Controversial Israeli political philosopher Professor Daniel Statman has been invited to visit Nuffield College for Trinity Term, despite a JCR statement condemning the decision. 

The statement, approved by Nuffield College JCR on 12^th March and circulated by the JCR President Isabella Cuervo-Lorens on 23rd April, accuses Professor Statman of producing academic work which “justifies genocide and war crimes” with “an underlying agenda – creating ethical justifications for Israel’s genocide”. Professor Statman was contacted for comment.

A Nuffield College spokesperson told Cherwell: “The college has given serious consideration to the concerns raised, and has taken the view that Professor Statman has not engaged in unlawful speech or conduct.”

Professor Statman is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel, and specialises in “ethics and political philosophy”. His time at Nuffield College forms part of a sabbatical from his work at the University of Haifa for spring 2026. 

The statement also quoted comments made by Professor Statman on an episode of the 18Forty Podcast released in October 2023, and recorded after the 7^th October terrorist attacks by Hamas in southern Israel and the beginning of Israeli military action in Gaza. In a section of the interview highlighted by the JCR, Professor Statman said: “I don’t have this very strong moral revulsion or moral sadness or regret by the knowledge of the death of these civilians”, and claimed “it’s okay to kill them”, citing “the principle of collateral harm”. In the same conversation, he acknowledged that civilians in Gaza “don’t deserve to die”, even if they are not “completely innocent”.

In the interview, he also rebutted claims that civilians in Gaza had been left with no safe space  from Israeli military action, saying, “I’m not very convinced by the claim they have nowhere to go to. They have places to go to. Orchards, the beaches and so on”.  He claimed there were “zero publications…in serious journals by Arab philosophers” and that Arab academics were “not part of the philosophical discourse at all”.

In a comment, JCR President Cuervo-Lorens told Cherwell: “The JCR and wider College community became aware of Mr Statman’s plans in Week 8 of Hilary Term 2026”, and that “the statement passed by a wide, near unanimous margin via anonymous vote [by Nuffield JCR members]”.

A Nuffield College spokesperson told Cherwell that the invitation to Professor Statman to visit the College was sent in “the summer of 2023…on the basis of his long-standing work on political philosophy”. The spokesperson described the invitation as “part of the College’s long-standing programme of regular academic visitorships, through which we host researchers from other UK and international institutions.

“As a College of the University of Oxford and an academic institution in their own right, we are committed to protecting lawful freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to providing an environment for rigorous academic engagement, open inquiry and critical debate within the law, where all members of our community are supported and treated with dignity, respect and civility.”

Professor Statman has written several philosophical works. His book War by Agreement: A Contractarian Ethics of War was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Outside of academia, he has served on public committees to revise the ethical code of the Israel Defense Force and to review requests for exemption from army service for Israeli citizens on the grounds of conscience.

“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.” So speaks the withering sarcasm of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, condemning all flowery fabrics to uncoolness even ten years after its release. Her dismissal implies that the floral print is basic – the horror of all fashion’s avant-garde. Oxford’s seeming aversion to pattern shows leftovers of this logic, with style shown through outfit styling rather than design details. Textiles often fall secondary to an ensemble’s overall impact, with florals seldom regarded as revolutionary. Yet in Oxford’s wealthy male-centred microcosm – and well beyond it – they prove to be a tool of subversion, intentional or not. Flower prints are muddy with complexity, and ripe for revisioning.  

Woven, printed, or embroidered, flowers are easily the most familiar motifs in fashion history. They have become associated with opposing constructions of femininity, with Christian Dior’s ‘flower women’ of the post-war period, petal-skirted in their essentialist embodiment. However, it was his floral-printed day dresses that influenced a generation of women, reaffirming nip-waisted body ideals and linking flowers as pretty, domesticated visions of nature with the ‘domestic goddess’ housewife trope. This is reflected today through a resurgence in the trad wife aesthetic, coupling homemade bagels with flowery, floaty gowns. Celia Birtwell’s sheer chiffons show 1960s reactionism to Dior’s ‘New Look’: the Hippie generation sought to shake off their mothers’ fashioning of femininity, with Birtwell’s prints evoking psychedelia and Pop Art through a feminist lens. Indeed, her Mystic Daisy print is a model for how cool florals can be, outfitting every It-Girl under the sixties sun. Jane Birkin famously wore it for a Vogue photoshoot (back when it was acceptable just to wear one outfit for your fashion call) and Liza Minnelli dons a Mystic Daisy shirt in Cabaret. However, for Anna Wintour, florals are fundamental in crafting her timeless elegance, becoming a motif that is reconfigured and coloured to fit current modernities. Each new series of Bridgerton makes this clearer, with florals used to connect Regency dress with contemporary fashion – and the more diverse narratives that come with it. Bridging nature and art, these biological bouquets have dressed ideological divides, making floral prints unexpectedly contentious.

