Cambridge's postgraduate pioneers

 

Victoria is working on masculinity, arms, armour, and the culture of warfare in Sixteenth-Century Italy and Germany. Victoria came to Cambridge after obtaining an MA in Italian Renaissance Art at Syracuse University and a position in the Valuations Department at Sotheby's, London.

 

Victoria’s research has already gained numerous plaudits, and raised some eyebrows along the way. In 2015, the Guardian newspaper revelled in Victoria’s work on the evolution and demise of the codpiece, as part of their coverage of the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall.

 

Victoria has also explored the vast archives of the Otto di Guardia, a powerful magistracy in Renaissance Florence. Weapons were prohibited in Florence in an effort to maintain peace but Victoria found that men often wrote to ask the Otto for permission to wear or carry, in public, banned weapons. Speaking at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston, Bartels used this research to shine a light on the ways in which Renaissance men used weapons and armour in their daily lives to promote a masculine image.

 

Victoria said: "I chose Cambridge because I really admire the work of my supervisor, Professor Ulinka Rublack. Having the opportunity to work with her, in addition to the other historians and graduate students at the History Faculty made Cambridge the ideal place for doing my PhD. The Fitzwilliam Museum is another incredible asset to have on hand, as their rich collections are extremely useful for my field of study.”

 

Olivier is examining key differences between French and British anti-jihadist counter-terrorism from 1975 to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, including interviews with senior figures in Government, the military, intelligence services and policing – in Britain, France and the United States – Olivier seeks to explain the complex internal and external drivers of French and British policy in this area. Central to Olivier’s work is an in-depth comparison of domestic and overseas approaches, relations with the United States, and relevant policy, legal, military, intelligence and policing aspects. Among other subjects, Olivier is examining the UK’s current use of drones in counter-terrorism and France’s reaction to recent lone wolf attacks at home.

 

Olivier said: “One of the greatest challenges I face is the speed with which the situation is changing in both countries. But this is also what drives me and makes the work so interesting. After studying languages at Cambridge as an undergraduate, I began a career as a defence and security professional. It’s great to come back to Cambridge to pursue my academic interest in this area – one of the key attractions for me was the flexibility and encouraging attitude at POLIS.  While there are other universities with impressive counter-terrorism specialisms, POLIS gives me access to a wide range of experts, including specialists in EU defence policy and the Middle East.” 

 

Markus and Saran are both members of the Relativity and Gravitation research group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. They were recently part of a team of researchers, from Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, which successfully simulated how a ring-shaped black hole could cause general relativity to break down. The pair helped show how a bizarrely shaped black hole could cause Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a foundation of modern physics, to break down. However, such an object could only exist in a universe with five or more dimensions. Ring-shaped black holes were ‘discovered’ by theoretical physicists in 2002, but this is the first time that their dynamics have been successfully simulated using supercomputers. Using the COSMOS supercomputer at the University of Cambridge, the researchers were able to perform a full simulation of Einstein’s complete theory in higher dimensions, allowing them to not only confirm that these ‘black rings’ are unstable, but to also identify their eventual fate.