King’s College, Cambridge Annual Report 2016 Annual Report 2016 Contents The Provost 2 The Fellowship 5 Tutorial 18 Undergraduates 31 Graduates 38 Chapel 45 Choir 49 Research 56 Library and Archives 59 Bursary 62 Staff 65 Development 68 Major Promotions, Appointments or Awards 94 Appointments & Honours 96 Obituaries 103 Information for Non-Resident Members 249 The organ in the Chapel has just returned to use, after complete The Provost refurbishment and cleaning. The remarkable bright sound, not to mention the resplendent gilding of the pipes, is a revelation. A gala concert is planned for 9 November to celebrate the organ’s return. 2 After the excitements of the 2015 Chapel The King’s Community Orchard is now fully laid out in the field to the 3 THE PROVOST celebrations, 2016 has been a year of quiet south of Garden Hostel. It features rare and heritage varieties of fruit tree, progress on a number of fronts. Buildings and a nuttery. It is intended that the produce will be available to all the have figured largely. The conservation King’s community; some fruit is already available in this first year. We are cleaning of the Gibbs Building is essentially THE PROVOST very grateful to our Senior Horticulturalist Steven Coghill and his team for complete, and its new appearance, with the this and all their other work in the College gardens. Portland stone glowing in its original colour, is breathtaking. The College is about Many of you will know that we have a new Director of Development. to apply for listed building consent for a Following Julie Bressor’s decision to return to the United States at the end plan for the interior, which will repair the of last year, Lorraine Headen was seconded to us from the University Professor Michael Proctor staircases and reorganise the basements to Development Office, where she was a Principal Gifts Officer, as an interim produce more useful and attractive spaces. measure. Having much enjoyed this experience she applied for and was The new Boathouse has been completed, and while the footprint is similar offered the substantive position! Lorraine will have met many of you the new structure is on two floors and features proper changing facilities already and will be in contact with many more of you over the coming for the first time. We are developing plans for a major increase in room months. We are delighted she has agreed to join the College. numbers and facilities in the graduate ‘colony’ on Cranmer Road, partially funded by the sale on advantageous terms of the always unpopular As anyone who has come to the College in the tourist season will know, the Whichcote House in Chesterton. Our maintenance team, ably led by Shane management of tourists, particularly around the front gate, represents a Alexander, has restored A staircase to its full glory. Finally, we are serious problem, though in some ways a welcome one since visitor charges are considering the possibility of roofing over Chetwynd Court as part of the now a significant part of the College’s external income. A new Department of proposed redevelopment of Keynes Hall. While these projects will Visitor Services has been created to bring together the functions of the undoubtedly improve our facilities, there are others looming which are custodians and guides both at the gates and inside the Chapel. The Shop (now just as necessary, including the reroofing of Bodley’s, where the stone roof called the Visitor Centre) combines the sale of College merchandise with a tiles are crumbling. So hard is it to find replacements that the College has ticket sales point both for visits and for concerts. had to get the support of Historic England to reopen a defunct quarry for the purpose. A staple of this report is a review of the College’s performance in the Baxter Tables. Once more we performed very creditably, with particularly good Last year I reported on the ‘world’s tallest Lego tower’, which was results in Social Sciences and Mathematics, especially in the final year supposed to be constructed on Scholars’ Piece in April 2016. Sadly there examinations. We remain fully committed to seeking out and admitting has been a delay, but it does seem possible that it will be built this spring. talented young people from communities and schools that have little tradition of Oxbridge entry, and the value-added aspect of our results reassures us that we are finding the right people, though the admissions The Fellowship process is not an exact science. However, the landscape is changing rapidly. As I wrote last year, the downgrading of AS levels has led the Colleges and the University to decide collectively to institute new, Cambridge-specific, 4 pre-admissions written tests for many subjects, to be taken for the first time As this Report was in the final stages of production the College received 5 THE FELLOWSHIP this autumn. There is concern that