Rich with jewel-toned realism, the Ashmolean’s In Bloom exhibition captures how flora has afforded creative and economic agency to women specifically. In the museum collection, Rachel Ruysch’s still lifes convey how studies of natural subjects enabled women access into the patriarchal art world without violating their prohibition from art schools. Flowers presented a readily available subject: symbolising female propriety, such blooms – exotic or commonplace – also allowed women to exploit Enlightenment interest in botany. Mary Moser’s flower still lifes gained her enough acclaim to become one of the two female founders of the Royal Academy of Arts and even established within the royal court, demonstrating flora as an entry point into traditionally male professions. Indeed, In Bloom displays a coloured engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian. It depicts a banana blossom with the life cycle of a Bullseye moth, capturing the utmost biological detail in unique composition. Retrospectively, Merian is considered one of the earliest entomologists. Yet the agency afforded by flowers to women shaped the art world’s dismissal of floral depictions. The association between flowers and femaleness has helped and hindered women, extending to their bodies through fashion.

High fashion has recently revamped the floral print. Springing from Paris’s latest catwalk extravaganza, Sarah Burton’s Givenchy collection problematised the prejudicial concept of Old Masters, dressing the modern woman in the Dutch Golden Age world of Rachel Ruysch’s paintings. The standout dress sees jewel pigments of tulips run in embroidery threads, effectively turning flowers into fringing. No daintily-coloured pastels to be seen here – these flowers are wonderfully gothic, outstepping their assumptions as passive embellishment and giving movement and flair to the wearer as she walks. If Jonathan Anderson’s fall/winter Dior show is anything to go by, the floral reformation is set to colour accessories too, romping all through summer in gorgeous water lily heels. This is a welcome step away from literalising the feminine flower at Dior, leaning into a more tongue-in-cheek, youthful use of the founder’s sourcebook. Riotously rosy, Dries Van Noten also saw men in floral-printed splendour, showing how flowers are dying out as binary statements of outmoded fashionings of femininity. This may not seem all that revolutionary in 2026, but in a city that still appears surprised to see a female physicist, the floral print still has a place as a vehicle of gender subversion. Come Trinity, the floral print poses a destabilising antithesis to Oxford’s unpatterned fashion staples, rooted in upper-class fashionings of male exclusivity. Floral fabrics are more than ready to be reclaimed from bastions of prairie-dress-wearing trad wives. They still have the power to be groundbreaking, regardless of what The Devil Wears Prada 2 might soon have to say.

Researchers led by University of Oxford academic Dr Wei Huang have successfully created biologically engineered cells, designed to target antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) bacteria. 

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the study involved developing and testing two types of nonreplicating therapeutic cells named “SimCells” and “Mini-SimCells”.  Dr Huang’s team describe these cells as smart “bioparticles” that can selectively eradicate drug-resistant bacteria, whilst sparing non-pathogenic cells.

The testing process saw SimCells targeting a multidrug-resistant strain of E. Coli. Within six hours, the SimCells eliminated more than 85% of the target bacteria, whilst the mini-SimCells eliminated more than 97% within 48 hours. The team utilised a ‘plug and play’ design to create a multipurpose cell that can be reused to target different pathogens by changing the nanobodies on its surface, without rebuilding the basis of the cell. 

The study seeks to counter the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which sees microorganisms like bacteria and parasites evolve to resist drugs developed to eradicate them. According to the World Health Organisation, AMR has emerged as “one of the top global health and development threats”, as antimicrobial medications such as antibiotics and antivirals become less effective. 

Huang and his research partner, Yun Dong, told Cherwell: “The conventional antibiotic pipeline is failing to keep pace. Our SimCell (simple cell) platform addresses these challenges by offering a new way to fight dangerous drug-resistant bacteria.

“Because they cannot replicate and do not work like standard antibiotics, Sim Cells could provide a safer and more adaptable way to strengthen our diminishing antibiotic arsenal against the world’s most serious AMR pathogens”. 

Cumulative projections from the Global Burden of Disease study suggest over 39 million deaths between 2025 and 2050 that would be directly attributed to AMR. The WHO predicts AMR to be the trigger for the next global pandemic, on account of the range of infections and diseases that will be immune to modern medicine. Procedures like cancer chemotherapy, caesarean sections, and organ transplants will also be inhibited. Estimates from the World Bank suggest AMR could result in $1 trillion in additional healthcare costs, and a cumulative global GDP loss of $100 trillion by 2050. 

Huang and Dong told Cherwell that rather than the “current paradigm of developing a new small-molecule antibiotic for each resistant pathogen”, the “universal base” of the SimCell makes it not only more effective than antibiotics, but also more efficient. The ‘plug and play’ method bypasses the time and cost-intensive research process for antibiotics, and has the potential to “accelerate the response to AMR outbreaks, reduce development costs, and ultimately contribute to a shift in infectious disease management”. 

Huang and Dong told Cherwell they hope to see their work deployed in treating “recurrent urinary tract infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, or gut decolonisation of MDR carriers”. Whilst the development of new antibiotics has been stagnant since the 1980s, the team believe advancements in synthetic biology have “the potential to reshape how we conceptualise antimicrobial intervention”.