Celebrating the Rhodes Visiting Fellows

Beginnings

At the meeting of the Rhodes Trustees on 17 October 1968, “it was agreed to provide, as an experiment, a Visiting Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall […] cost free to the College”. This signalled the start of a programme that ran for over 35 years, but has remained relatively poorly understood, often overshadowed by the contemporaneous debate about opening the Rhodes Scholarships to women. Here we examine the history of the programme and celebrate the achievements of some of the 33 women who received fellowships.

*Minutes of the meeting of the Rhodes Trustees, 17 Oct 1968*

The initial letter from Sir Kenneth Wheare, Chairman of Trustees, to Lucy Sutherland, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, on 25 October 1968 lays out the structure of the programme:

“I should like to outline a proposal which the Rhodes Trust hopes will be of service to your College. My colleagues and I would like to furnish a visiting Fellowship to Lady Margaret Hall for a woman from the Commonwealth or South Africa at a post-doctoral level and under thirty years of age. Possession of a doctorate we would not regard as essential – we are trying to suggest a level rather than a prerequisite. We would hope that the Visiting Fellow might be housed and fed in College and this the Trustees would expect to pay for since we want the entire proposal to be cost free to the College. […]

We would expect her to undertake six hours’ teaching a week (no more, no less) for the College or in a laboratory. […]

Transportation the Trust would pay for here and back and, in this regard, we think that the College may find it convenient to fly over a short list of two or three candidates at the expense of the Trust. Tenure of the successful candidate we have thought as being for two years – with a slight extension into a third to tie in with other timetables if necessary. We are prepared to help with advertisements but selection would of course be entirely in the hands of the College. […]

We have it in mind if the scheme should seem viable that we would consider a similar offer to your sister Colleges. We hope that Lady Margaret Hall will be willing to pioneer this experiment for us”.

Lucy Sutherland’s reply a week later showed enthusiastic support from the LMH Governing Body:

“We are proud to be the College which is entrusted with the first trial of the scheme and wish to assure the Trust of our fullest co-operation in making it successful.”

*Advertisement for the first Rhodes Visiting Fellow*

While the differences between the Rhodes Scholarship and the Visiting Fellowship were very clear from the outset, within the month, the Washington Post was reporting this as “Women to Be Rhodes Scholars,” a misrepresentation that has persisted to some degree ever since. Rhodes Scholars of the time had usually completed a bachelor’s degree and came to Oxford for a taught course before sometimes going on to a DPhil. The Visiting Fellows were, as the advert for the first fellowship at LMH below shows, expected to engage in academic work of a postdoctoral standard, and undertake research and teaching.

1970: the first Visiting Fellows

In June 1969, three candidates flew from Australia to be interviewed at LMH, with Susan Kippax being selected as the first Rhodes Visiting Fellow. The events of the interview day have received a somewhat disproportionate level of attention in the history of the Fellowship – while walking in the LMH gardens after the interview, Susan jumped into the Cherwell to rescue a drowning man who had fallen off a punt - she recounts the story in her interview for the Trust’s Oral History Project, suggesting a rather more reluctant hero than has sometimes been reported.

Susan arrived in Oxford in January 1970: “I think what was unexpected for me about Oxford was how formal the English were, particularly at college. But, once we’d got used to each other, we were all very friendly and got on well together, and it was a very pleasant experience. I’d already been tutoring and doing research for a couple of years, but Oxford was actually a very good introduction to my full academic career. I learned quite a lot, mainly about tutoring, but also how to read lots and how to use a big library. The libraries in Oxford were amazing, and it was a good place to work.” Susan returned to Australia after Oxford, establishing the National Centre in HIV Social Research at Macquarie University and later at the University of New South Wales.

