_{Home > Alumni > (COPY) (COPY)}

Happy New Year’s Greeting to the entire Wolfson family, wherever you are.

I hope and trust you found time over the holiday period to re-charge your batteries, catch up with loved ones, and celebrate saying hello to 2022.

As the days here in Cambridge start to get noticeably longer, and as Covid restrictions ease a little, I am feeling upbeat and confident about the year ahead. I am optimistic that this is the year when I may once again travel and meet up with more of you in person.

What will 2022 bring for Wolfson? 

We continually strive to improve: to have more students put Wolfson as their first choice; to offer more scholarships; to widen participation, offering opportunity to more students from disadvantaged backgrounds; and to nurture students once they are here, by feeding their imagination and creativity, giving them opportunities to experience something new, and expanding their horizons. 2022 will see us working ever harder to achieve these goals.

We are also embarking on a new phase: planning for Wolfson of the future! We have adopted a new site masterplan which you can look up online here. This is an exciting vision of what Wolfson could look like in 2050 – with new facilities, more accommodation, and more and better spaces where we can study, socialise and come together to imagine and invent a better world.  It is a masterplan for the Wolfson College which our students deserve. I look forward to walking that path alongside you all.

I see that it is also time to wish you all a Happy Lunar New Year as well! 

Ring True, Wolves

Professor Jane Clarke, President

Thank you for your support!

A huge thank you to everyone who responded to the end-of-year call to support the College’s Annual Fund. Around 90 alumni generously gave gifts totaling £30k in support of the General Fund and Student Support Fund. All the money will be put to very good use. Here’s a message from student, Nomisha Kurian who did her PhD fieldwork on children's wellbeing in high-poverty communities in India

"I am deeply grateful to Wolfson and its generous donors for a travel bursary to help fund my fieldwork. Since this trip was for primary data collection for my PhD, this fieldwork has been core to my degree and necessary for its completion. I conducted interviews and arts-based research with children and teachers in high-poverty communities for my thesis on child wellbeing in Mumbai, India. Although I could not take photos of participants due to child safeguarding policies, I attach a collage made by one of my 11-year-old child participants, where she visually depicted her understanding of wellbeing. Her collage showcases her sketch of herself as a princess, enjoying positive mental health and better socio-economic resources. This young girl demonstrated great resilience, courage, and optimism despite living in poverty, and I believe her bright spirit is conveyed by the colour and vibrancy of her collage"

One-off or regular gifts are easy to give online from anywhere in the world and can be made at any time throughout the year. Watch out for more feedback about how your money is being spent.

You can donate to Wolfson Collegevia our website.

News From the Wolfson Community - Spotlight on Fellows

Wolfson Welcomes Nine New World-Class Researchers
From the origins of life to early cancer detection
The College officially welcomed its new cohort of Junior Research Fellows (JRFs) this month: nine world-class researchers covering a broad range of subject areas, including chemistry, biomedical optics, epidemiology, social anthropology, developmental psychology, molecular biology, history of international relations, and genetics and translation at the origins of life on Earth. 

Junior Research Fellows are a key part of the College, making the College home to a vast spectrum of world-leading research, representing multiple University departments and coming from diverse international backgrounds.

Professor Jane Clarke, Wolfson College President, said: "I am delighted to welcome our new crop of JRFs to Wolfson. The College benefits enormously from the presence of early career academics. They bring new ideas to the fore, they mentor and inspire our graduate students, and they epitomize the diverse and international nature of our community. It is through supporting and nurturing the next generation of researchers, both research students and JRFs, that Wolfson... (Read more)

Dr Akeem Sule - College Research Associate
Exploring depictions of mental health in popular culture
Dr Sule has taught psychiatrists internationally, in Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Egypt, Nigeria, the Republic of Ireland, and here in the UK. Through Hip Hop Psych, co-founded with College Research Associate Becky Inkster, he has explored representations of mental health in hip-hop music. Now, he is turning his attention to depictions of Black mental health and racial trauma in film and TV.

Dr Sule's research explores material that relates to mental health, either directly or indirectly, investigating how UK TV programme Hollyoaks deals with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) to how Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island depicts “the delusional material of patients”. His work is cross-cultural, examining Bollywood movie ‘Devdas’ which depict alcohol dependence’ and ‘Nollywood’ movies, from the Nigerian film industry, which, he says, “often have characters ‘possessed by evil spirits’ who probably might instead be suffering from mental health problems”.

All of these cultural outputs, says Dr Sule, “potentially open discussion about stigma, cultural representation of distress, and mental health problems.”

We spoke to Dr Sule about his research and how popular culture can... (Read more)

Alumni Stories

Member of the Month - Paul Sutton
Paul matriculated at Wolfson in 2000 and studied for a PGCE. We caught up with him after his recent interview with Sky Arts.

What is your current occupation and how did you get into this role?

I'm an independent book publisher. I also do consultancy work and scriptwriting in the international film industry. On completing my studies at Wolfson, I was given a small grant from the University to help towards my costs in founding and editing Camera Journal, the Cambridge University film journal. This was a lavish 100-plus page bi-annual affair that only lasted two issues because it was so well received: copies had somehow found their way to Methuen and I. B. Tauris, both of whom contacted me directly to write books for them.

Though I enjoyed the following years of researching and writing, I missed using the design skills and editorial judgments I had cultivated when publishing the film journal. And although I was paid a less-than-living-wage advance to write books for large publishers, I was not satisfied that they kept all the royalties. Instead of sulking about this, I decided to be a publisher.

What do you most enjoy about your job?

I enjoy the freedom not to be held back by the decisions of others. I get the sincere satisfaction of making beautiful books that add to... (Read more)