• “Normality Testing after Outlier Removal,” with Bent Nielsen
• “A model where the Least Trimmed Squares estimator is maximum likelihood,” with Søren Johansen and Bent Nielsen (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 85, 3, 886-912, 2023)
• “Heteroscedastcity Testing after Outlier Removal,” with Ines Wilms (Econometric Reviews, 40, 51-85, 2021)
• “Cumulated Sum of Squares Statistics for Non-linear and Non-stationary Regressions,” with Bent Nielsen (Econometric Theory, 36, 1-47, 2020)
• “Summability of Stochastic Processes: A Generalization of Integration for Non-linear Processes,” with Jesús Gonzalo (Journal of Econometrics, 178, 331-341, 2014)
• “Regime Shifts in Stock-Flow I(2)-I(1) Systems: The Case of US fiscal Sustainability,” with Josep Lluís Carrión-i-Silvestre (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 26, 298-321, 2011)
• “Testing for Multicointegration in Panel Data with Common Factors,” with Josep Lluís Carrion-i-Silvestre (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 68, 721-739, 2006)
• “Uniform Consistency of Marked and Weighted Empirical Distributions of Residuals,”with Søren Johansen and Bent Nielsen
• “The Analysis of Marked and Weighted Empirical Processes of Estimated Residuals,” with Søren Johansen and Bent Nielsen
• “Co-summability: From linear to nonlinear co-integration” with Jesus Gonzalo

Recent Podcasts:

• ‘What is Zionism’ (14 Apr, 2024), on Dan Snow’s History Hits:

https://podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit/episode/2a16d5ff7608203c6ffc8e6e6dcef16912b2e83e/view

Recent Publications:

• ‘What Can Resist the Will of England in Palestine?’: Christian Zionism in England before the Balfour Declaration, in (Colin Shindler, ed.) The Routedge Handbook on Zionism (London: Routledge, 2024), pp. 453-68.
• ‘Israel studies in the UK: the history of an idea’. Journal of Israeli History, 1–17 (8 May 2024) https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2023.2349346
• Review of Theodore Lessing (trans. Peter C. Appelbaum), Jewish Self-Hate,
• German Historical Institute London Bulletin,Vol. XLIV, No. 2 (Nov. 2022), 163–7. https://www.ghil.ac.uk/publications/bulletin/ghil-bulletin-44-2022-no-2
• (Abigail Green and Peter Bergamin), ‘Vera Salomons and the Kotel: reading international Jewish history through a Jewish country house’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol 21, Issue 2 (2022). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/14725886.2021.2008795?needAccess=true
• ‘Revisionist Zionism in Israel’, in : Kumaraswamy P.R. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Israel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2717-0_10-1
• The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 2020). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-making-of-the-israeli-far-right-9781838604790/