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Paul Ulishney (2016, History)
I am the Stavros Niarchos Foundation DPhil Scholar at Christ Church, where I started life as a theologian and ended up a historian of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire. My first two degrees (BA and MPhil) were in Theology/Biblical Studies and Patristic Theology, respectively, where I specialized in the intellectual history of Late Antiquity. From there, I expanded my scope towards the broader history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages by switching into the field of History, and undertaking an MA in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at University College London. I returned to Oxford to work on the third year of my DPhil in History – supported by the American Friends Scholarship – where I aimed to unite the diverse strands of my previous graduate training by writing a thesis on the religious, political, and social history of the post-Byzantine Christian communities living under the Marwānid dynasty of the Umayyad Caliphate.
Jenna Zmrzel (2020, History)
As a DPhil student studying history, I am grateful that my research is supported by the American Friends of Christ Church. My research interests are primarily situated between gender history and nineteenth-century travel history. In 2019 I completed an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge where I looked at the published diaries of two British women who travelled to India in the 1890s, and the various ways in which they were connected to the British Raj in an unofficial capacity. Although a slightly different scope, this set a foundation for my DPhil research as I now focus on gender and British tourism in the Victorian era. Specifically, my project analyses female participation in personally-conducted excursions led by the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son in the mid- to late nineteenth century.
Amanda Curtis (2021, Information, Communications, and the Social Sciences)
I’m currently a fourth year DPhil in Information, Communications, and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute. My time in Christ Church has been both intellectually and socially inspiring, and it has been a privilege to be surrounded by so many fellow passionate students. During my first year, I was social secretary for the GCR and helped organize the first exchange with our sister college at Cambridge, restarting a long-standing tradition. Outside of my DPhil, I run the Oxford Games & Technologies reading group, which has members from across the House, Oxford, and other UK universities.
My research investigates how playing video games influences the ways we think, know, and make meaning. As games become more widespread and integrated into people’s daily lives, it’s important to understand how they shape our relationships with knowledge. I take an ethnographic case study approach to do this, involving in-game interviews, diary studies, and semi-structured ethnographic interviews.
The support of the American Friends of Christ Church Scholarship has been instrumental to allowing me to explore a variety of extra-curriculars and truly engage with the Oxford community. I would like to express my deep gratitudeto the House alumni who support current students through such initiatives.
Peter Varga (2021, Experimental Psychology)
It is a great joy to be back at Christ Church as a postgraduate after first coming up to the House as a visiting undergraduate. I am now reading for the DPhil in Experimental Psychology under the supervision of Christ Church’s own Prof Brian Parkinson. Drawing on my background as a classically-trained guitarist and liturgical organist, my thesis investigates how emotion and higher states (e.g., inspiration) are communicated by composers to listeners via music as well as the implications of this process for cultural transmission and evolution. This work is supported by my typically interdisciplinary approach to research, exemplified in past projects examining the role of aesthetics in science, experiences of higher goods (e.g., unity, truth, goodness, beauty) as indicators of self-transcendent well-being, the function of inspiration and imagination in the creative process, the effect of social stress on prospective memory, and differences between terrestrial and lunar psychophysics using virtual reality.
The process of cobbling together funding at Oxford can be exceedingly difficult and time-consuming, especially after the first year when most funding sources are no longer available. I am thus especially grateful for the support of the American Friends in the form of this scholarship aimed specifically at continuing postgraduates. It makes a significant difference in allowing me to pursue my intellectual and musical interests and offer novel contributions in my academic field as well as in College life, uninhibited by financial obstacles.
Madeline Nielsen (2024, Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature)
After falling in love with the study of books and manuscripts, my dream was to come to Oxford for training and mentorship opportunities I had not previously had access to, which would enable me to better contribute to my field and continue my research. The American Friends Endowment's generous support made that possible.
I always had a love for literature, and delighted in Latin poetry. In undergrad, I got a bit of exposure to Medieval manuscripts and later rare books, and I became obsessed. These objects, I realized, connected me to generations of readers from times past, humanizing ancient texts through thousands of individual experiences. I wanted nothing more than to continue with the study of books and manuscripts, curious to discover what stories they had to tell, and what insights they could offer that a study of the text alone did not reveal.
In the United States, I attempted this work, but without access to Paleography training, many archives, or scholars doing similar work, I could only go so far. Now at Oxford I am being trained in the "hard skills" of Paleography and Textual Criticism so vital for my research, allowed free range in a treasure trove of special collections with unbelievable holdings, and learning from people doing similar work. I have truly found "my people".
My gratitude to the Endowment is beyond words for their choice to support me at Oxford, and for all the amazing learning experiences I've been able to have here as a result. Living in Oxford and getting to be a part of such a rich community of like-minded scholars is a dream-come-true.
