List of Somerville College, Oxford, people


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. 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, journalist Esther Rantzen, reformer Cornelia Sorabji, writers Marjorie Boulton, Vera Brittain, A. S. Byatt, Susan Cooper, Penelope Fitzgerald, Winifred Holtby, Nicole Krauss, Iris Murdoch and Dorothy L. Sayers, politicians Shirley Williams, Margaret Jay and Sam Gyimah, Princess Bamba Sutherland and her sister, philosophers Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Onora O'Neill, archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, actress Moon Moon Sen, soprano Emma Kirkby and numerous activists.
Somerville educated at least twenty-eight dames, sixteen heads of Oxford colleges, eleven life peers, ten MP's, four Olympic rowers, three of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945, two prime ministers, two princesses, a queen consort and a Nobel laureate.

Firsts

Somervillians have achieved an impressive number of "firsts", both nationally and at the University of Oxford. The most distinguishable being that of 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, who was Prime Minister of India for much of the 1970s. Other notable firsts are Cornelia Sorabji, first female lawyer in India and first Indian national to study at any British university; Anne Warburton, the first female British ambassador; Constance Coltman, Britain's first woman to be an ordained minister; Evelyn Sharp, Baroness Sharp, first female Permanent secretary; Manel Abeysekera, Sri Lanka's first woman diplomat; and Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera, first woman to head a major British bank.

Activists and feminists

Notable honorary fellows are Louise Johnson, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nancy Rothwell, and Kiri Te Kanawa. Notable foundation fellows are Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, and Wafic Saïd.

Principals

The first principal of Somerville Hall was Madeleine Shaw-Lefèvre. The first principal of Somerville College was Agnes Catherine Maitland 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, who established the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship in 1903 which was the first to offer women in Oxford opportunities for research. Alumnae Margery Fry, Helen Darbishire, Janet Vaughan, Barbara Craig and Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth also served as Principal of Somerville College.
The current principal is Janet Royall, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon. She succeeded Alice Prochaska at the end of August 2017.