Anthony Ayari
Visiting Scientist from France in Residence at Green College
Dr Anthony Ayari is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), based in the Physics Department of the University of Lyon at the Light and Matter Institute. His research explores the behaviour of matter and electrons at the atomic scale, where classical and quantum physics intersect. He earned his PhD in Physics from Université Grenoble Alpes, France, with a focus on exotic electronic states in cryogenic environments. Following his doctoral studies, Dr Ayari joined the Nanoscience Group in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland (USA) as a research associate, where he conducted pioneering work on ultrathin transistors. In Lyon, his research on vacuum electron sources achieved record-high-temperature quantum emission and enabled the creation of highly coherent electromechanical devices, leading to multiple patents and collaboration with industrial partners. Dr Ayari serves on the scientific steering committee of the Center for Nanoscience and previously chaired the NanoElectroMechanical Systems committee at the Observatory for Micro and Nanotechnology.
Dr Ayari will be in residence at Green College for three months, beginning in early September 2026.
Christine Ferguson
Inaugural Patricia Merivale Scholar in Residence
Professor Christine Ferguson (FEA, FRHistS) is Chair in English Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where her research focuses on the entwined histories of popular fiction, science, and alternative spirituality in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. She is the author of three books and two edited works, including the essay collection The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Andrew Radford, and the new monograph Opens Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain’s Occult Revival, 1842-1936 (Oxford University Press, 2025). In 2026, she will publish the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings as part of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Dr Ferguson is also a society member of Green College. She was in residence at Green College for a week in late July 2025, and then for a longer period beginning in late April through mid-May 2026.
Megan Leitch
John Grace Memorial Scholar in Residence
Dr Megan Leitch is professor and chair of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. Before relocating to the Netherlands in 2024, she was reader in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she worked for 12 years after receiving her PhD from the University of Cambridge. She has been president of the International Arthurian Society British Branch and co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature, and is now co-editing Boydell and Brewer's Arthurian Studies book series. She has published monographs on treason and romance in the Wars of the Roses (2015) and sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature (2021). She is now working on her third monograph, The Medieval Middlebrow: Romance, Gender and the Body Politic, c. 1300-1534, supported by the Leverhulme trust.
Dr Leitch will be in residence at Green College from late August through to mid-October, 2026.