Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Vicky was born in London to Hungarian-born parents. She was educated at South Hampstead High School, one of the Girls’ Day School Trust group of schools. She read History at Somerville, matriculating in 1974.

At Somerville she was active in the JCR, serving as Treasurer. Both the GDST and Somerville celebrated their centenaries shortly after she completed her time with them, reminding her of the importance of the campaign for equal access to education.

She subsequently qualified as a solicitor and practised first commercial and consumer law, and subsequently charity, trust and probate law.

Vicky’s passion is for education at all levels, both for what it can contribute to society and civic life, and for its enrichment of each individual life. 

As part of that commitment, she served from 1995 to 2007 on the Council of the Girls’ Day School Trust, which is the largest group of independent schools in the UK, comprising 25 schools educating nearly 20,000 students aged 4 to 18 throughout England and Wales. Vicky also trained and worked as an adult literacy teacher in West London.

From 1985 to 1988 Vicky lived in Geneva, where she represented an NGO at the UN and its member organisations.

Vicky and her husband Colin returned permanently to Geneva in 2008. From 2008 to 2014 she was on the Board of the International School of Geneva. She has a daughter and a Somervillian son. She is happy to have shared with all her family her love of literature and the dramatic arts.

Dame Rosalind Marsden was the EU Special Representative for Sudan from September 2010 until October 2013.

Before joining the EU, she had a long career in the British diplomatic service, including postings as Consul-General in Basra, British Ambassador to Sudan and British Ambassador to Afghanistan. She has also served as Head of the United Nations Department and Director (Asia-Pacific) in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. Earlier in her career she served twice in the British Embassy in Tokyo and spent two years on secondment to the private sector, working in the corporate finance department of an investment bank.

She received her BA in Modern History from Somerville College, Oxford and her D.Phil from St Antony’s College, Oxford. – See more at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/dame-rosalind-marsden#sthash.ElSiYjHJ.dpuf

Harriet Maunsell is non-executive director at the Pension Insurance Corporation.

Formerly, she was Chairman of the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority and non-executive director of the Serious Fraud Office. In 1994 she was awarded the OBE for services to pensions.

Michele Moody-Adams is currently Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011.

Before Columbia, she taught at Cornell University, where she was Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as an Associate Dean. 

She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is also the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy. Her current work includes articles on academic freedom, equal educational opportunity, and democratic disagreement. Her next book, coming out in late 2021, is entitled Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope.  She is also working on a project entitled Renewing Democracy and a book on the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Moody-Adams has a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. She has been a British Marshall Scholar and an NEH Fellow.

https://www.ntfcf.org.hk

Onora Sylvia O’Neill, Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve CH CBE FBA is a philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.

The daughter of Sir Con Douglas Walter O’Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Oxford University. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor. During the 1970s she taught at Barnard College, the women’s college in Columbia University, New York. In 1977 she returned to Britain and took up a post at the University of Essex; she was Professor of Philosophy there when she became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1992.

She is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a former President of the British Academy 1988-1989 and chaired the Nuffield Foundation 1998-2010. In 2003, she was the founding President of the British Philosophical Association (BPA). Until October 2006, she was the Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and she currently chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Ann Oakley is a writer and a sociologist.

She has written both novels and many non-fiction books. Most of her life has been spent working in university research. She is best known for her work on sex and gender, housework, childbirth and feminist social science. Her more recent interests have focused on evidence-based public policy and methodologies of research and evaluation, on the sociology of the body and on biography and autobiography as forms of life-writing.

She is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the UCL Institute of Education, and until January 2005 was Director of the Social Science Research Unit (SSRU) at the Institute, where she also headed the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre). She holds an honorary appointment as a Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. In 2011 the British Sociological Association gave her one of their first Lifetime achievement Awards for her extraordinary contribution to the history of the development of sociology in Britain. She now works on research part-time, and spends the rest of it writing, wondering what to do about her archives, developing environmentally friendly cleaning products, and spending time with her grandchildren.