This Michaelmas, we welcome 3 new Fellows, an affiliate Fellow and 3 new Bye-Fellows to Robinson.

Fellows

Dr Olivia Glaze (Faculty of MMLL)

Affiliated Lecturer in Portuguese

Research interests
Olivia works across the medical humanities and gender studies, examining representations of illness, trauma, and disability in contemporary Portuguese literature, film, and photography. Her research considers these experiences in relation to gender, empire, and austerity, with a particular focus on women’s life-writing and autofiction.

Olivia is also interested in research-policy engagement and in strengthening connections between academics and policymakers, particularly around the role of languages research in understanding and addressing societal challenges. Read more here

Olivia has been appointed as Robinson's first Head of Academic Skills. The role will complement the work of the Wellbeing Team with a focus on the teaching practice of staff and supervisors, as well as the academic skills of students within College. Thank you to Simon and Claire Godwin who have funded this position. 

Dr Freddy Foks (Faculty of History)

Dr Foks’ speciality is the history of modern Britain and its empire. He was a PhD student and JRF in Cambridge and was then a Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

In terms of research, Dr Foks’ prizewinning first book is Participant Observers, Anthropology, Colonial Development and the Reinvention of Society in Britain. He is now working on two book projects. The first is a history of migration to and from the UK with a particular focus on subsidised emigration. He is also writing a popular history book about the maritime history of modern Britain from the Victorian era to the 1970s.

Dr Lucy Thompson (Department of Geography)

Lucy is a cultural, historical, and political geographer interested in dance, creative practices, mobilities, and embodiment. Her doctoral research examined the cultural and historical geographies of dance, investigating the first geographical inquiry into the overlooked circum-Atlantic histories of tap dance. Overall, her PhD theorised dancing bodies in a rhythmic, embodied, and ‘more-than-representational’ art form, while investigating how dancing bodies are entangled with power, intersectional inequalities, and corporeal resistance, inseparable from their circum-Atlantic geographies. Methodologically, she is interested in exploring more creative, embodied, participatory, and digital methods within, and beyond, archives.

During her Isaac Newton Trust Fellowship, Lucy will work on developing her PhD into a monograph, alongside continuing her research into the renowned, but now largely forgotten, ‘first’ named tap dancer in the mid-nineteenth century – William Henry Lane (‘Master Juba’). She will also be pursuing a new interdisciplinary research project on rhythm, politics, and resistance.

Teaching Interests:

Lucy has taught across many Human Geography papers in the Department of Geography. At Part IA, this includes ‘Cultural Geography’, ‘Historical Geographies of Globalisation’, ‘Geopolitics and Political Geography’, ‘Geography’s Shapes’, and ‘Sustainable Development’. At Part IB, she is offering a lecture series for ‘Citizenship’, alongside qualitative research methods teaching. At Part II, she has supervised for ‘Political Appetites’ and undergraduate dissertations (within cultural, historical, and political geography).

She has also been heavily involved in Access & Outreach teaching across the University of Cambridge. Over the past year, she worked in the Outreach Team at Corpus Christi College, teaching Geography sessions to Sixth Form students over a 6-month programme, alongside designing, organising, and teaching on a brand-new postgraduate outreach programme – Experience Postgraduate Digital Humanities (co-organised with Cambridge Digital Humanities and funded by the Isaac Newton Trust).  

Other Interests:

Undergraduate Outreach and Admissions, Postgraduate Widening Participation, Theatre (including choreography and directing) 

Affiliate Fellow

Professor Ilaria Favretto

Professor Ilaria Favretto is a cultural historian of modern and contemporary Europe. She obtained her first degree in Milan and then a PhD at Queen Mary College (University of London). After a post-doctoral fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford, she worked at the University of Milan and then Kingston University (London).

Ilaria’s most recent work focuses on protest and social movements; and labour history. Through archival research, oral history, and sources such as cinema and songs, she studies protest cultures and practices, focusing particularly on forms of protest, their underpinning political and cultural traditions, roles and meanings in mobilisation, and circulation and re-adaptation to different needs and contexts across time and movements. In Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western European History (co-edited with Xabier Itcaina, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, 2017), she explored the impact of popular culture and earlier protest traditions, such as charivari, on modern and contemporary forms of collective action. Her latest book, Cultures of Protest and Industrial Conflict in Italy since 1945 (OUP, 2025), traces protest methods and cultures in Italian factories from the collapse of Fascism to today, offering new insights into the breadth and scope of workers’ protest practices and their models. The book won the American Association for Italian Studies 2025 Book Prize for History, Society and Politics and is currently being translated in Italian by the publisher Einaudi.

Ilaria is currently co-writing a book, Factory Soundscapes: Sonic Experience and Struggle on the Fordist Shop Floor for Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Elements series).

Bye-Fellows

Dr Gerrie Strik

Gerrie is a Humanities scholar working at the intersection of literary studies, cultural theory and philosophy. Her research concerns the literary imagination as a medium through which identity is conceived and experienced. She obtained her PhD for a dissertation on the concept of new materialism in modern Dutch literature. She was Rector of De Vrije Hogeschool, a liberal arts college in the Waldorf tradition. As Rector, she developed with her team a "New Liberal Arts" approach to education, with the aim of enabling young people to think through, and act on, the great challenges of their time. Alongside her academic work, she is an essayist writing on feminism, sex-based rights and gender for major Dutch newspapers.

At Robinson she is working on her current book project, Plato's Children, tracing conceptions of androgyny in Western literature and art, from Plato and Virginia Woolf to contemporary writers such as Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Nelson. The main argument of the book is that androgyny may offer a more integrative way of understanding the self than the concept of gender identity, and what such a framework could mean for young people working through questions of identity today.
 

Dr Gill Plain 

English Literature and Popular Culture

Dr Jiajing Zhang
By agreement with the Needham Research Institute, as Ho Peng Yoke Fellowship holder for 2026-2027.