Recognition of distinction

Fellow and Tutor in Law, Professor Sandy Steel; Professor of Mathematical Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy, Alexander Paseau; Senior Research Fellow in Persian and Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture, Dominic Parviz Brookshaw; and Fellow and Tutor in Chinese and Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Margaret Hillenbrand, have all been recognised for distinction.

Sandy Steel is Professor of Law and Philosophy of Law in the Faculty of Law at Oxford and Lee Shau Kee's Sir Man Kam Lo Fellow in Law at Wadham College. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, the University of Münster, and New York University.   

He's interested in philosophical and doctrinal questions about private law. He has written mainly about torts and private law theory, but also maintains an interest in general jurisprudence and has co-authored (with Nick McBride) a critical guide to the subject: Great Debates in Jurisprudence (Palgrave, 2014, 2nd edn 2018).  

In 2016, he was awarded the Modern Law Review's Wedderburn Prize for his article 'Justifying Exceptions to Proof of Causation in Tort Law'. His other book, Proof of Causation in Tort Law (CUP, 2015, paperback edn 2017) won the Society of Legal Scholars Birks Runner-up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. His work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the High Court of Australia.  

He is currently busy working on two monographs for Oxford University Press, one on omissions liability in tort, and one on the normative foundations of remedial law.  

Sandy teaches tort, contract, jurisprudence, commercial remedies, and philosophical foundations of the common law.

Alexander Paseau is Professor of Mathematical Philosophy and the Stuart Hampshire Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Wadham.

He was educated at Cambridge (BA 1996, PhD 2003), Oxford (BPhil 1999) and Princeton (visiting graduate 2001), in Mathematics and then Philosophy. Before taking up his present post in 2005, he held a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Alexander’s research interests include logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of religion, metaphysics and epistemology. He teaches Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (in the Mathematical Institute), Philosophy of Mathematics, Elements of Deductive Logic, and various other lecture and tutorial courses.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Tutorial Fellow in Chinese at Wadham. She took a BA in Chinese and Japanese at Pembroke College, Cambridge, an MA in modern Chinese literature at the University of Edinburgh, and a DPhil in East Asian comparative literature at Merton College, Oxford.

Before coming to Oxford in 2009, she held a Chuan Lyu Fellowship in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, and a lectureship in modern Chinese culture and language at SOAS, University of London. Her research focusses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, especially cultures of protest.

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at The Oriental Institute and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham. He holds a DPhil from Oxford in medieval Persian poetry, and a BA from Oxford in Arabic with Persian.

The current focus of Professor Brookshaw’s research is the intersection between performance, patronage, and desire in texts produced by poets and other literati who were active in Shiraz in the fourteenth century CE. In his wider research, Brookshaw examines the emergence and genesis of Persian wine poetry in the eastern Iranian lands in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the relationship of this poetry to the earlier Arabic khamriya, the heteroerotic and homoerotic dynamics of Persian and Arabic lyric poetry, and the interplay between the bacchic and the panegyric in the Persian ghazal.

In terms of the modern period, Brookshaw looks at women poets and their royal patrons in the first half of the Qajar period (circa 1797-1848), and he is currently working on a monograph in which he investigates the role played by poetry in the formation of a royal cultural policy in early nineteenth-century Iran. Brookshaw’s research on modern/ist twentieth-century Persian poetry is centred on Iranian poets and their dialogue with (and ultimate subversion of) the Persian poetic canon. His other research interests include poets of the Iranian diaspora, non-Muslim religious minorities in Iran, and Persian language learning.

Before arriving at Wadham in September 2013, Brookshaw taught Persian literature and language at Stanford University (2011-2013), the University of Manchester (2007-2011), McGill University (2005-2007), and the University of Oxford (2002-2005). From 2004-2014 he served as Assistant Editor for Iranian Studies. He is a former member of the Board of the International Society for Iranian Studies, and of the Governing Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies.