Academic Leaders & Seminars
Dr Nuno Castel-Branco
Dr Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning an M.Sc. in Physics at the University of Lisbon. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has spoken about Galileo, Copernicus, and science and religion to broad audiences in the United States and Europe. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist, uses Nicolaus Steno as a ‘tour guide’ for science, medicine, and religion in seventeenth-century Europe. His writing has appeared in places like the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American.
01.
The Intellectual Life
Thomas More: "Letter to the University of Oxford".
02.
The Intellectual Life
Dorothy Sayers: "The Lost Tools of Learning"
03.
The Intellectual Life
John Henry Newman: "The Idea of a University" (selections)
In this three-session seminar, participants will explore the enduring meaning and purpose of a liberal education through classic texts by some of Oxford’s most influential thinkers. Through close engagement with Thomas More’s “Letter to the University of Oxford,” Dorothy Sayers’s “The Lost Tools of Learning,” and selected readings from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, the seminar invites students to reflect on what it truly means to educate the whole person—intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
The seminar will offer a lively yet rigorous conversation about truth, reason, tradition, and faith, showing how classical educational ideals continue to speak powerfully to the challenges of modern life and the timeless question of human flourishing. Taught in a discussion-led format, each session emphasizes close reading, collaborative inquiry, and thoughtful dialogue, encouraging students to actively engage with the texts and with one another in a stimulating intellectual community.
Dr Andrew Moeller
Andrew Moeller is a hosted researcher at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, an associate member of the History Faculty at Oxford, and is also affiliated with the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. Andrew previously was a researcher in ethics and the humanities for the Boundaries of Humanity Project, based at Stanford. He is now the leader of a research project, under the Medical Humanities Research Hub, entitled "Biotechnology and the Humanities". This project draws and builds upon scholarship in the humanities, such as history, philosophy, theology, and ethics, to better understand biotechnologies aimed at human enhancement and their relationship with human society, and to foster interdisciplinary and open discussion of emerging biotechnologies. In addition to his work as a historian of eugenics and human enhancement, Andrew has also published on the role of the discipline of history within bioethics, as well as on the ethics and desirability of radical life extension.
01.
The Intellectual Life
The Limits of Pluriversalism: On Religious Influence in Bioethics
02.
The Intellectual Life
Personhood, Moral Strangers, and the Evil of Abortion: The Painful Experience of Post-Modernity
The two sessions will draw from a wide range of thinkers, including John Rawls and Tristram Engelhardt, to examine both the fault lines and the potentials for finding common ground among persons of diverse religious and non-religious persuasions on a variety of moral issues. Discussions will focus on contemporary ethical challenges like abortion, human enhancement, and assisted dying—and whether a focus on human identity might provide a way forward within pluralistic societies