Five Sidney Fellows promoted to professorships 

Our new Professors, from left to right: Professor Stanley Bill, Professor Robbie Duschinsky, Professor Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Professor María Noriega-Sánchez, Professor Rupert Stasch.

The University of Cambridge has announced the appointment of five current Sidney Fellows as Professors, with the appointments to take effect from 1 October 2023:   

• Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni has been appointed Professor in International Relations 

• Stanley Bill has been appointed Professor in Polish Studies 

• Robbie Duschinsky has been appointed Professor of Social Science and Health  

• María Noriega-Sánchez has been appointed Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies 

• Rupert Stasch has been appointed Professor in Social Anthropology 

The appointments were announced in the Cambridge Reporter on 14 June.

Professor Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni is Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS) and Politics and History at Sidney. Her research focuses on international organisations, international security, and the role of non-state actors in global governance with specific focus on international arms control and disarmament and environmental advocacy. 

Professor Eilstrup-Sangiovanni said: “I am delighted to have been promoted to a personal professorship. As someone who never really intended to become an academic, this is wonderfully unexpected, and I could have never achieved it without the support and encouragement of my family, colleagues and students.  

“It encourages me to continue doing what I love, in terms of both my research and teaching focus, and it perhaps also provides me with a bit of added courage to venture into new research areas.” 

Professor María Noriega-Sánchez’s research interests lie in the field of language pedagogy, particularly in the role of translation in language learning and the use of new technologies to foster collaboration. Her book Mundos en palabras: Learning Advanced Spanish through Translation (Routledge, 2018), co-authored with Ángeles Carreres and Carme Calduch, explores innovative ways of using translation for language teaching and learning.  

Professor Noriega-Sánchez said: “I am delighted with my promotion to a personal professorship and extremely grateful to Sidney Sussex College and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics for their invaluable support over the years.

“I am especially pleased and honoured since this is the first promotion exercise of the recently created Teaching and Scholarship academic career pathway and, as such, a recognition of research-informed teaching practice and pedagogical innovation.

“In my case, this is of particular significance as it is the first time that former University language teaching officers have been eligible for academic promotion. We have seen a concerning decline in recent years in the number of students taking up modern languages in UK schools. In my view, establishing professorships for language teaching academics sends a powerful message within the educational sector and society as a whole. It highlights the value of learning languages in getting to know about other cultures, communities, ways of thinking, and indeed in widening our understanding of the world, which is now more important than ever.”

Professor Rupert Stasch is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist. His research focuses on how social relations are mediated by processes of representation, particularly visual representations and visual acts.

Professor Stasch has undertaken fieldwork over a number of years with the Korowai people in West Papua, Indonesia. He is currently writing an ethnography of encounters between Korowai and tourists, filmmakers, and magazine journalists. This will follow his earlier book Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (2009).

Professor Stasch said: “I’m very fortunate to be working at a university and College that is home to such a concentration of academic researchers with extraordinary expertise and intellectual commitment, and I’m very grateful for being recognised and supported for my work by this appointment.”

The five new Professors mentioned are all Fellows of Sidney Sussex College.

Professor Stanley Bill works on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, and on contemporary political discourse in Poland. He has particular interests in populist discourse, postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural and political history, the poetics of the body, religion and secularization, and Polish-Ukrainian relations. He is the author of Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (2021).

Professor Bill said: "Being a Fellow at Sidney means being part of a close-knit interdisciplinary community. For me, it has been a place of great intellectual opportunities, inspiration, and support beyond the main centre of my work in the Faculty. I value my time here enormously."

Professor Robbie Duschinsky is Head of the Applied Social Science Group within the Primary Care Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care. He is Director of Studies in Sociology at Sidney.

Robbie is co-PI of the “Living Assessments” Collaborator Award, exploring the integration of health and social care in assessments of children, and also of the “COACHES” study, examining mental health referrals and treatment for young people with social care involvement.

Professor Duschinsky said: "Sidney Sussex has always seemed to me to give a priority to kindness, especially in taking seriously the challenges students may face. These qualities help make the College a special community." 

The College congratulates our Fellows on their appointments.