Later in the same year, St Hugh’s and Somerville appointed their first Rhodes Visiting Fellows, Jaynie Anderson and Christine Swanton. While the Trust’s involvement was perceived by the colleges as being financially generous, pastorally it was rather more arms-length. “They didn’t quite know what to do with us”, recalls Jaynie. “I met the Warden of Rhodes House, Bill Williams, by accident when I was taken into Balliol for lunch with Dan Davin, head of Oxford University Press, who was intent on commissioning a book from me. Dan was a classicist and had been a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand. There was so much happening in Oxford that it hardly mattered.” Like Susan, she found Oxford “a bit stiff,” but saw the compensations. “This weird habit of eating dinner early in a college was tolerable because you might sit next to an outstanding scholar.”

“I was interviewed by Edgar Wind, who was the first professor of art history in Oxford. And it wasn’t like an exam, really. It was just like the most wonderful experience of talking about your subject and it went on for hours and I didn’t want it to stop. The art history department at Oxford at that time was very small, and the professor, Francis Haskell, wasn’t very interested in Renaissance art and didn’t really like what I was doing on Giorgione. He was very discouraging, and overtly misogynist, and he said to me, ‘You have to be at least over 60 to write on Giorgione, and it won’t be an Australian woman who does it.’”

Her subsequent career proved Haskell wrong, with Jaynie renowned internationally as a leading expert on Giorgione. In 2015 she became the only art historian to have been awarded the Stella d’Italia, appointed by Sergio Mattarella, President of the Republic of Italy, for her outstanding contribution to the study of Venetian art history.

She was not alone in experiencing misogyny from Oxford academics. Elizabeth McLeay was a Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall from January 1977 to December 1978 from New Zealand: "I went to a talk given by a prestigious professor. When the speaker included a New Zealand example in the exposition, it was factually wrong. When it came to questions, I plucked up my courage and put up my hand – for the first time in an Oxford seminar. I said that I had enjoyed the paper but also pointed out the error, very politely I thought, and corrected it. The speaker looked at me and sardonically said, ‘I might have known there’d be a New Zealander in the audience.’ I was upset and outraged. At the end, I went up to the speaker and pointed out that I should not have been treated so discourteously. This was an unhappy experience for me but it also, oddly enough, increased my confidence about taking part in Oxford academic discourse."

L-R: Susan Kippax (1970), Jaynie Anderson (1970), Lyndall Gordon (1973), Elizabeth McLeay (1976), Susan Siegfriend (1982)

1971-1976: expansion of the Fellowship

At a time when debate about opening the Rhodes Scholarship to women was raging in the US, Joan Leopold was selected as the first Visiting Fellow from the US and contributed to the debate via a letter in the New York Times. “Flexibility in eligibility and selection marks an important advance over previous major Anglo-American scholarships,” she notes, but, “the main disadvantage is that the number of fellowships is small; it is intended to rise to a maximum of ten divided among Commonwealth and U.S. competitors, far below the number of scholarships for American men alone.”

Returning to Oxford in 2025 to conduct research at the History of Science Museum for a book on Edward Tylor, Joan recalled, “it was an exceptional moment in the seventies. My time at Oxford had a profound influence on me. It was very intellectually invigorating and lots of the people who were there then have risen to prominent positions in various fields of studies. There was a great sense of fellowship among the students and the faculty.”

During the peak of the mid-1970s, around 3 or 4 Fellows were appointed each year. There was a clear intention to rotate the Fellowships around the world, with each appointment being advertised to regions aligned with Rhodes Scholar constituencies. But colleges were not compelled to pick candidates from a specific constituency or country and, as a result, the Fellowships were somewhat unequally distributed.

Rhodes Visiting Fellows by year of selection

Lyndall Gordon wrote about her experience at a Rhodes Visiting Fellow in a 1975 edition of The American Oxonian.

“The Fellow is selected in Oxford by the dons with whom she will be associated. Three to six candidates (in different fields) are flown to England at the expense of the Rhodes Trust and housed in College for two or three days. When I went to St Hilda’s in 1973, it was not at all like an institution, more like a hospitable country house and, apart from the interview itself, which was brief and businesslike, the few days had rather the atmosphere of a pleasant visit than an earnest test.

The interview was formal. The Fellows of the College, grouped on one side of a long table, their heads close together, appeared as in a medieval picture. I sat alone on the other side of the table.

