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Research

My main research interests are in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of art, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. In my most recent book, Action, Knowledge, and Will, I argue that human behaviour has four irreducibly different dimensions—physical, psychological, intellectual, and ethical—which were amalgamated or confused in the traditional idea of a ‘will’. My work in philosophy of art has focused mainly on the visual arts. My book The Objective Eye is about the nature of colours and shapes, their representation in pictorial art, and the concept of realism in art theory. I have also written about art and neuroscience.

Publications

Links to some of my recent publications:


Introduction

Nickerson was a graduate student at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied proton collisions at CERN. After that he worked as post-doc, lecturer and then as a professor at Harvard University in the USA on a deep-inelastic muon scattering experiment. He returned to Oxford as a member of the physics faculty in 1990.

Teaching

Nickerson believes that the best way to learn physics is to listen to lectures by those who already understand the subject, read extensively and solve problems. A key element in expediting the learning process is access to experts who can help resolve any difficulties, and the tutorial system is ideal for this. Nickerson expects to discuss physics broadly in tutorials, and will be trying to make sure that students have understood the material.

Research

Nickerson is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. There are twelve UK universities participating in the project which altogether has over 2000 physicists involved. For some years Nickerson led the UK team working on the experiment and was chair of the international collaboration board for the tracking detector. He now leads the UK work to build the next generation tracking detector for ATLAS, which will be bigger, better and much more radiation hard. Nickerson is hardware orientated – he leads teams building detectors and makes them work.

Publications

Nickerson’s CV includes numerous publications. There are dozens on results from the ATLAS detector alone – these can be found on the web quite easily.

Introduction

I was educated at Nairn Academy in the North of Scotland and at Edinburgh University, where I took two degrees, in English and German. Having done doctoral research at Oxford, I held temporary posts at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Downing College, Cambridge, before being appointed in 1989 Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, where I stayed till I moved to Queen’s in 2010. I have held a Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation. In 2004 I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. I was Germanic Editor of the Modern Language Review from 2000 to 2010, and now direct the book series ‘Germanic Literatures’ published by Legenda.

Teaching

Besides supervising numerous doctoral candidates, I teach a number of subjects in taught courses, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent topics of undergraduate lecture courses include German tragedy; Goethe; Heine; Thomas Mann.

Research

My first book was Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (OUP, 1985). I remain keenly interested in the modernist period (roughly 1890-1930) and in German-Jewish literature and Austrian literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In recent years I have become more interested in eighteenth-century and comparative literature (as in my Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine, OUP, 2009).  I recently published The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790 (London: Penguin, 2020; New York: HarperCollins, 2021). I have also reached out to the broader public with volumes on Kafka and Goethe in OUP’s Very Short Introductions series, and with translations of Hoffmann, Heine, Moritz and Kafka in the Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics. My interests have recently spread to modern Scandinavian literature, which I am learning to read in the original languages.

Publications

A full and regularly updated list of my publications can be found on my Faculty webpage.

Introduction

I was born in Belfast and educated first in Ireland, then in England. As an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford (1967-71) I studied French and German. As a postgraduate I undertook research into the narrative works of Charles Nodier (1780-1844) and completed my DPhil in 1976. Meanwhile I had come to Queen’s in October 1973 as a full-time Lecturer in French. I was elected a Fellow and Praelector in French in October 1977 and held this post until my retirement in 2016, when I was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship. As a Fellow and member of the Governing Body of Queen’s I contributed to College life in a variety of roles, including as Dean (1981), Tutor for Admissions (1985-90), Senior Tutor (1995-6), Estates Bursar (1996-2001), and Secretary of the Accommodation Strategy Committee (2003-8).

I became Professor of French in 1997, was appointed Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in 2005, and elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009.

Teaching

I taught French language and literature to all years. I had a special interest in translation (and published translations of Voltaire’s contes as well as of novels by Zola and Maupassant), and I taught translation from French into English to all years, as well as first-year grammar classes and some translation from English into French for first- and final-year students. I gave tutorials and seminars on a wide range of topics, authors, and genres across the whole span of French literature since 1715, in particular from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My graduate supervision was focused on nineteenth-century French literature and culture.

