Dr Samuel J Abrams

Educated at Harvard and Stanford, Samuel J. Abrams is concurrently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College, and a faculty fellow with New York University’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research. He is the author of several books on a variety of topics including public opinion, Congress, religion and society, and polarisation, and he has been widely published in the New York Times, Real Clear, and the Washington Post, alongside major scholarly journals. He is presently working on two book projects exploring partisanship, polarisation, and society, and Gen Z on college campuses. 

Dr Sophie Aldred

Sophie Aldred is an historian of early modern Britain and its expanding world. She is currently writing a monograph on the library of the parliamentarian John Robartes (1606–1685), showing how legal, biblical, and historical scholarship informed debates over authority, conscience, and governance during the Civil Wars and Restoration. Her next project, Reading and the Colonial Context: Precedent, Providence, and the Exercise of Early Empire c.1630–1702, examines the intellectual and moral frameworks that shaped England’s early expansion overseas, exploring how books and acts of reading informed colonial administration and debates over empire.

Dr William Aslet

William Aslet is an architectural historian of Europe in the long eighteenth century. Having first studied at Oxford, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2023. He is currently preparing a monograph on the eighteenth-century Scottish architect James Gibbs with a particular focus on his training in Rome. Having also published on sixteenth-century English portrait miniatures, Dr Aslet has a broad interest in the history of British art. He is a trustee of the Walpole Society and currently edits the Volume of the Walpole Society, the leading journal for documentary research in the field of British art history. He is an Associate Member of the SCR at Worcester College, Oxford, where he was the Scott Opler Fellow from 2023-25.

Dr Katherine Bayford

Katherine Bayford works on the history of asymmetric warfare from the French Revolution to the present. She is particularly interested in strategic failures in Western military policy, and military strategy in the Napoleonic Age. She works at the European Journal of International Security, and was previously a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Subversion, Unconventional Interventions and Terrorism. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Spectator, Unherd, the New Statesman, and Engelsberg Ideas.

Dr Connor Beattie

Connor Beattie works on Roman imperialism, particularly Roman expansion during the Middle Republic (c. 300-146 BCE). His planned first monograph looks specifically at the causes of Rome’s eastern expansion in the late-3rd and early 2nd centuries BCE and his project for a second monograph at the Pharos Foundation will expand on this to explore the causes, nature, and success of Roman imperialism across the Empire’s complex geography. He also works on the Roman military, particularly Roman military equipment and the combat culture of the Roman army in the Republic, and his work has been published in world-leading journals, including Historia, Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly and The Journal of Ancient History. 

Prof Nigel Biggar

Prof Nigel Biggar CBE is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. Described as ‘one of the leading living Western ethicists’, he has become a major commentator on cultural politics and academic freedom in the UK and beyond. Prof Biggar’s most recent book – Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) – is a Sunday Times bestseller and a Telegraph Best Non-Fiction Book of 2023. It strives to present a balanced assessment of Britain’s imperial past as a source of both pride and shame. His other works include What’s Wrong with Rights? (2020) and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (2014). His writing appears in outlets including the Financial Times, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Critic, UnHerd, The Irish Times, the Canadian National Post, and First Things.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

After initial studies in Classics, Jaspreet Singh Boparai began studying the classical tradition in French and Italian art and literature. Following an MA at the Courtauld Institute on mediaeval manuscript illumination and an MA from the Warburg Institute on Renaissance humanism, he became interested in the history of classical scholarship, earning the last-ever PhD from the department of neo-Latin at Cambridge. He has received scholarship from the École normale supérieure, and the British School at Rome, and a fellowship from the Villa I Tatti Centre for Renaissance Studies in Florence. A founding editor of Antigone Journal, he is currently writing a book about Latin and Greek on the Indian subcontinent.

Dr David Butterfield

David Butterfield works primarily on Latin literature, particularly poetry of the Late Republic and Augustan periods. His research has focused especially on the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius, and he is fascinated by the transmission of knowledge and literature from antiquity to the modern world. Following two decades at the University of Cambridge, latterly as Director of Studies in Classics, Praelector, and Archivist at Queen’s College, he was appointed Professor of Latin at Ralston College, based in Savannah, Georgia. He has written and edited books on Lucretius, Varro, A.E. Housman, and The Spectator, and published some 70 articles and 30 reviews in academic journals. He is also Literary Editor of The Critic, Contributing Editor of The Spectator, and Editor-in-Chief of Antigone.

