Our Foundation is home to a host of brilliant and original thinkers, from revered household names to a rising generation of young scholars. Meet our staff, research fellows, and grant recipients.

Prof David Abulafia

David Abulafia’s special interests lie in maritime history, particularly the history of maritime trade; another strong interest is medieval and Renaissance Italy, examined from a southern perspective; his maritime interests also include early encounters between Europeans and native peoples in the Atlantic.

His early publications concentrated on the medieval Mediterranean, and included The Two Italies (1977), a biography of Emperor Frederick II (1988), A Mediterranean Emporium (1994), and The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms (1997). More recently, he has published The Discovery of Mankind (2008), and a history of the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the present, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011), which won the British Academy Medal and has so far been translated into twelve languages. The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2019) won the Wolfson History Prize

He became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1974, was appointed to his first Faculty post in 1978, and was Professor of Mediterranean History, 2000-2017. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Academia Europaea, visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Natolin campus) and visiting Beacon Professor at the newly-founded University of Gibraltar.

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.

Connor Beattie

Connor Beattie works on Roman imperialism, particularly Roman expansion during the Middle Republic (c. 300-146 BCE). His DPhil looks specifically at the causes of Rome’s eastern expansion from c. 200-190 BCE and his project 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 has interests in epigraphy and archaeology, having conducted work on inscriptions on Roman arms and armour. Connor has numerous published articles, most recently ‘The Nadir of Historiography? Valerius Antias, Senatus Consulta and the Second Macedonian War’ published in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte.

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 was named one of Prospect magazine’s ‘top thinkers of 2024’, and 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. It comprises a moral inquest with an urgent political point: a forensic exposure of falsehoods and a cry for faith in the future of the West. It builds upon a series of international conferences on the ethics of empire throughout history, which was the subject of a vigorous but failed cancellation effort by academic colleagues in 2017.

Prof Biggar’s other works include What’s Wrong with Rights? (2020), Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (2014), and In Defence of War (2013). His writing appears in the Financial Times, theTimes, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Critic, UnHerd, The Irish Times, the Canadian National Post, and First Things.

Dr Panayiotis Christoforou

Dr 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 builds 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.

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.

He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. 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. His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize.

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.  A summa cum laude Harvard graduate with a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a law degree from Yale, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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) – as well as numerous articles and monographs.  His personal website is https://newparadigmsforum.com.

His work at the Pharos Foundation concerns competitive strategy vis-à-vis China and Russia, with a particular focus upon technology denial, national security export controls, strategic deterrence, and nuclear weapons policy.

Sian Hansen

Sian Hansen holds a diverse portfolio of consultancy and non-executive board positions in areas such as financial services, policy development and the arts. Until recently, she was the Chief Operating Officer of CT Group, the global political and corporate strategy firm founded by Sir Lynton Crosby.  Sian’s current director level and advisory roles include Non-Executive Director of JP Morgan Multi-Asset Growth and Income PLC, Non-Executive Director of Pacific Assets Trust and a Trustee of the Almeida Theatre. She is sits on the Advisory Board for Cerno Capital PLC and is a Senior Advisor to the Sanctuary Counsel. From 2013-2016, Sian was Executive Director of the Legatum Institute, a global public policy think tank dedicated to promoting prosperity through individual liberty, free enterprise and entrepreneurship.  Previously, she spent seven years as Managing Director of the UK think tank Policy Exchange, an educational charity promoting research and discourse on public policy. 

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. In addition to turning her thesis into a monograph, Dr Hard is preparing a number of journal articles for publication. She is co-authoring a book on postcards written by literary figures, bringing to light previously unpublished material. She also serves as a Trustee of the Philip Larkin Society, whose journal About Larkin she edits.

Dr Nathaniel Helms

Dr 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

Dr 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.

Isabelle Kent

Isabelle 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 is currently completing her PhD.

Dr Patrick Nash

Dr 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

Dr 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

Dr 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 D.H. Robinson

Dan 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, he served as a senior advisor on Scottish, Union, and regional policy at the Cabinet Office and at the Department for Levelling Up between 2016 and 2023.

In both academia and public life, Dr Robinson’s work has explored the intersections of politics, freedom, nationhood, and geopolitics. He is currently writing a three-volume 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.

Dr Robinson’s 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). He serves on the advisory council of the unionist forum These Islands, and has written extensively on education policy, recently for the think-tank Politeia. He has written for a variety of media outlets and think tanks, and he is a frequent contributor to The Critic.

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, Dr 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.

Dr James Vitali

Dr James Vitali is Head of Political Economy at the think tank Policy Exchange and Director of the Conservative History Group. He is also a Conservative Councillor in Dorset, and 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. James’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.