Oxford Faculty

While at Oxford, Michał  focused on combining his architectural training with that of a writer and wrote his master's and doctoral theses on the relationship between architecture, film, and literature. During that time, he lived on a river boat; writers need adventures to write about, after all. In his architectural master's thesis, he focused on the conservation of Hu-Tong areas in Beijing, China, as well as on the relationship between urban structures and systems of government. After university, to develop as a writer, he underwent pilot training while working as ground crew and firefighter at an airfield. This experience provided the material for a collection of short stories, published in 2009 under the title “Entropie”. He then continued writing about space and society for journals and newspapers and worked as a broadcast journalist producing his own weekly cultural TV show.  Michał now works as screenplay consultant and assistant director on feature films and had his acting debut on the silver screen in 2021, playing a doomed intellectual. Some say he only did it to let himself be killed on-screen. Michał is fluent in English, Polish, and German, and gets by reading novels in French and Spanish, occasionally trying to revive his rusty Latin by reading some of the lighter classics. This fall, Michał will be returning to the film set to work on a WW2 spy film to be shot in the Polish mountains, and a family drama to be shot in Croatia.

A lifetime theater professional—as an actor, writer, director, producer, and teacher—Lizzie is the founder and Artistic Director of Shake-Scene Shakespeare, currently the UK’s only cue-based teaching and performing company producing Shakespeare from cues only. Lizzie returned to academic study in her 50s and is researching a practice-led PhD (part time) at the Shakespeare Institute. Her experience as an actor, director, producer and book-holder for Shake-Scene, as well as her professional acting career, inform her research interests. Lizzie regularly runs workshops (in person and online) in the techniques required to make working from cued parts the vibrant acting experience it can be. Shake-Scene performed live cue-based productions from their creation in 2017 until the 2020 lockdown opened up the new medium of online theater. Twenty-nine full play performances later, as well as many performances of collected scenes, Shake-Scene are still performing regularly online, with an ever-growing international company, and recently returned to live performances with Much Ado About Nothing at the Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells.

While at Bowdoin College, Erica focused in English, creative writing, and environmental studies, and was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. Her honors project—a literary nonfiction work rooted in field work and interviews about the controversial return of wolves to the western United States—laid the groundwork for her debut book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, which will be published in spring 2023 by Flatiron/Macmillan in the U.S. and Canongate in the U.K.. After Bowdoin, Erica worked in Italy as a co-producer of Amuri, a documentary about endangered Sicilian food traditions which premiered at the Oxford Food Symposium. She went on to get her M.F.A. in creative nonfiction at the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts fellow and assistant editor at the Great River Review. The winner of awards and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Institute of Journalism and Natural Resources, and the Ucross Foundation, her published essays and journalism can be found in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, Outside, The Yale Review, and other publications. She has taught on a student writing trip in Oxford, as the 2019-2020 Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, and as a Writer-in-the-Schools in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, where she now lives and works as a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.

While at Oxford earning her undergraduate degree, Rodina focused her academic interests on the genetics and developmental biology of the immune system, which led her to undertake research at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. There, she pursued how stem cells signal between each other in embryonic life stages. Prior to embarking on medical school, Rodina followed her passion for dance and trained professionally at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, founded by Sir Paul McCartney. Following her internship, Rodina ranked in the top 5% of candidates to win a place on one of the leading residency programs in the UK in her chosen specialty of anesthesiology. Rodina delivers anesthesia for a vast array of surgeries, cares for the sickest patients on the Intensive Care Unit, is the airway specialist on the hospital on-call emergency resuscitation team, and has additional expertise in pain management. Rodina is an instructor for the Resuscitation Council UK, teaching students and colleagues life-saving skills for cardiac arrest situations. She is also Guest Faculty at London South Bank University. Presently, she is in a Fellowship in the Intensive Care of premature and newborn babies in her hometown of London.

While at Cambridge, Vicky specialized in human geography and worked with refugees and asylum seekers in London and Calais. She went on to complete a Master of Science in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at Oxford, furthering her interest in justice in the asylum system. After graduating, Vicky spent two years in the UK Government (Civil Service) in asylum and refugee policy and research, while also doing pro-bono research for the legal charity Just for Kids Law. In October 2021, Vicky started a PhD at Oxford, studying the criminalization of asylum seekers in the UK. She is Director of Screen Share UK, an organization that supports, informs and advocates against the digital exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. Alongside her PhD, she runs events for the research group Border Criminologies, and is a participant in the Bonavero Institute’s Legal Aid Clinic, which involves paralegal work with a solicitor’s firm with clients at the prison HMP Huntercombe. In her spare time, Vicky learns intermediate Arabic and enjoys open water swimming.

Rob is a writer, teacher, and Los Angeles native, although travel keeps him away from Hollywood for months at a time. As an undergraduate art history major at UCLA, he was assistant arts editor for the Daily Bruin and worked kitchen prep in his dorm. While pursuing his master’s degree in film at USC, he worked as a phlebotomist, middle school English teacher, and realtor. He is currently shopping a TV pilot (Runway) and a feature-length script (No Kissing). If he hadn’t pursued a writing career, his second choice would have been to be a chef. He is a charter member of Slow Food and once had to move because his library of cookbooks had outgrown his apartment. Rob has taught numerous seminars at Putney’s international Pre-College programs, and at Pre-College at Amherst College, where he also served as director. He has worked with Putney for 22 years.

An architect from Serbia, Mihaela is an intellectual polymath with master’s degrees in cognitive science from the University of Vienna, neuroscience from King’s College London, and film aesthetics from Oxford. Until recently she was Director of Strategy and Development at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, partnering with the Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and AI. Mihaela has taught on summer programs at Oxford since 2014.

After earning master’s degrees in Economics (in Serbia) and Cognitive Science (in Vienna), Luka came to Oxford where he earned a doctorate in Experimental Psychology. His research focuses on the interplay between passions and reason, and he has taught innovative courses at both the university and secondary school levels—including summer programs in Oxford—since 2014.

During his undergraduate, Gonzalo specialized in human rights through his academic activity and volunteering in a shantytown, accompanying victims of police harassment, abuse, and violence. As a lawyer, he worked for three years in the Chilean State in the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality, where he participated in the professional team responsible for decriminalizing pregnancy interruption. Then he did his LLM in LSE, where he got training in Social Sciences and Law and Society. In October 2020, Gonzalo began his PhD at Oxford Centre for Criminology, researching policing, police forces, and democratic theory. He is on the Board of a Primary School. In his spare time, he participates in literary discussion groups, cycles, and plays football (soccer).

At Oxford, Max wrote his doctorate on twelfth-century Byzantium and the Crusades, for which he carried out extensive fieldwork in the Balkans and the Middle East. He then became a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, where he continued his research with expeditions to Israel-Palestine, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Serbia, and Kosovo. He has since become a lecturer in Tokyo, while also being a research associate at St. Benet's Hall, University of Oxford. He is a keen rower and rowing coach, and in addition to teaching on various summer programs has lectured to the Defence Academy of the UK, and worked in outreach programs to homeless people. He speaks several languages, half of which are no longer actually spoken.