Our Committee

The lecture series is organised by former and current Pembroke College students.

Alexander Rutherford is a DPhil student at Pembroke studying artificial intelligence for robotics. Like many of the committee, he became rather attached to The Hobbit while growing up and hasn’t looked back since.

Anika Luo is a DPhil student in Biochemistry / Paediatrics working on developing vaccines against malaria. She discovered the joys of fantasy literature as a young child and has imagined herself as a witch, demigod, Jedi, hobbit, and so many more across the years. Hailing from a faraway land across the pond, she is excited to be embarking on this Unexpected Journey here at Pembroke.

Lily Sonnenblick is in her second year studying for a BA in history at Pembroke. When not in the Radcliffe Camera reading about actual rebellions, battles, and folktales of magic and monsters, she can often be found delving into fantasy-novel variants on similar themes.

Lucy Heppel is in the first year BA English Language and Literature. She is a fan of classic literature (especially Lord of the Rings!) and fascinated by the process of adaptation from page to screen and beyond.

Nadia Polonsky is a first-year student reading for an MSci in Psychology and Linguistics at Pembroke College. She grew up in Cambridge and is thrilled to now be at *the better* university in Oxford, where many of her favourite authors went.

Seda Öztürk is a DPhil student specialising in theoretical syntax at Pembroke College. Although she got familiar with fantasy as a genre early on in her life, she discovered Tolkien’s world with the famous trilogy of The Lord of the Rings when she was a teenager, followed by reading The Hobbit.

Our Founders

Gabriel Schenk spent his childhood pretending to be a knight, dreaming up fantasy worlds, and trying to get into Narnia. He completed his DPhil in English at Pembroke College in 2014, analysing different versions of King Arthur in literature, from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. He started the Tolkien lecture series with Will Badger in 2013, after finding out that nothing had hitherto commemorated Tolkien’s twenty years at the college.

Will Badger holds an MFA in Fiction from NC State University and a DPhil in English Literature from Pembroke College, Oxford. His research explores the early modern supernatural, specifically representations of witchcraft in the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists. Will currently teaches literature and creative writing at Lees-McRae College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Will is an accredited (PCIfA) member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. 

Former Committee Members

We thank our former committee members with gratitude.

  • Ariana Zlioba (MPhil in Comparative Government, Pembroke College)
  • Augustus Porter (DPhil in Astrophysics, Pembroke College) 
  • Harriet Carter (BA in English, Pembroke College)
  • Lindsey Cohick (MPhil in International Relations)
  • Louis Morris (DPhil in History, Pembroke College)
  • Michelle Chong (DPhil in English, Pembroke College)
  • Will Brockbank (DPhil in Old English and Old Norse LL, Jesus College)