Irangani Abeysekera
Honorary FellowIrangani Abeysekera is a former Sri Lankan ambassador.
After reading Modern History at Somerville, she became her country’s first female career diplomat, serving in the UK, Thailand and Germany.
Margaret Adams
Emeritus FellowPauline Adams
Emeritus FellowHer Excellency Judge Akua Kuenyehia
Honorary FellowIn February 2003, H.E. Judge Kuenyehia was nominated by the Government of Ghana and elected as judge of the International Criminal Court. She currently serves as President of the Appeals Division.
From March 2007 until March 2009, she was the Presiding Judge of Pre-Trial Chamber 1. In March 2003, after the inauguration of the judges of the ICC, she was elected First Vice-President and was a judge in the Pre-Trial Division. H.E. Judge Kuenyehia was born in Akropong, Akuapem in Ghana and obtained her first degree from the Faculty of Law, university of Ghana, Legon. She then attended Somerville College, Oxford University, where she obtained a BCL, and shortly thereafter became the first female to be appointed as a law professor at the University of Ghana. While at the university, she taught criminal law, gender and the law, international human rights law and public international law.
She is a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Ghana and has extensive experience as a solicitor, advocate, and law teacher. Judge Kuenyehia was Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghana for seven years before her election to the ICC. Outside of the University, Judge Kuenyehia was among other things, a member of the UN Expert Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a member of the Council of Cape Coast University and the Board of Directors of Barclays Bank, Ghana Limited. She has been a pioneer advocating for equal opportunity, justice and development for women in Ghana and around the world. She is co-author of a text book on Women and Law in Sub-Saharan Africa, published in August 2003, which is currently the only comprehensive text book on the subject.
Professor Caroline Barron OBE
Honorary FellowProfessor Caroline Barron is a medieval historian whose research centres on the late medieval period in Britain.
She served as President of the London and Middlesex Archaelogical Society from 2008-2011 and as President of the British Association for Local History since 2016. She is also a former President of the Somerville Association.
She was appointed OBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to education.
Professor Janet Bately CBE
Honorary FellowJanet Bately is Sir Israel Gollancz Professor Emeritus of English Language and Medieval Literature, King’s College, London.
A student at Somerville College Oxford, she began her academic career at Birkbeck College London, where she was successively Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader, moving to King’s College, London as Professor of English Language and Literature in 1977. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and made CBE in 2000. Still actively engaged in research, her specialisms are in Old English language and literature, and bilingual dictionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Dr Doreen Boyce
Honorary FellowDoreen Boyce (1953, PPE) is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville and former Provost and Dean of Faculty at Chatham College (1974-1980).
An influential campaigner for equal opportunities in the workplace, she was President of the Buhl Foundation (1982-2007) and founded the Executive Women’s Council to provide a source of collective support and influence for professional women.
Lesley Brown
Emeritus FellowLesley Brown is Centenary Fellow in Philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. She has published articles on ancient philosophy, contributed introductory material to Plato, Selected Myths (OWC, 2004) and introduced Plato’s Protagoras and Meno for Penguin Classics.
(2019) ‘Aristotle (with the help of Plato) against the claim that morality is ‘only by convention’’ in Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI 1.1 (2019): 18–37.
(2019) ‘The Sophist on Statements, Predication and Falsehood’, Ch. 13 of the Oxford Handbook to Plato, ed. Gail Fine, 2nd ed.
(2018) ‘Rethinking Agreement in Plato’ in Virtue, Happiness, Knowledge Themes from the work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin ed David Brink, Susan Sauvé Meyer and Christopher Shields, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 18–33.
(2018) ‘Aporia in Plato’s Theaetetus and Sophist’ in The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy ed George Karamanolis and Vasilis Politis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91–111.
(2014) Plato, Theaetetus, Oxford World’s Classics, Introduction and notes by Lesley Brown, translation by John McDowell.
(2014) ‘Why is Aristotle’s Virtue of Character a Mean? Taking Aristotle at his Word?’ In The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. R. Polansky (C.U.P).
(2011) ‘Negation and Not-being: Dark Matter in the Sophist’, in Presocratics and Plato: A Festschrift for Charles Kahn, ed A. Hermann et al Parmenides Publishing.
(2010) ‘Definition and Division in the Sophist’, in Definition in Greek Philosophy edited by David Charles, Oxford 2010, pp151–171.
(2008) ‘The Sophist on statements, predication, and falsehood’, in The Oxford Handbook of Plato edited by Gail Fine, Oxford 2008, pp 437–462.
(2007) ‘Glaucon’s challenge, rational egoism and ordinary morality’, in Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato’s Republic, ed. D. Cairns, F-G Herrmann and T. Penner (Edinburgh Leventis Sudies 4), pp 42–60.
(2006) Review of David Sedley, ‘The Midwife of Platonism’, Mind 2006 115: 1178–1181.
(2006) ‘Did Socrates agree to obey the laws of Athens?’ (on Plato’s Crito) in Remembering Socrates edd R.L. Judson and V. Karasmanis O.U.P 2006, pp 72–87. Formerly published in Philosophy and Power in the Greco-Roman World edd E.G. Clark and T. Rajak, OUP 2002.
(1999) ‘Being in the Sophist’: in Plato I Metaphysics and Epistemology ed G. Fine (Oxford Readings in Philosophy (1999) (revised and expanded version of a 1986 paper)
(1998) ‘How totalitarian is Plato’s Republic?’ in Essays on Plato’s Republic, ed Erik Nis Ostenfeld, Aarhus University Press 1998, pp 13–27.
(1998) ‘Innovation and Continuity: The Battle of Gods and Giants in Plato’s Sophist 245-249’ in Method in Ancient Philosophy ed J. Gentzler, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1998, pp 181–207.
(1997) ‘What is the ‘mean relative to us’ in Aristotle’s Ethics?’ in Phronesis XLII -1 (1997), pp 77–93.
(1994) ‘The verb ‘to be’ in Greek philosophy’ in Language (Companions to ancient thought 3) ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge 1994) pp 212–236.
Dr Paula Pimlott Brownlee
Honorary FellowPaula Pimlott Brownlee is an American higher education consultant, and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College.
After studying for a DPhil in Organic Chemistry at Oxford, she became a research chemist and then an academic, holding professorships at several American universities. In 1990 she became President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Dame Antonia Byatt
Honorary FellowA.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories.
Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
Academic Honours
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999
Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE”S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;
Publications
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning”s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellae),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale”s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer”s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Professor Dame Averil Cameron
Honorary FellowAveril Cameron is a scholar of the Literature and history of the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Periods. She was Warden of Keble College from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies.
She held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in the Faculty of Theology 2011-13, and is chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. Averil is President of CBRL (Council for British Research in the Levant) and was President of FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques) from 2009-14.
After several recent contributions on the general history of late antiquity and Byzantium Averil Cameron is now returning to her earlier interest in Christian literature. Her Leverhulme project is focused on the large corpus of prose dialogues written by Christians, mainly in Greek, from the second century AD to the end of Byzantium. Some works exist about the earlier material, but there is no existing study which looks at the phenomenon as a whole, or relates the dialogues to other forms of Christian and non-Christian writing.
Margaret Casely-Hayford CBE
Honorary FellowDr Margaret Casely-Hayford (1980, Jurisprudence) is a lawyer, businesswoman and prominent advocate for diversity in education and public life.
She is the Chancellor of Coventry University and Chair of The Globe Theatre.
One of the first black British women to become a partner in a City law firm, she was named Black British Business Person of the year in 2014. After a 4 year stint as chair of charity ActionAid UK, she was awarded a CBE in 2018 for charitable services. She was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2020.