Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Tessa Ross is CEO of House Productions, and the former Controller of Film and Drama at Channel 4.

Under her leadership, Film4 worked with the most innovative talent in the UK and built a reputation for developing and financing some of the most acclaimed British films of recent years. These include Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland, Chris Morris’ Four Lions, Shane Meadows’ This is England, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave, Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank and Room, Todd Haynes’ Carol, and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Her work in television includes commissioning programmes such as Shameless, Sex Traffic, The Devil’s Whore, Longford, White Teeth, and Clocking Off.

Tessa has been a governor at the NFTS, a governor of the BFI and a member of the ICA Council. She was on the Board of the National Theatre and appointed as its first CEO. Tessa was one of eight film industry representatives on the panel of the 2012 Film Policy Review, chaired by Chris Smith. She was appointed CBE in the New Year 2010 Honours List and was awarded a BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Film in 2013.

Emma Rothschild is Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University.

She is Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and professeur invitée at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. She is involved in collaborative research projects, at the University of Cambridge and at Harvard, on Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas and on Visualizing Historical Networks. She is also an Affiliated Faculty member at Harvard Law School. Publications include “Economic History and Nationalism” (Capitalism, Winter 2021), “A (New) Economic History of the American Revolution?” (New England Quarterly, March 2018), “Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France” (American Historical Review, October 2014), Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011), and An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2021).

https://www.infinitehistory.org

Catherine Royle joined NATO in January 2015 as Political Adviser to the Commander at Joint Force Command Brunssum after a long career as a British diplomat. She joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1986 following studies at the Universities of Oxford (BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and Wales (MscEcon in Strategic Studies).

After an initial stint in London, Catherine’s first post was in Chile as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. She returned to the UK at the end of 1991 where she worked on various aspects of UK policy in Iraq until 1997. Catherine then served in Dublin as First Secretary for EU and Economic Affairs. From 2001-2003 she served as Head of the Policy Unit on the Convention for the Future of Europe. She acted as policy advisor to Peter Hain – the UK’s ministerial representative at the Convention on the Future of Europe – during the drafting of the proposed European Constitution (which later became the Lisbon Treaty).

Catherine spent seven years in Latin America where she served as Deputy Head of Mission in Buenos Aires, and then as British Ambassador to Venezuela where she worked closely with UK business to protect and promote investment in a politically volatile environment, and to build a partnership with Venezuela on tackling narcotic trafficking.

Catherine was posted to Kabul in September 2010 as Deputy Ambassador at the British Embassy. In August 2012 she took up the role as Head of the Secretariat of the International Police Co-ordination Board. In that role she reinvigorated the organisation and partnered MoI in developing a 10 Year Vision for the ANP/MoI and initiating work on a series of 2 year rolling plans to promote implementation of the vision.

Catherine’s work on Afghanistan continued in JFCBS. She was a regular visitor and firm supporter of ANP / MOI until the end of the NATO mission.

Her time in JFCBS has coincided with NATO’s return to its core mission of deterrence and defence. She has been actively involved in the defence planning for Eastern Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Catherine is also leading a project on assessing deterrence.

Catherine is Commodore of the NATO Tri-border sailing club. She has two surprisingly well-adjusted sons.

Caroline Series (1969, Mathematics) is a distinguished mathematician working in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and Dynamical systems.

After studying at Somerville in 1969, Professor Series held posts in Berkeley and Newnham College, Cambridge before arriving at the University of Warwick in 1978. In 1987 she became Reader in Mathematics at Warwick and, in 1992, Professor. In 2017, she became the third woman in its history to serve as president of the London Mathematical Society. In 2023, she was awarded a CBE in the King’s first list of Birthday Honours.

The distinguished jurist Gopal Subramanium is a former Solicitor General of India and a Senior Advocate of the country’s Supreme Court.

Mr Subramanium was born in 1958 in Bangalore, and studied law at the University of Delhi. He was the youngest lawyer to be designated a Senior Advocate by India’s Supreme Court and has appeared as lead counsel in a number of landmark cases. Between 2009 and 2011 he served as Solicitor General of India, and was presented with the National Law Day Award for Outstanding Jurist by the President of India in 2009. One of Mr Subramanium’s most important contributions to legislation in India was to improving India’s sexual violence laws.

Somerville is a place where anybody who is interested in discovering himself and more importantly solutions for the world will find a vital wellspring of opportunity.

GOPAL SUBRAMANIUM

Mr Subramanium is a generous benefactor of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Developement. He endowed the Gopal Subramanium Scholarships in honour of his teacher His Holiness Shri. Bharati Tirtha. The scholarships support talented Indian postgraduate scholars to study at Oxford, with the first matriculating in 2017. He also supported the college choir’s tour of India in December 2018, which featured concerts and workshops with disadvantaged children in Goa and Mumbai.

In 2019, Mr Subramanium was elected as a Foundation Fellow of Somerville, the College’s highest recognition for philanthropy.

In its commitment to tackling the pressing challenges of the world, Somerville must be regarded not merely as an avant garde institution of promise and ability, but one that is deeply committed to the fundamental canons of humanism.

GOPAL SUBRAMANIUM

Kiri Te Kanawa is a New Zealand lyric soprano best known for her repertoire of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss.

After leaving school, she won various singing competitions in New Zealand and Australia, and in 1966, after a period as a popular singer and recording artist, she became a student at the London Opera Centre.

As a soprano, Te Kanawa shot to stardom in the 1970s with a series of appearances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and the enthusiastic support of conductors such as Colin Davis and Georg Solti. Her first big success was as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1971. That was followed by a run of Mozart operas and, among others, a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème in which she sang Mimi. Her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1974 as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello was widely acclaimed. In 1981 she sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and her rendering of George Frideric Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim” reached a worldwide television audience of more than 600 million. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1982. She received similar honours in Australia (1990) and New Zealand (1995).

In addition to singing in a great number of opera recordings, Te Kanawa produced a number of popular recordings, including such works as Kiri Sings Gershwin (1987), Kiri Sings Porter (1994), Kiri Sings Berlin (1998), and Maori Songs (1999).

Although in 2002 she began to scale back her appearances on the opera stage, she actively continued to perform concerts and recitals in connection with the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation (2004), whose mission it is to provide support and financial aid to struggling singers and musicians of New Zealand. In August 2009 Te Kanawa announced that she would fully retire from opera the following year. However, she continued to sing in public until 2016, when she performed her last concert. During this time she played Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in an episode (2013) of the TV series Downton Abbey.

In 2014 Baroness Vadera was appointed as the first woman to chair a major UK bank.

Her move to Santander follows a remarkable career that has seen her at the heart of banking, business and politics in the UK and abroad. We asked her about the global financial crisis, trouble in the Eurozone, the outlook for women in the workplace and the lessons she learnt from an exceptional childhood.