Wellbeing and Welfare

Sarah leads the welfare team, overseeing the provision of wellbeing and welfare support for students throughout their academic studies. Students can book welfare appointments with Sarah from the Welfare page of the Student Hub.

As Registrar and Director of Admissions, Helen has oversight of all on-course student administration, admissions and outreach.

Helen 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 at 12:30pm-1:15pm.

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.

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.

Andrew is the Associate Professor in Civil Procedure at the Law Faculty and a Fellow in Law of Mansfield College. He has taught civil procedure on Oxford’s BCL/MJUR course since 2008 and has taught contract and tort for University College and New College respectively. From 2015 Andrew will take on the General Editorship of Civil Justice Quarterly. Andrew completed a BA/LLB (hons) at the University of Melbourne in 2001 and the BCL in 2005. He completed a DPhil at Oxford on legal professional privilege in 2011, and published a book on ‘Legal Professional Privilege for Corporations: A Guide to Four Major Common Law Jurisdictions’ with Oxford University Press in 2014. He has been a visiting scholar with NYU's Hauser Global Law School Program and an occasional guest lecturer in civil procedure at Melbourne Law School. Andrew worked as a solicitor at the Australian law firm Slater & Gordon until 2007, and has been a practising barrister at the Victorian Bar since 2011. His main area of practice is mass tort litigation and has worked on asbestos, thalidomide and tobacco litigation amongst others. He has advised the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on whether the use of light and mild descriptors for cigarettes constituted misleading advertising, assisted the US Department of Justice on its RICO claim against the US tobacco industry: US v Philip Morris et al and advised the Australian Government on the defence of its tobacco plain packaging laws against constitutional and international legal challenges. He has received awards for his work exposing British American Tobacco’s “document retention policies” in McCabe v British American Tobacco including from a coalition of public health NGOs. Andrew’s main research interests are civil procedure, tort and causation.

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.

Rachel is a DPhil student in the English Literature – funded by the AHRC, the Clarendon Fund, and Mansfield College’s John Hodgson Theatre Research Fellowship. Prior to this, she completed a BA in English Language and Literature and an MSt in English Literature (1830-1914) also at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research focuses on the emergence of avant-garde theatre movements in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. She has a broad interest in Anglophone/ European Drama between the nineteenth century and the present day. Topics of particular interest include queer/feminist theatre-making, social problem dramas, verbatim drama, as well as sensation fiction/drama.

Outside her role supporting the teaching of English, she also works as the College’s Tutor for Academic Support. This role involves working with students on a 1:1 basis to help develop their general academic and study skills.