Three St Peter’s academics promoted to professorial titles at the University of Oxford in 2024

Professor Claire Williams joined Oxford in 2009 as Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese at St Peter’s and Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. She teaches Modern Literature from the Portuguese-speaking world (from Machado de Assis and Aluísio de Azevedo to Conceição Evaristo and Luiz Ruffato), Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research focuses on women’s writing and minority writing from the Lusophone world, particularly Clarice Lispector and Conceição Evaristo (Brazil), Maria Ondina Braga and Ana Luísa Amaral (Portugal), and Lília Momplé (Mozambique). She is interested in women’s life writing (especially biography), travel writing and translation. Her most recent publications are the co-edited After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century (Legenda/MHRA, 2022) and a volume of biographical texts by Portuguese writer Maria Ondina Braga (1923-2003), Biografias no Feminino (Imprensa Nacional, 2023). She is editing a collection of Clarice Lispector's interviews for Brazilian publisher Rocco, which will appear in 2024.

Professor David Alonso joined Oxford in 2019 as St Peter’s Carrie Perrodo Fellow and Tutor in Physics and Professor of Cosmology in the Department of Physics. Prof Alonso researches cosmology and is mostly interested in extracting information about fundamental physics from large astronomical datasets on different wavelengths. He is most interested in two regimes in the evolution of the Universe: the mysterious accelerated expansion at late times, fuelled by an unknown form of “Dark Energy”, and the violent expansion of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, since it provides a unique window into physical processes at very high energies. Prof Alonso is heavily involved in two international collaborations studying these two epochs: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Simons Observatory experiment.

Professor Vlad Mykhnenko joined Oxford in 2017. He is a Research Fellow at St Peter’s College and Professor of Geography and Political Economy at the Department for Continuing Education. His research is dedicated to the advancement of geographical political economy – a study of modern capitalist social formations understood as highly dynamic and innovative, but spatially uneven, variegated, crisis-driven systems. Major research foci include the interrelationship between spatial imbalances in production and consumption, physical and material manifestations of urban growth and decline, state power inequalities, and their impact upon economic development, territorial, social, and political cohesion. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Prof Mykhnenko has provided frequent expert comment on the conflict, and this year he co-authored and published a ground-breaking, peer-reviewed report demonstrating how a Green Steel pathway could turbocharge Ukraine’s post-war recovery.