Research

My research career began with French Romanticism, and I published my first book on Stendhal’s novels. After that I went simultaneously backwards and forwards. My translation of Voltaire’s Candide first appeared in 1990, and this led to a comprehensive study of his contes and some years later to a full-scale biography. At the same time I developed a deep interest in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898): his work remained at the centre of my research for over two decades, and I published three books on him.

Since then I have been engaged in a wide-ranging study of nineteenth-century French poetry, focusing, under the project title of ‘The Poet as Lawgiver’, on how poets of the period envisaged the public function of poetry and their own public role(s) as poets. From 2009 to 2011, and thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, I was enabled by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to undertake full-time research into this topic. This led to the publication of my Unacknowledged Legislators in Post-Revolutionary France in 2016. Since my retirement as Fellow and Praelector in French I have been continuing work on this project with reference to Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), and my recently completed book on him is due to be published in the bicentenary year of his birth.

Publications

  • Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
  • The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s ‘contes philosophiques’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
  • Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
  • Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) [winner of the R.H. Gapper Prize awarded by the Society for French Studies ‘for the best book published in the field of French studies by a scholar based at an institution of higher education in the United Kingdom or Ireland’]
  • Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2005; paperback, 2006) [shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography]
  • Stéphane Mallarmé (London: Reaktion Books, 2010)
  • Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France: Chateaubriand – Staël – Lamartine – Hugo – Vigny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) [winner of the R. Gapper Prize, formerly the R.H. Gapper Prize]
  • The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming [2021])

Translations

  • Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories (Oxford World’s Classics, 1990; revised and enlarged edn., 2006)
  • Zola, La Bête humaine (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996) [shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize]
  • Maupassant, A Life (Oxford World’s Classics, 1999)
  • Zola, Germinal (Penguin Classics, 2004)

Background

I grew up in Surrey and went to Guildford Grammar School. I read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. I then worked at the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge from 1969 to 1983 with a year at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1980-81. In 1983 I was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford and a tutorial fellowship at Queen’s. I was Estates Bursar from 2006 to 2008.

Research Interests and Representative Publications

I worked in the field known as ‘attention’ in which people are given several tasks to perform simultaneously. By seeing which tasks can be combined with little interference and which cannot it is possible to deduce the organisation of the cognitive system.

  • Shallice, T., McLeod, P. & Lewis, K. (1985).  Isolating cognitive modules with the dual task paradigm: Are speech perception and production separate processes? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37, 507-532.

An important task for the cognitive system is to link perception of the objects moving around you to appropriate actions, intercepting some, avoiding others. To understand the visual-motor system working at its limit I studied how professional cricketers manage to hit the ball with little more than half a second to choose and execute a complex action.

  • McLeod, P. (1987). Visual reaction time and high-speed ball games. Perception, 16, 49-59.
  • Land, M. & McLeod, P. (2000). From eye movements to actions: How batsmen hit the ball. Nature Neuroscience 3, 1340-1345.

A second paradigm that I used for studying visual-motor interaction is how people know where to go to catch a ball. Catching, like many motor skills, is implicit. That is, people cannot explain how they do it. Why is the algorithm that ensures you intercept the ball before it hits the ground is not available for conscious report?

  • McLeod, P. & Dienes, Z. (1996).  Do fielders know where to go to catch the ball, or only how to get there? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 531-543.
  • Reed, N., McLeod, P. & Dienes, Z. (2010). Motor skill and implicit learning: What people who know how to catch a ball don’t know. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 63-76.

A pervasive cognitive bias, known as the Einstellung effect, is that once you’ve had a good idea, it’s hard to see that there is a better one. The problem is that people notice evidence that supports their idea but seem blind to evidence that goes against it. By measuring the eye movements of chess players who find a good move and then fail to spot a better one (which they could find if the good move was not possible) we demonstrated the cognitive mechanism that underlies this bias. People are literally blind to evidence that is not consistent with the view they already hold.

  •  Bilalic, M., McLeod, P. & Gobet, F. (2008). Why good thoughts block better ones: The mechanism of the pernicious Einstellung (set) effect. Cognition, 108, 652-661.

I graduated from Southampton University in 1968 with degrees in Physics and lectured in Physics at Imperial College until 1984 when I joined Philips Research (UK) after a short period of secondment. After four years of research on semiconductors and devices I came to Oxford in 1988 when I was appointed to a Tutorial Fellowship at Queen’s and University Lectureship in Engineering Science.