Dr Panayiotis Christoforou

Panayiotis Christoforou’s work uncovers how the citizenry of the Roman Empire participated in politics, challenging the idea that the people had little political life under the one-man rule of the Roman emperor. His new project looks at how public attitudes and perceptions influenced the behaviour of individual emperors, turning the scholarly lens from the emperor to the people who gave him his power. Dr Christoforou’s latest work – Imagining the Roman Emperor: Perceptions of Rulers in the High Empire – was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Dr Megan Dent

Megan Dent is an academic and writer interested in politics, culture, and religion. After completing her DPhil, Disraeli and Religion at the University of Oxford, Dr Dent researched and reported on policy for Apolitical, a digital platform for government. She publishes and edits academic work on nineteenth-century history and religious thought, and her writing appears in The Church Times, The Dispatch and The Critic. Dr Dent’s research with Pharos focuses on the philosophical and theological foundations of classical liberalism and the history of conservatism.

Prof Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company, and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin. 

Dr Christopher Ford

Dr Ford is Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University’s Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies, and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  In prior government service, he was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation (2018-21), also performing the duties of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He is the author of three books – China Looks at the West: Identity, Global Ambitions, and the Future of Sino-American Relations (2015), The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations (2010), and The Admirals’ Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War (2005).

Dr Clarissa Hard

Dr Clarissa Hard specialises in twentieth-century English poetry. She wrote her PhD at the University of Cambridge on the material imagination and different categories of space in Philip Larkin’s work, adducing D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy as important influences. Dr Hard has a particular interest in sacred spaces and ecclesiastical architecture. Her current research explores the poetic evocation of churches over the past century, tracing the development of ideas about national identity, the pastoral, transcendence and neo-medievalism. The project includes writers such as T.S. Eliot, A.E. Housman and R.S. Thomas.

Dr Maxwell Hardy

Maxwell’s research embraces many aspects of the Greco-Roman world, with a particular focus on Augustan and post-Augustan Latin poetry. At present, he is writing a commentary on the third book of Statius’ Silvae, a collection of Latin poems that celebrate in elaborate style the lives and achievements of elite Romans in the reign of Domitian (AD 81–96). His other principal research interests include textual criticism, ancient poetic metre, and the history of classical scholarship. Maxwell completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, his BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge. He has taught Classics as a stipendiary lecturer at The Queen’s College and Trinity College, Oxford.

Dr Jack Haughton

Dr Nathaniel Helms

Nathaniel Helms is a philosopher who works largely on the epistemic dimensions of responsibility. What must we know in order to be culpable for something we’ve done wrong? What are we obliged to learn for moral reasons? Are some questions more worth answering than others for their own sakes? A recent graduate of the University of Oxford, Dr Helms addresses these questions in a forthcoming series of articles. He originally hails from Texas and spent time in Iraq and Florida prior to settling – permanently, he hopes – in the UK.

Dr Edward Howell

Edward Howell works on international relations and security in East Asia, especially the Korean Peninsula and North Korea’s foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. He is now turning to a project on the politics of nuclear proliferation in the wider Asia-Pacific region. Dr Howell serves as Korea Foundation Fellow at Chatham House. His analysis appears regularly in the media, including The Telegraph, BBC, UnHerd, and The Spectator. His latest book – North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order: When Bad Behaviour Pays – was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

Dr Edward Jones

Edward Jones is an ancient historian whose work focuses on Classical Athens. His first monograph examines the institutional and cultural dimensions of accountability in Athenian administration and offers a new interpretation of inscribed accounts (administrative records set up in public and sacred spaces such as the Athenian Acropolis). His second book project explores how Athenian ideas of public and private shaped Attic society, seeking to bridge the gap between older, institutionally focused scholarship and more recent social history. Dr Jones holds a DPhil in Ancient History (University of Oxford) and was recently the Macmillan-Rodewald Student (Postdoctoral Fellow) at the British School at Athens (2024–25). He is also a member of the Council of the British School at Athens.