these tests may make it harder to the sad news of the death, on 14 November 2016, of Dr John Stewart, separate true talent from good coaching. In another Government initiative, Emeritus Reader in Gravitational Physics. An obituary will appear in the university application forms may be anonymised so that the names and Annual Report 2017. THE PROVOST genders of applicants will not be known until after they are selected for interview. This is intended to improve diversity, but seems to us to make it New life Fellows harder to pursue our access initiatives. Professor Martin Hyland Professor Jean Michel Massing In fact the Baxter Tables themselves are probably to disappear. The Dr Rob Wallach University has proposed that the public display of Class Lists be abolished, in response to concerns about the use of personal data. The matter will be Fellows moving on decided by a ballot at the end of this term. If the proposals go through the The following left their Fellowships in the last year: data needed to compile the tables will no longer be available, though the • Mark Ainslie Colleges will still know how well they are performing against the University average. • Julie Bressor • Hadi Godazgar I have managed to get to the end of this report without mentioning Brexit, but it cannot be ignored. The uncertainty for the University, facing the loss • Mahdi Godazgar of European research funding if we leave the Single Market, is very • Eva Nanopoulos concerning, as is that for EU students and staff if there is an end to free movement. It is to be hoped that at least some of these uncertainties will • Malachi McIntosh be closer to being resolved by the time the next Report appears. • John Ottem Michael Proctor • Ben Phalan • David Stewart New Fellow commoners alaN DavisoN Alan came up to King’s in 1975 to study Economics and was supervised by Adrian Wood and Tony Lawson. When he left in 1978 he first worked as an economist for a mining company before becoming an analyst specialising in from the University of Stuttgart, Heriot-Watt University, and the Illinois the base and precious metals markets. After a decade of this he changed Institute of Technology. course and became an institutional stockbroker first for Lehman Brothers (or Shearson American Express as it was then called) and then Prudential alice Blackhurst (JRF, French & Visual Arts) Securities. He is married to Elizabeth Desmond, a graduate of Wellesley Alice Blackhurst completed her doctoral research on ideas of luxury in 6 and Stanford. contemporary French women artists in the Department of French at 7 Cambridge in November 2015. In 2015–2016 she was Visiting Lectrice at the THE FELLOWSHIP MartiN taylor University of Montpellier, and has previously studied at NYU (Visiting Martin was born and brought up in Lewisham, south-east London and Scholar, 2013); Harvard (Herchel Smith Scholar, 2010–2011) and attended King’s as an undergraduate studying History between 1987–90. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in Modern and Medieval Languages in 2010. THE FELLOWSHIP Martin has spent his career to date in asset management, primarily as a hedge fund manager specialising in portfolio equity investments across the world: a role from which he has recently retired. Her current research looks at the use of clothing in contemporary art projects, and she is preparing manuscripts on drawing in the work of Beyond markets Martin is a lover of all things related to politics, economics, Louise Bourgeois and luxury as represented in the films of the late Belgian gardening, architecture and West Ham United FC. director Chantal Akerman. New Fellows aliNe GuillerMet (JRF, Art History & Theory) Aline Guillermet studied Philosophy at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, WilliaM F. Baker (Extraordinary Fellow) William (Bill) F. Baker is a Structural Engineering Design Partner for the and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She joined the Department of Art architectural engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP. His work History and Theory at the University of Essex in 2010, where she wrote her spans a wide array of structural engineering projects, ranging from small PhD dissertation on the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter. She pavilions to the world’s tallest free-standing structure, the Burj Khalifa. He has held a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies at the Whitney has an Honorary Professorship in Structural Engineering Design in the Museum Independent Study Program in New York (2012–13), and a Department of Engineering where his research and lectures focus on Teaching Fellowship at the University of Essex (2015–16). design and on adapting the contributions of Rankine, Airy, Maxwell and Aline’s post-doctoral research aims to investigate the ways in which digital Michell to modern design.