I built up the student intake to the College for Engineering and added Materials Science, which resulted in the appointment of Professor Keyna O’Reilly in 2002, when I left to set up the Begbroke Science Park for the University, retaining a Research Fellowship with the College. During the time I was a Tutorial Fellow, I spun off three companies from my research group. Opsys was founded by two post-docs and made organic light emitting displays and it was taken over by Cambridge Display Technology in 2002/3; Oxonica was formed in 1999 and went on to make doped titanium oxide nanoparticles for sunscreens and cerium dioxide nanoparticles for diesel fuel additives. The company is fairly dormant today and simply collects revenues. In 2000 with my Chemistry Colleagues Professor Allen Hill FRS and Professor Luet Wong we set up Oxford Biosensors that was making a point-of-care test for markers for cardiac risk. We didn’t quite make it to market and the company folded in 2008.

I built up the Begbroke Science Park from scratch and this resulted in what was at the time a very new and different Science Park. My vision was to have spaces for new spin-off companies and laboratory space for Departments, to relieve the congestion in the Science Area in town. This vision was not shared by everyone! …but it worked very well and has been copied in many universities and is now firmly established as part of the University’s infrastructure.

Whilst I was Director of the Science Park, I sat on several EPSRC committees and was the Advisor on Nanotechnology to the Research Councils between 2009 and 2013 and I received recognition for my contribution to Science and Engineering with the award of an OBE in 2013.

After being forced to retire as Director of the Begbroke Science Park by the University because of my age in 2013, I took on several responsibilities: Senior Principal Fellow at Warwick Manufacturing Group 2013-2018, Chair of the Industrial Advisory Board, Bristol University (Physics)(2013-2018), Visiting Professor King’s College London (Physics and Engineering) 2014-, Visiting Professor UCL (Engineering) 2016-. I have sat on several EPSRC committees and now concentrate on being a member of the UKRI Strategic Advisory Board on Quantum Technology and the STFC “Challenge Led Applied Systems Programme”. I still teach on the Continuing Education online course on Nanomedicine which I helped to set up. I also give courses on Innovation to the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Division (which I adapt to suit the other universities too).

I also divide my time in assisting research students and post-docs in the various universities (I am either a co-PI or advisor on several projects), and in assisting start-up companies and consulting for companies. Since I have no laboratory facilities any more in Oxford, because of the EJRA, I have set up a small laboratory at home and have use of laboratory facilities elsewhere.

My interests are broad. I retain an interest in basic Physics, especially in electromagnetic effects from extremely low frequencies to optical frequencies, especially plasmonic effects. I am currently looking at the electrical impedance of plants, which is a new interest of mine. I work on new methods of synthesis of nanoparticles, for several specific applications. I also work on biosensors and have an association with groups developing several types of sensor for virus detection. I also collaborate with the Chemistry Dept in Oxford (Professor Peter Edwards) on several energy projects: recovering chemicals from waste plastic, stripping hydrogen from hydrocarbons and making pure carbon and the synthesis of jet fuel from carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

In 2012/3 I also set up a new company, Oxford NanoSystems, that makes a unique nanostructured coating that enhances boiling in fluids, and hence has use in enhancing the performance of heat exchangers and heat pumps. This will be crucial for the quest to form a zero-carbon economy. We make use of links to several universities and we now have a small factory in Abingdon and employ 16 people. I am currently engaged in helping several colleagues form new companies.

Introduction

Nicholas Dimsdale was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, gaining a First Class Honours degree in Economics in 1959. He then pursued graduate studies at Harvard and Cambridge from 1959 to 1961.

In 1961, Nicholas was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Economics at The Queen’s College. He served as Estates Bursar for the College from 1977 to 1995, and was made an Emeritus Fellow in 2004.

From 1965 to 1966, Nicholas was an Economic Adviser at the Department of Economic Affairs, and he later acted as Consultant for the National Economic Development Office (1993). He was Managing Editor of Oxford Economic Papers from 1980 to 1989, and continues to be a member of the editorial board.

Nicholas’s other academic appointments include a Visiting Fellowship at ANU, Canberra (1995); a Research Associateship at Oxford Winton Institute for Monetary History (2011); and two Associate Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford (2013-15 and 2021 onwards).

