The following is a list of notable people associated with Somerville College, Oxford , including alumni and fellows of the college. This list consists almost entirely of women, due to the fact that Somerville College was one of the first two women's colleges of the University of Oxford, admitting men for the first time in 1994. [1] The college and its alumni have played a very important role in feminism.
Somervillians include prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin, television personalities Esther Rantzen and Susie Dent, reformer Cornelia Sorabji, writers Marjorie Boulton, Vera Brittain, A. S. Byatt, Susan Cooper, Penelope Fitzgerald, Alan Hollinghurst, Winifred Holtby, Nicole Krauss, Iris Murdoch and Dorothy L. Sayers, politicians Shirley Williams, Margaret Jay and Sam Gyimah, socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell, Princess Bamba Sutherland and her sister, philosophers G. E. M. Anscombe, Patricia Churchland, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley, psychologist Anne Treisman, archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, actress Moon Moon Sen, soprano Emma Kirkby and numerous women's rights activists. It has educated at least 29 dames, 17 heads of Oxford colleges, 11 life peers, 10 MP's, 4 Olympic rowers, [2] 3 of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945, [3] 2 prime ministers, 2 princesses, a queen consort and a Nobel laureate.
Somervillians have achieved a good number of "firsts", internationally, nationally and at Oxford University. The most distinguished are the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher, the first and only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science Dorothy Hodgkin, and the first woman to lead the world's largest democracy Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India for much of the 1970s. Others include Cornelia Sorabji, first female lawyer in India and first Indian national to study at any British university; Anne Warburton, first female British ambassador; Constance Coltman, Britain's first woman to be an ordained Anglican minister; Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera, first woman to head a major British bank and chair the Royal Shakespeare Company; Evelyn Sharp, Baroness Sharp, first female permanent secretary, and Carys Bannister, first female neurosurgeon in the UK.
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Notable honorary fellows (excluding alumni) are Simon Russell Beale, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nancy Rothwell, and Kiri Te Kanawa. Notable foundation fellows are Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, and Wafic Saïd.
The first principal of Somerville Hall was Madeleine Shaw-Lefèvre (1879–1889). The first principal of Somerville College was Agnes Catherine Maitland (1889–1906) when in 1894 it became the first of the five women's halls of residence to adopt the title of 'college', the first of them to appoint its own teaching staff, the first to set an entrance examination, and the first to build a library. She was succeeded by classical scholar Emily Penrose (1906–1926), who established the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship in 1903 which was the first to offer women in Oxford opportunities for research. Alumnae Margery Fry (1926–1930), Helen Darbishire (1930–1945), Janet Vaughan (1945–1967), Barbara Craig (1967–1980) and Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth (1980–1989) also served as Principal of Somerville College.
The current principal is Janet Royall, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon. [121] She succeeded Alice Prochaska at the end of August 2017. [121]
St Hilda's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. The college is named after the Anglo-Saxon saint Hilda of Whitby and was founded in 1893 as a hall for women; it remained a women's college until 2008. St Hilda's was the last single-sex college in the university as Somerville College had admitted men in 1994. The college now has almost equal numbers of men and women at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Murray Edwards College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It was founded in 1954 as New Hall and renamed in 2008. The name honours a gift of £30 million by alumna Ros Edwards and her husband Steve, and the first President and woman Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Rosemary Murray.
Bedford College was founded in London in 1849 as the first higher education college for women in the United Kingdom. In 1900, it became a constituent of the University of London. Having played a leading role in the advancement of women in higher education and public life in general, it became fully coeducational in the 1960s. In 1985, Bedford College merged with Royal Holloway College, another constituent of the University of London, to form Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. This remains the official name, but it is commonly called Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL).
Dame Hermione Lee is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, was an English philosopher of morality, education, and mind, and a writer on existentialism. She is best known for chairing an inquiry whose report formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. She served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Dame Professor Averil Millicent Cameron, often cited as A. M. Cameron, is a British historian. She writes on Late Antiquity, Classics, and Byzantine Studies. She was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford, and the Warden of Keble College, Oxford, between 1994 and 2010.
Dame Emily Penrose, was an ancient historian and principal of three early women's university colleges in the United Kingdom: Bedford College from 1893 until 1898, Royal Holloway College from 1898 until 1907, and Somerville College, Oxford University from 1907 until 1926. She was the first woman to achieve First Class honours in Classics at Oxford University, and was instrumental in securing the admission of women as full members of the university in 1920. She became Oxford's first Dame in 1927.
Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, Mrs Gourlay, was a British physiologist, academic, and academic administrator. She researched haematology and radiation pathology. From 1945 to 1967, she served as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.
Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, was an English historian who published under the name C. V. Wedgwood. Specializing in the history of 17th-century England and continental Europe, her biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works.
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is a department of the University of Oxford, England. It is part of the university's Humanities Division.
Kennedy Scholarships provide full funding for up to ten British post-graduate students to study at either Harvard University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Susan Hockfield, the sixteenth president of MIT, described the scholarship program as a way to "offer exceptional students unique opportunities to broaden their intellectual and personal horizons, in ways that are more important than ever in an era defined by global interaction.". In 2007, 163 applications were received, of which 10 were ultimately selected, for an acceptance rate of 6.1%.
Dame Lucy Stuart Sutherland was an Australian-born British historian and head of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Mary Longstaff Jacobus, is a British literary scholar.