Dr Isabelle Kent

Isabelle Kent is an art historian of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on Spain and its related states. Her current project, ‘The Heroic Body as Artifice in Habsburg Spain’ looks across visual and literary culture to understand how the male ideal was manipulated, reinvented and undermined between 1550 and 1660. Her next project will focus on humour and wit in Flemish art. She also has interests in early modern antiquarianism and the critical fortunes of Spanish art in Britain (on which she edited a book in 2020). Alongside her academic work, Isabelle is committed to public engagement. From 2017–19 she held a curatorial fellowship at the Wallace Collection, and she regularly works as an art critic, public lecturer and educator. Isabelle holds a BA and MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge where she has also recently completed her PhD.

Claire MacLeod

Claire MacLeod is the administrator for the Foudation. She is a communications specialist and interdisciplinary researcher based at the University of Oxford. Claire has a first-class MA (Honours) in Modern History from the University of St Andrews (2017-21) and an MSc Education (Digital and Social Change) from the University of Oxford (2021-22). Claire’s work covers a wide range of disciplines including early modern book history and education policy. Her MA thesis focused on the development of the seventeenth century French provincial book world. Claire is also preparing an intellectual biography of a German philosopher of education, Elisabeth Blochmann. 

Prof Noel Malcolm

Noel Malcolm was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1981-7); he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of the Spectator. In 1999 he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard; he gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (2001), and the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge (2012). Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Academies of Sciences of both Albania and Kosovo; at Cambridge he is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Caius. He has published on topics including early modern philosophy, the history of the Balkans, and the history of relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

Prof Alexander Marr

Alexander Marr is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge, where he is Head of the Department of History of Art. He is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he is Dean of Discipline. He specializes in European and British art and architecture 1400-1800, especially their intellectual, literary, and scientific aspects. His awards include a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008), a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2013), and a Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship (2022). He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society in 2013. His books include Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art (2026), Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius (2021), Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (2018), Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (2011), and Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2006).

Dr Barnaby Marsh

For over 25 years, Barnaby Marsh has helped to conceptualize, design, and launch transformative initiatives at academic and cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Royal Society, the Santa Fe Institute, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and many others. Before co-confounding MSM Changemakers in 2024, Barnaby held a range of private sector positions in management consulting, financial innovation (derivatives), and in the nonprofit sector. For more than 10 years, he was a senior executive at the $2 billion John Templeton Foundation, where he led the Foundation’s grantmaking, communications, and philanthropic partnerships. As of 2025, he has guided more than $3 billion in new initiatives, and currently helps his clients structure and refine major benefactions. 

Dr Patrick Nash

Patrick Nash is an expert on the law of religion, comparative family law, and lawfare. Before co-founding Pharos, where he serves as the Foundation’s Director, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford, and a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. He previously taught jurisprudence, public law, criminal law, tort law and family law at the Universities of Bristol and Newcastle. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2019, and is a member of Lincoln’s Inn. Dr Nash’s latest book is Total Lawfare: New Defense and Lessons from China’s Unrestricted Lawfare Program (Routledge, 2024). He recently published British Islam and English Law: A Classical Pluralist Perspective with Cambridge University Press (2022), and co-edited Cohabitation and Religious Marriage: Status, Similarities, and Solutions (Bristol, 2020). He is currently working on an edition of the lectures of the German jurist, Otto von Gierke, for the Oxford Constitutional Theory series.

Dr Jonathan Nathan

Jonathan Nathan is an intellectual historian of the Renaissance. He wrote his PhD dissertation at Cambridge on the Cymbalum mundi, a set of French dialogues long reputed (falsely) to hide an atheist message. Meanwhile he’s tried his hand at textual criticism, philology, bibliography, and the history of Hebraist scholarship. Now he’s working on state persecutions of heretics in the Renaissance. He hopes to reconstruct the theological convictions of the persecutors themselves, which are often ignored or badly misconstrued by modern theorists and historians.

