Stanford House Faculty
While the tutorial is the centrepiece of the academic experience on the Oxford programme, students also take a seminar course. In Oxford, these are intensive, small-group discussion courses taught by local faculty, most of whom have posts at Oxford University or at other institutions nearby. Seminars are also offered by the Centre Director, and the Senior Tutor, drawn from their own research.
Faculty in Residence
Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP programme locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. View a list of current and future faculty.
Dr Pedro Arcain
Pedro's work explores the intersection of public policy, law, government, and regulation. He is particularly interested in(i) how the design of institutions and organizations can improve governance and public service delivery; (ii) how informal networks shape legal and regulatory outcomes; (iii) how leadership and management styles influence constitutional politics; and (iv) how different regulatory approaches affect the delivery of major policy projects, particularly in infrastructure and technology.
Pedro has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Law and Blavatnik School of Government, as well as at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has also contributed to the Victor Nunes Leal Chair at Brazil’s Supreme Court and the Democracy Program at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Pedro is a qualified lawyer in Brazil.
At Stanford House, Pedro’s courses adopt interdisciplinary approaches to prepare students for complex decision-making. Students engage critically with theory while developing practical skills through case studies, simulations, policy reports, and analytical papers. Guest speakers ranging from supreme court justices to senior parliamentarians join class sessions to share real-world insights into today’s challenges
Dr Emma Plaskitt
Emma Plaskitt is a graduate of McGill University, Montréal, and Merton College, Oxford, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century novelists Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney. Since 1994 she has taught English literature 1640–1901 for many Oxford colleges, including Brasenose, Somerville, and St Hugh’s. Having worked for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where she contributed articles on a variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, she now focuses on teaching for Stanford in Oxford and for Oxford’s Continuing Education Department (Oxford Lifelong Learning). Though a specialist on the literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century, her research interests include the Victorian novel—particularly the gothic novel and novel of sensation—and children’s literature and fantasy. She is currently preparing a scholarly edition of the late Victorian gothic fantasy novel, Lilith, by George MacDonald.
Dr Liam Bekirsky
Liam recently completed his DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, focusing on knowledge creation networks and practices in the education sector. His research and teaching interests include social networks, political economy of technology and innovation, sociology of digital technologies, EdTech, and education. Liam holds master’s degrees in Public Policy of Digital Technologies from Sciences Po, and in Global Affairs (Political Economy of Innovation) from the University of Toronto, as well as undergraduate degrees in History and French, and teaching from York University in Toronto. He has been a tutor at Stanford House in Oxford for over three years.
Haydn Middleton (New College, Oxford)
Haydn has taught Creative Writing for the Stanford in Oxford Program since 2015 and previously lectured for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. He is the author of nine literary/fantasy novels for adults, plus dozens of books of fiction and non-fiction for children, and he writes on pop/rock music for The Critic magazine. An adaptation of his novel, The Ballad of Syd & Morgan – an account of an imagined meeting in 1968 between the novelist E M Forster and Syd Barrett, a founder member of Pink Floyd – was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2023. Further information on his publication history, and an ongoing blog, can be found at www.haydnmiddleton.com.
Dr Juliana Dresvina (History Faculty; Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford)
Julie is a cultural historian whose work bridges scholarship and storytelling. Trained in History, Theology, English, and Psychology, she publishes widely on topics ranging from early medieval saints and monsters to twentieth-century Oxford writers, artists, and myth-makers. Her research focuses on how imagination, material culture, and narratives shape human experience across time. She teaches courses in literary and cultural history with a strong Oxford focus, including Oxford and the Rise of Fantasy, The Inklings of Oxford, and Fantasy in Its Natural Habitat. Alongside her academic career, she is also a practising fantasy writer and has completed two fantasy novels, currently out on submission with her literary agent. She is the 2025–26 Inklings Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, where she works on the legacy and future of fantasy literature.
Dr Matthew Landrus (Supernumerary Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford)
Matthew examines innovative interactions with natural philosophy, technology and the practical arts during the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. As a specialist on the working methods and intellectual interests of artist/engineers, he studies cross-disciplinary investigative and inventive approaches in the histories of ideas, science and technology. Much of his work focuses on European material culture, though often in connection with global, transcultural developments. Examining the transmission and development of knowledge, he works mainly with early notebooks, manuscripts, informative objects and built environments that help assess trajectories of innovative engagements.
Although Matthew focuses on early modern Italy, his research has extended beyond core subjects to developments of the following courses: the science of art, history of medicine, history of collecting, princely courts, the Grand Tour, British history, architectural history, historiography, philosophy, transcultural objects, South Asian visual culture, illuminated manuscripts, paradoxes in visual culture, and modern art. He has also worked on a broad range of exhibitions, focusing in recent years on the work and reception of Leonardo da Vinci.
This work assists with teaching Oxford courses on ‘global networks of innovation, 1000-1700: China, Islam and the rise of the west’, ‘theories and methods in historical analysis’, a short course on the ‘history of medicine’; and assists with tutorials on ‘histories of madness and mental healing in a global context’, medieval and early modern British history, nature and art in the Renaissance, conquest and colonisation in the sixteenth century, Flanders and Italy in the quattrocento, and South Asian sculpture.