Wives of beneficiaries of the Rhodes Trust have been regularly entertained at Rhodes House, but women who are actual holders of the Fellowships were not formally invited to the dinners until the spring of 1975. I imagine that the Trustees considered the Colleges to be taking adequate care of us, a correct assumption, but it meant that Rhodes Fellows were not introduced. In fact we did manage to hunt down one another and by 1975 were meeting regularly.”

In her Oral History Project interview, more than 50 years after the publication of that article, Lyndall recalled the dinner she referred to. “I was put next to the Warden, Edgar Williams, and he said to me ‘what authors do you like reading?’ And I said, quite quickly, ‘Virginia Woolf’. ‘Oh she was as mad as a hatter’, he said. He was very disapproving of my taste and didn’t talk to me much after that!” Lyndall has spent the majority of her career at St Hilda’s, becoming renowned as a biographer of, amongst others, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Another Fellow who came to Oxford and stayed is Jeyaraney Kathirithamby-Davies, a Visiting Fellow at St Hugh’s in 1975. “I'd just finished my PhD and gone back to Malaysia, and I was working in the university there. I was in my second year, teaching about 300 students a year, and I just couldn't do it, I wanted to concentrate on my research. So I applied for it thinking it's just a research position for two years. St Hugh's extended it for another year, and I stayed on because I met my husband, so I didn't go back. But I've been working all over the world. I’ve been to Papua New Guinea and Australia and collecting insects, all over the place, really.”

There were no restrictions on which subjects the Fellows should specialise in. While Lyndall found St Hilda’s in particular need of English tutors, Jeyaraney's experience as an entomologist was rather different. “There were not very many zoology students then - there were a few, which I tutored but most of the time was spent on research. The professor had a small patch in his garden with these hosts, which are Delphacidae, which are homopterans, which had these parasites in them which I had been researching in rice fields in Malaysia. I just couldn't believe it, in Oxford! So I used to go every summer to collect with him, and he used to come and help me.”

1977-1990: Fellowships and Scholarships for Women

By the time the first female Rhodes Scholars arrived in Oxford in 1977, there had been 17 Visiting Fellows. It is often overlooked that another 16 Fellows were appointed after this time; as the Fellowship had never been conceived as directly equivalent to the Scholarship, there was no contradiction in running the two programmes in parallel. But, ironically, a programme born partly from the discriminatory terms of Rhodes’s will was by now threatened by the same equalities legislation that led to opening the Rhodes Scholarships to women, and the move towards Oxford’s women’s college becoming co-educational. In February 1976 the Warden, Edgar Williams, started consulting with lawyers, concerned that the Trust was subsidising discrimination. While equality law continues to allow exceptions for single sex education institutions, offering a fellowship only to women at a mixed college would be unlawful.

Elizabeth McLeay's recollections of that period draw upon letters she wrote home to New Zealand. "Early on in my tenure I realised that I was at LMH during a crucial time. I wrote (16 February 1977), ‘At the moment one of the big arguments here, especially at LMH and the other four women’s colleges, is whether the women’s colleges should “go mixed”. Five men’s colleges are already integrated and several more are planning to do so. The die-hards within the College seem to think that the day LMH admits men to its doors, what is left of English civilisation will finally completely collapse!’"

Like others before her, some of Oxford's customs caught her unaware: "I knew that, as a Visiting Fellow, I was eligible to attend Congregation and wanted to hear a debate on co-residence in the Colleges and the relevant University regulations. This led to a further embarrassment during my first year. I was not allowed to enter the hall because I should have worn my academic gown. It never occurred to me that it was a fancy dress occasion."

