As we begin the new academic year, LMH is delighted to welcome four new Governing Body Fellows in Law, History, Chemistry and Classics: Dr Roxana Banu, Dr Joshua Bennett, Professor Michail Stamatakis and Dr Guy Westwood.
Read more about them below.
Dr Roxana Banu – Fellow and Tutor in Law
Dr Roxana Banu joins LMH from Queen Mary University London, where she was most recently a lecturer in Private International Law.
Dr Banu completed her undergraduate studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, then went on to gain her LLM at Fordham University in New York before completing her PhD at the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Alan Marks Medal for the best graduate thesis and the Strauss Fellowship in International Law.
Dr Banu’s interests lie in private and public international law, legal history, and feminist theory. She is the co-editor of the first volume of Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law, forthcoming with OUP in the series “Philosophical Foundations of Law”. Her current research projects include an exploration of the history of private international law in the colonial context and the social history of interwar cross-border family maintenance conventions. She is also working on an account of the pervasiveness of questions of gender in the theoretical and methodological development of private international law.
Alongside her role as Fellow and Tutor in Law at LMH, Dr Banu is Associate Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law at Oxford.
Dr Joshua Bennett – Fellow and Tutor in History
Dr Joshua Bennett joins LMH from Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History from 2020 until 2023. He read for undergraduate and graduate degrees in History at Christ Church, Oxford. Following the completion of his doctorate in 2015, Dr Bennett was a Lecturer at St John’s College, Oxford, before returning to Christ Church for a time as the Walter Dingwall Junior Research Fellow in History. He has held visiting positions at the Huntington Library; the University of Marburg; and the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz.
Dr Bennett’s research focuses on modern European intellectual history, especially in Britain and Germany. He is particularly interested in the role which religious thought and scepticism have played in understandings of history and social science, and in liberal conceptions of ‘progress’, since approximately 1800. His current book project explores the rich relationship between secularism and progressive social thought in Europe and North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alongside his role as a Tutorial Fellow at LMH, Dr Bennett is Associate Professor in the History of European Political and Social Thought, 1848-c.1950, in the Faculty of History.
Professor Michail Stamatakis – Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry
Professor Michail Stamatakis joins LMH as Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry from University College London (UCL), where he was Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
Professor Stamatakis holds a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and a PhD from Rice University, USA. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Professor Stamatakis’s research focuses on heterogeneous catalysis and is inspired by the urgent need for chemical technologies that promote a sustainable future for contemporary societies. It encompasses activities ranging from fundamental to applied, aiming at not only understanding how catalytic materials accelerate chemical reactions, but also guiding catalyst discovery to improve the efficiency of chemical transformations. Central to these activities is the development of computational methods and software (https://zacros.org) able to capture the molecular-level processes underpinning catalysis. These methods are also applied to study reactions relevant to the conversion of alternative/renewable feedstocks into chemicals and fuels, the management of (greenhouse) gas emissions towards mitigating pollution and climate change, or the engineering of long-lasting catalytic materials for efficient industrial-scale operations.
Alongside his role as Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry at LMH, Professor Stamatakis is Professor of Computational Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry.
Dr Guy Westwood – Fellow and Tutor in Classics
Dr Guy Westwood has been teaching Classics at LMH since 2019 as a Departmental Lecturer and was appointed as Fellow and Tutor in Classics this year. Dr Westwood read Classics at Balliol College and stayed in Oxford for his graduate work, completing his MSt and DPhil at Merton College. He held the Leventis Research Fellowship in Ancient Greek at Merton from 2013-17 then spent a year teaching at the University of Birmingham before returning to Oxford in 2018 as a Lecturer in the Classics Faculty.
Dr Westwood’s research focuses on classical Greek and Roman rhetorical prose literature, especially the surviving political oratory of democratic Athens. His first book, The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines: Oratory, History, and Politics in Classical Athens (Oxford: OUP, 2020) looked at how these two prominent fourth-century Athenian politicians deployed examples from, and ideas about, Athens’s past to persuade mass citizen audiences in the city’s lawcourts and political Assembly.
Dr Westwood’s research continues to focus on Demosthenes and Aeschines in particular, and he is also increasingly looking at classical Athenian oratory’s performance aspects and its relationships with drama, especially comedy.
Alongside his role as Fellow and Tutor in Classics at LMH, Dr Westwood is Associate Professor in Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Faculty.