Miles Kempton recently graduated with an MSc (with Distinction) in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology from Balliol College, University of Oxford. Previously, he studied History at Royal Holloway, University of London where he received numerous academic awards and graduated top of the Arts and Social Sciences Faculty. Miles’s principal interests lie in the history of the life sciences and the impact of Darwinism in Britain. He has given papers on a variety of topics, from the history of animal behavioural science in the nineteenth century to contemporary debates in animal ethics. In addition, Miles has just returned from seven months teaching English on the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion.

Mirela Ivanova is a DPhil student in History at Balliol College, Oxford. She joined Balliol for an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies after completing an undergraduate degree in History at Wadham College, Oxford. Her research looks into the implications of writing and literacy in early medieval communities and religious and political thought, focusing especially on the Balkans. Additionally she is interested in the processes of religious conversion in medieval societies, and the dynamics therein for the formalisation of ‘heresy’. To this end she teaches a course on comparative conversions for Oxford Summer Courses. Outside of her academic research she has lived, worked, and studied in Bulgaria, England, the States, and Russia, and written on politics, socialism, medieval literacy, culture, social mobility and feminism for a range of publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford Left Review, the London Progressive Journal, and ISIS Magazine amongst others.

James Harris is in the final year of his doctorate in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. Within the University of Oxford, he has taught undergraduates on literature and politics in early modern England, and lectured on the English Civil War and seventeenth-century print culture. His current research project explores the intersections of politics, religion, and identity in Cornwall and south-west Wales in the later Stuart period.

Marc Howard is a DPhil student in International Development at Exeter College, University of Oxford. He previously graduated from St Antony’s College, University Oxford with an MSc in African Studies (with Distinction), for which he won the Terence Ranger Prize for Outstanding Dissertation Performance. His doctoral research explores the histories of war veterans in Zimbabwe, and their role is forging its fledgling security institutions. He has recently presented his research in the UK and abroad, and his wider academic interests include development theory and practice, Cold War history, and war studies.