Publications

  • Dimsdale, N.H. and A.J.Glyn (1971), ‘Investment in British Industry: A Cross-sectional Approach’, Bulletin of Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics. August.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. (1975), ‘Keynes and the Finance of the First World War’, in Essays on J.M.Keynes ed. Milo Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • (1981) ‘British Monetary Policy and the Exchange Rate 1920-1938’, Oxford Economic Papers July, Supplement.
  • (1982) ‘The Treasury and Civil Service Committee and the British Monetarist Experiment’ , in Advances in Economic Theory ed. M. Baranzini. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • (1984) ‘ Employment and Real Wages in the Interwar Period’, National Institute Economic Review. November.
  • (1987) ‘Keynes on British Budgetary Policy 1910-1946’, in Private Saving and Public Debt ed. M.Boskin, J.S.Flemming and S.Gorini. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • (1988) ‘Keynes on Interwar Economic Policy’, in Keynes and Economic Policy: The General Theory after 50 Years, ed W.A.Eltis and P.J.N.Sinclair. London: Macmillan.
  • Dimsdale, N.H., S.J.Nickell and N.J.Horsewood (1989), ‘Unemployment and Real Wages in the 1930s’, Economic Journal. June.
  • Dimsdale, N.H., S.J.Nickell and N.J.Horsewood (1989), ‘Employment and Wage Flexibility in Interwar Britain’, Discussion Paper No 71, Institute of Economics and Statistics, Oxford.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. (1990), ‘Money, Interest and Cycles in Britain since 1830’, in Essays in Honour of Sir John Hicks, Greek Economic Review, Supplement, ed. A.S. Courakis and C.A.E. Goodhart.
  • (1991) ‘British Monetary Policy since 1945’, in The British Economy since 1945, in The British Economy since the Second World War, ed. N.F.R.Crafts and V.Woodward. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and N.J.Horsewood (1991), ‘A Model of the UK Economy in the Interwar Period’, European Economic Review. Vol 36.
  • Crafts, N.F.R., N.H.Dimsdale and S.Engerman (eds) (1992), Quantitative Economic History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and M . Prevezer (eds) (1994), Capital Markets and Corporate Governance, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Dimsdale, N.H.(1994), ‘Banks, Capital Markets and The Transmission Mechanism’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Vol. 10.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and Horsewood, N.J.(1995), ‘Fiscal Policy and Employment in Interwar Britain: Some Evidence from a New Model’, Oxford Economic Papers. Vol.47.
  • Dimsdale, N.H.and J.S.Chada (1999), ‘A Long View of Real Interest Rates’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Vol. 15.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and N.J.Horsewood (2002), ‘The Causes of Unemployment in Interwar Australia’, Economic Record, December.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. (2005), ‘Harrod and Interwar Economics’, Oxford Economic Papers.
  • Dimsdale, N.H., N.J.Horsewood and A.Van Riel (2006), ‘Unemployment in Interwar Germany:An Analysis of the Labor Market,1927-1936.’ Journal of Economic History, Sept.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. (2010), ‘The Financial Crisis of 2007-9 and British Experience’, Oxonica.
  • Hills, Sally, Ryland Thomas and Nicholas Dimsdale, ‘The UK recession in context-what do three centuries of data tell us?’(2010) Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Q4, Vol 50, No4.
  • Dimsdale, N.H.and Hotson, A. eds (2014), British Financial Crises since 1825, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and Hotson, A. (2014), Financial Crises and Economic Activity in Britain since 1825 in Dimsdale and Hotson.
  • Dimsdale, N.H. and Horsewood, N. (2014), The Financial Crisis of 1931 and the Impact on the British Economy in Dimsdale and Hotson.
  • Dimsdale,N.H. (2014), Monetary Trends in the UK since 1870 in Money, Prices and Wages ed M.Allen and D’Maris Coffman, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Thomas, R. and Dimsdale, N.H. (2017), Three Centuries Data Set, Bank of England, On line.
  • James Cloyne, Nicholas Dimsdale and Natacha Postel-Vinay (2018), Taxes and Growth: New Narrative Evidence from Interwar Britain, NBER Working Paper 24659.
  • Dimsdale, Nicholas and Ryland Thomas (2019), UK Business and Financial Cycles since 1660 Volume 1: A Narrative Overview, Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction

I have studied, researched and taught in Oxford since first arriving there as an undergraduate in 1975. I have been a Fellow of Queen’s since 1989.

