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Research Fellowship - Hong Kong Link

Hong Kong Link Early-Career Research Fellowship/College Lectureship

As a result of the generosity of our Hong Kong alumni, the College appointed its first Hong Kong Link Research Fellow in October 2015. The Research Fellowship/College Lectureship is allocated to different subjects from time to time. 

The first Hong Kong Link Research Fellow (in Law), 2015-2018, was Dr Tom Adams, currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and Tutorial Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

The second Hong Kong Link Research Fellow (in modern British History) was Dr Charles Read.

Charles Read's research and teaching interests focus on the banking, economic and political history of the British Isles over the past two centuries. His research examines the economic causes and consequences of famines, financial crises and pandemics in the United Kingdom over that period. The research for his previous project, for a doctoral thesis on the Irish Famine entitled British Economic Policy and Ireland, c.1841-53, has won the Thirsk-Feinstein PhD Dissertation Prize, the T.S. Ashton Prize for the best Economic History Review article and the New Researcher Prize of the Economic History Society. In August 2018 he was awarded a prestigious prize from the International Economic History Association at the 18th World Economic History Congress at MIT for the best dissertation in nineteenth-century economic history completed at any university in the world in 2015, 2016 or 2017.

He is currently completing two monographs, both of which are due to be published soon. The first, entitled British financial crisis and the Great Famine in Ireland: the United Kingdom’s biggest economic-policy disaster re-examined, combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of the available evidence to re-examine the role that economic policy played during the Irish Famine of 1845-53. The book finds that the policy debates inside the government during the crisis were more between advocates and opponents of financial orthodoxy at the Treasury than it was between advocates and opponents of laissez-faire  on the ground in Ireland. The responsibility for the government’s failure to save more lives therefore lies in the victory of the Currency School’s orthodox monetary views over the direction of British economic policy in the 1840s. His second monograph, entitled The Banking School and British Financial Crises since 1825, excavates from the archives the ideas of the Banking School, a forgotten group of heterodox Victorian economists, about how to prevent financial crises. The book will also show how their ideas can be applied to the history of banking crises over the past two centuries—as well as how their ideas may still be relevant today for preventing crises in the future.

The third Hong Kong Link Research Fellow (in Politics) was Dr Samuel Zeitlin. He is currently a Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at University College London.

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin was a Hong Kong Link Early Career Research Fellow and College Lecturer in Politics. He studies and teaches political philosophy, the history of political thought, and international relations. His dissertation, which he is currently working to revise into a scholarly monograph, examined the themes of war and peace in the political philosophy of Francis Bacon. The monograph treats Bacon's relation to and views concerning the Thirty Years' War, the Armada Wars, the French Wars of Religion, and the 1604 Treaty of London.  His translation and edition (co-edited with R.A. Berman) of Land and Sea won an award in the Religion category at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2016.  His reviews have been published in Contemporary Political Theory, The Common Review, and the Cambridge Humanities Review.  His articles have been published, or are forthcoming, in History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, Telos, Politisches Denken Jahrbuch, Global Intellectual History, and Modern Intellectual History. A second monograph project in political theory and the history of political thought examines Carl Schmitt's relations with German National Socialism.

Further current research projects include an edition (with Lars Vinx) of The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual and Statute and Judgment (both forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2021).

Prior to coming to Cambridge, he taught courses at UC-Berkeley, at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, and at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

The current Hong Kong Link Research Fellow (in Law) is Ms Matilda Gillis.

Matilda Gillis is the current Hong Kong Link Early Career Research Fellow and College Lecturer in Law. She researches in international law, human rights law, immigration law and public law more generally. Her dissertation, which she is currently revising into a monograph, examined the interactions between national legislatures and international courts on the issue of how the right to enter and remain in a country applies to non-nationals. The monograph will look specifically at how the UK Parliament interacts with the European Court of Human Rights, and interacted with the Court of Justice of the European Union on this rights issue and its findings and conclusion provides a response to the UK Government’s plans to repeal the UK Human Rights Act and to, in turn, introduce a ‘Modern Bill of Human Rights’.  Matilda’s work has been published in the German Law Journal, the Journal of World Trade, the Adelaide Law ReviewLaw and Humanities, the Melbourne Journal of International Law and the Law and Financial Markets Review.

Matilda supervises in international law and criminal law for Corpus. She has previously supervised human rights law and company law at several colleges at Cambridge, and has taught on the LLM paper ‘Law of the World Trade Organization’. Matilda has also been a sessional academic in corporations law at the Australian National University (ANU), and has acted as an external examiner in International Human Rights Law at the ANU and in Company Law at the University of Edinburgh. 

Matilda first came to Cambridge for an LLM at Trinity College in 2018, which was fully supported by a Henry Arthur Hollond Studentship in Law and an honorary Lionel Murphy Postgraduate Endowment Scholarship. Matilda won several prizes for her LLM performance, including the Clive Parry Prize for International Law for the best performance in International Law across the LLM International Law papers. Matilda then moved to Peterhouse to complete her PhD, which was fully funded by a Peterhouse Graduate Research Studentship.

Matilda is also a qualified Australian lawyer, and she worked as a solicitor in constitutional law for the Australian Government Solicitor before coming to Cambridge. She has acted as a consultant and research assistant for several Chambers in London and for the Cambridge Climate Litigation Network.