Jesus College is delighted to announce that we have appointed Dr Janina Schupp as our new SOUTHWORKS Digital Hub Career Development Fellow.

Janina (below) joins us from the University of Cambridge, where she was an Affiliated Lecturer in Architecture and Moving Images and Postdoctoral Research Associate of the recent AHRC-funded CineMuseSpace (2017-2020) and GCRF-funded CineGenus (2019-2020) projects.

 

The Digital Hub, located in our new Northgate building which is due to open later this year, is designed to be a flexible space that will use state-of-the-art streaming technologies and digital methodologies to transform the learning and research experience of the Jesus academic community and wider Oxford research community. The new facility will also enable us to increase our outreach activities to both the local community, and schools across Oxford, England and Wales.

As the SOUTHWORKS Digital Hub Career Development Fellow, Janina will help to curate a broad programme of public and College events hosted in the Hub, working closely with Senior Fellows and College Officers. She’ll be responsible for developing innovative activities that embrace the latest digital technologies to share the incredible world-leading research of our Fellowship to a wide range of audience. This work includes, for example, creating digitised versions of the College manuscripts and early printed books, and running online science experiments to engage primary-aged children.

This exciting position has been made possible thanks to the generosity of Mr Alejandro Jack, associate Alumnus of Jesus College and the Said Business School (Diploma in Global Business 2012), and his business partner Mr Jonathan Halife. In 2004 they started SOUTHWORKS, a UK-based software development firm. The company works on high-profile digital projects for well-known clients such as Microsoft, Amazon, Discovery, and 7-Eleven.

Mr Jack was particularly excited by the Hub’s role as a centre for learning and knowledge exchange in Oxford, which he sees as a natural pairing for SOUTHWORKS. He comments: “As a business that strives to Make Everything Right^TM, we are delighted to support Jesus College in fostering greater relationships with local and academic communities through the Career Development Fellow position and the digital scholarship offered by SOUTHWORKS.”

Mr Halife says: “This is a super exciting appointment that will advance the learning and research experience at Jesus College by finding innovative ways to use technology to connect with audiences. We are thrilled that SOUTHWORKS can support this.”  

 

Janina’s overarching research interest lies in how our urban existence is shaped by technological and media progress and how global challenges affecting urban environments and populations can be analysed and responded to via digital technologies. Digital resources, including film and social media, are at the core of her projects to explore the past, the present and envisage the future of urban communities.

She gained a Master’s degree in Philosophy in Screen Media and Cultures from the University of Cambridge (2013), and a PhD in Architecture and Moving Images, also from Cambridge (2018), for her research on ‘Audiovisual Battlefields: The remediation of cinema and media imagery and technologies in military urban conflict simulations’.

Previously, Janina was an Invited Visiting Scholar at the Nanjing University School of Architecture and Urban Planning (2018), a Camargo Foundation Fellow (2017) and a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center (2015-2016).

Janina says, “I am delighted to have been appointed as the SOUTHWORKS Digital Hub Career Development Fellow. Throughout my recent projects, high-level innovation through collaboration and engagement across disciplines and cultures has been key and this exciting position is a perfect fit to my personal work and research philosophies. The spectrum of interdisciplinary, digital scholarship in the Digital Hub additionally makes it an ideal milieu for my future endeavours to examine the impact of technology on cities and society, and I especially look forward to contributing my digital research and creative media experience to support scholars, events and activities in the Digital Hub once it is launched”.

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS FREng, Principal of Jesus College, says, “The Digital Hub at Northgate will be both physical and virtual convening space, enabling our students and academics at all stages of their career to exploit the extraordinary opportunities offered by new digital tools and methods. It will present our work to a wider public and support our access activities. We are delighted to welcome Janina to the College, and look forward to working with her on a wide range of engaging programmes that support our vision of Jesus College as a centre for interdisciplinary learning and research in the 21^st century”.