Teaching

I am a modern British History specialist, and most of my teaching focuses upon nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, but I also enjoy teaching post-1945 international history. I am presently involved in setting up a new Special Subject on Britain in the 1970s, looking at the impact of the crises of that period upon a society under pressure.

Research

I am a historian of modern London and specialise in the 1960s and 1970s, looking not just at the ‘swinging city’ but also at the impact of economic, social and cultural change upon what was fast becoming a world city. Studying a large and diverse metropolis has enabled me to escape being typecast as a ‘political historian’ or a social or cultural one, but has allowed me to practise several different varieties of history in my work. I was also the United Kingdom researcher for the Oxford-based pan-European oral history project ‘Around 1968: Activists, Networks, Trajectories’, for which I interviewed around forty people associated with the radical movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Publications

  • ‘Macmillan’s Martyr: the Pilgrim case, the ‘land grab’ and the Tory housing drive, 1951–9’, Planning Perspectives, 23(2), 2008.
  • ‘“Die Briten kommen.” British beat music and the conquest of Europe in the 1960s’, in M.Conway and K.K.Patel, eds, Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. Historical Approaches (London, Palgrave, 2010).
  • ‘The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man’, in C.V.J.Griffiths, J.J.Nott and W.Whyte, eds, Classes, Cultures and Politics. Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).
  • ‘Communes in Britain and Denmark’ (with Anette Warring), in Cultural and Social History, 8(4), 2011.
  • ‘Containing Racism? The London Experience, 1958-1968’ in S.Tuck, ed., The Subversive Special Relationship: race and protest in the United Kingdom and United States in the civil rights era (New York, Palgrave, 2012).

Introduction

After school in York, my academic career began in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where I was an undergraduate, graduate and Research Fellow; after which I enjoyed five years in the Greek Department at Liverpool University. I came to Queen’s in 1981. I was the Senior Tutor for six years and latterly Fellow Librarian. I was also Chairman of the Faculty of Classics prior to retirement.

Teaching

Though my research is primarily in Greek, I taught a good number of subjects in both languages, seeing the two literatures as inextricably linked culturally and historically. I think it equally important that people should know their languages well, and that they should have a sense of what is currently happening in literary theory. I stress too the importance of not studying literature in isolation, but of seeing it in its relationship with historical, social, religious, cultural and other factors. I have supervised graduates doing theses on for instance mythology, tragedy and comedy amongst other subjects.

Research

  • Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy, Cambridge 1993.
  • ‘Greek Sacrifice: forms and functions’, in A. Powell (ed.), The Greek World, London & New York 1995, 463-82.
  • ‘Tragic Filters for History: Euripides’ Supplices and Sophocles’s Philoctetes’, in C.B.R. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian, Oxford 1997, 39-62.
  • Herodotus Book VIII, Cambridge 2007.
  • ‘Athens and Delphi in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, in S. Goldhill and E. Hall (eds.), Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition, Cambridge 2009, 208-31.

Introduction

I grew up in Surrey, and local history interests were an early stimulus for my research on the English landscape. I graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1976, and after five years as a research student and Junior Research Fellow there, I was appointed to a Tutorial Fellowship at Queen’s in 1981. I maintain a long-standing involvement in practical archaeology, and in the worlds of building and landscape conservation. I appeared several times on Channel Four’s ‘Time Team’ series, and have made a Channel Four documentary on medieval beliefs in vampires. After retirement in October 2020 and election to an Emeritus Fellowship, I intend to continue my research activities as a full member of the College community.

Research

Although a historian, I use written and physical evidence in equal measure: the interplay between environment, buildings, objects, and human activities has always fascinated me. My focus has been on England, but I have regularly pursued comparisons, especially with France, eastern Europe and Scandinavia. I have worked and published extensively on medieval social, economic and cultural history; on material culture and technology; on buildings and domestic environments; and on popular belief and religion. I have long practical experience in field archaeology, excavation, and the recording of buildings.

Publications

  • (joint author) Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape (Liverpool University Press, 2020)
  • Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton University Press, 2018)
  • (ed.) Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2007).
  • The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford University Press, 2005)
  • Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Sutton Publishing, 1994)
  • Early Medieval Surrey (Sutton Publishing, 1991)

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