Neil Record

Neil Record is Chairman of Record plc, a listed specialist currency asset manager. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Essex University and University College London, where he gained an MSc in Economics. He started his career as an economist at the Bank of England, and followed this with a five-year stint in industry. In 1983, aged 30, he founded Record plc. He has lectured on Investment Management at Cambridge University, and is author of the first book on specialist currency management within an investment context: Currency Overlay (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). Neil has been a prime mover in attempting to improve transparency in public sector pensions in the UK, and is author or co-author of four papers on this topic, including Sir Humphrey’s Legacy (2006). He was also a finalist in the 2012 Wolfson Economics Essay Prize on potential Eurozone break-up.

Dr John Ritzema

John Ritzema’s current project is on the Jerusalem temple cult and visions of God in the Hebrew Bible, involving comparative work on the literature and iconography of Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and the Levant. He also has interests in the study of Hebrew by renaissance humanists, and in conversations between British constitutional law and Christian Theology. Since 2020, he has served on the Board of Trustees of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which supports the academic study of the Levant. Besides his academic work, his writing has appeared in The Critic, the Catholic Herald, and The Plough.

Dr Lewis Roberts

How do the most local and apparently trivial features of artworks relate to the largest and most demanding questions of value and belief? Working at the intersection of a wide range of fields including literary criticism, philosophy of mind, and ethics, Lewis Roberts’s work centres on the relationship of art to the good. Dr Roberts is presently Director of Studies in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He read for a BA and MSt at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a PhD at St John’s College, Cambridge, and held a prestigious Jane Eliza Procter Fellowship at Princeton University.

Dr D.H. Robinson

Daniel Robinson is the Foundation’s academic director. Born in Northumberland and educated at Cambridge, his career prior to co-founding Pharos bridged academia and politics. Formerly a Fellow of History at Magdalen College, Oxford, in both academia and public policy, Dr Robinson’s work has explored the intersections of politics, freedom, nationhood, and geopolitics. He is currently writing a history of European integration since the Second World War, which aims to provide a better understanding of the past and future of the ‘European project’ and its relationship with British politics. His previous work includes Natural and Necessary Unions: Britain, Europe, and the Scottish Question (2020), and The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution (2020).

George Robinson

George Robinson is a hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He started his career at the Swire Group in Hong King and W.I. Carr in Seoul and Bangkok. In 1993, he co-founded Sloane Robinson, headquartered in the City of London. He was formerly co-owner of Prospect magazine, a trustee at Policy Exchange, and he is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, his alma mater.

Dr Lola Salem

Decoding opera’s anatomy, Lola Salem researches 17th-century singers and patronage through the lenses of economic and legal thought. Professionally trained as a singer at the Maîtrise de Radio France, she is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure and a Civic Future Fellow of 2024. She holds a D.Phil. in Music (University of Oxford) and was awarded the STIMU Symposium’s Young Scholar Prize in 2018.  Alongside her lectureship in Music at Oriel College, her consultancy work focuses on art, culture, and education. She regularly writes for a variety of UK and European magazines, such as The Critic.

Imogen Sinclair

Imogen Sinclair has over a decade of experience working in British politics, during which she founded a pressure group and stood for election to Parliament. She returns to her academic field to consider pre-political sources of meaning and value. Imogen’s research considers the metaphysical foundations of culture and its relationship to nature. Her work draws on the writing of the late American sociologist Philip Rieff, particularly his theory of ‘sacred order’, which will prove illuminating as Imogen examines emerging phenomena, such as reports of Christian revival in Britain. Imogen’s writing appears in numerous publications including The New Statesman and The Spectator.

Dr Rebekah Van Sant

Rebekah Van Sant’s current project focuses on Hebrew poetry and prophecy, in particular why prophetic oracles are often presented in poetic form in the Hebrew Bible and how that impacts their interpretation. She received her MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, specialising in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. In addition to this project, she has published on the concepts of exile and diaspora in biblical and ancient Jewish literature, as well as supersessionism in biblical studies.

Dr James Vitali

James Vitali’s book project will set out a new political economy for Britain – one which seeks to restore the ethical and moral foundations upon which a free economy depends. He is Head of Political Economy at the think tank Policy Exchange and Director of the Conservative History Group. He was an inaugural Civic Future fellow. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University, where he was the JH Plumb Scholar at Christ’s College and served as President of the Cambridge Union.