LMH and St Anne’s started admitting men in 1979 and appointed their final Rhodes Visiting Fellows in 1978. St Hugh’s became mixed in 1986 but appointed no Visiting Fellows after 1980. The clearest exchange in the archives on the subject dates from June 1993 when Somerville College asked:

“When we first announced our decision to go mixed in 1992, we understood that we might no longer enjoy the allocation to Somerville of the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship which has brought us to many able women from the Commonwealth and the United States. Now that the formal amending of our Charter and Statutes has been approved I wish to see final clarification of the position. We have been very grateful to the Trustees for their generosity in providing the resources for this Fellowship over the years: I am sure those who have held the Visiting Fellowship have felt the Trustees were succeeding in their aim of filling “a notable gap in opportunity in women’s education…”

In reply, Sir Anthony Kenny, the Warden, wrote:

“As you surmised, this will mean, in accordance with the precedent set in the case of the other women’s colleges, that the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship scheme at Somerville will come to an end. I am glad that the Trust was able to support the able women who have held that fellowship during the period when the Trust funded it”

Louise Nelson was a Fellow at St Anne’s in the final year before the college admitted male students. “The two other women interviewing with me, one was interested in the marginal notes on Greek papyri, and the other in medieval literature. And I thought ‘well Oxford would be a wonderful place to do that work,’ so I actually relaxed as I thought I don’t have a chance of getting this. The other two women had a terrible time in their interviews whereas mine was ‘oh, you’ve been to the Arctic’ and ‘oh, you’re a microbiologist and interested in soils.’ I think they were very keen on increasing their capabilities in science because they had been more arts-focused, and that was probably one aspect of why I was offered the fellowship.”

“I was in residence at St Anne’s and there was a little note slipped under my door to say that I had been the successful candidate. Typically Oxford… there isn’t someone telling you directly or sending you an official letter, a little note under the door!”

“As a scientist, I really didn’t know many people in the arts or classics. Going to a college of women in all sorts of disciplines was one of the highlights. There was certainly excitement about what was coming. Some of the Fellows were not in favour, and worried about the impact on a cloistered and supportive environment for young women.”

Louise returned to Canada for a career in microbiology including both government research and commercial ventures before returning to academia at the University of Saskatchewan and then the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus.

Susan Scott also received the “little note under the door” on a May 1985 day that gave a brutal introduction to the British weather to a visiting Australian. “I was stunned because it snowed on my first day. ‘Goodness, it’s cold in this part of the world,’ I thought!”

“I had applied for the Rhodes Scholarship in 1979 and was shortlisted in Victoria but unfortunately didn’t receive it. So I did my PhD in Adelaide, and in my last year there saw this flyer pinned on the wall advertising the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship at Somerville. I thought, this looks incredible, and I saw it was really quite different to the Scholarship and appropriate for me at that stage of my career. The interview panel was predominantly fellows of the college, but there was a specialist interviewer from the Penrose group at the Mathematical Institute. I had been interested in relativity for years and was dying to work with Roger Penrose. It was everything I hoped for and more – a fantastic group with staff, post-docs, research student coming from all over the world. It was vibrant, very active and I learnt so much there.”

After 4 years in Oxford, Susan took up a post at ANU in Canberra where she is now Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Physics. “There were several things pulling me back but I needed to stay in Oxford long enough to make sure the effects of the network I produced in that time were going to last, and they did.” In 2020, Susan become the first female physicist to receive the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. “It was a really important moment because it did something for women in science in Australia – it put out there that women could reach these eminent levels.”

Throughout the programme, the Trust was consistent in its “Rhodes Visiting Fellow” terminology, but the colleges often used “Rhodes Research Fellow” as a means of aligning the post with their existing staffing structures. Susan notes, “I always felt that it would have been nicer to simply call them ‘Rhodes Fellowships’. ‘Visiting’ somehow suggests something for a few months, whereas the common term for the fellowships was two or three years.”

While the Rhodes Trust was now concurrently funding both Fellowships and Scholarships for women, there remained very little connection between the two. Susan Siegfried was a Visiting Fellow at St Hilda's in 1982. In her Oral History interview she recalls, "I applied for the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship at a moment when I was trying to imagine how a doctoral dissertation might become a book, and how a young scholar might gain the intellectual freedom needed to rethink early research on a larger scale. I was actively seeking a supported leave that would enable me to develop my dissertation on the critical reception of the French history painter Jean‑Auguste‑Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) into a first monograph."

"Visiting postdoctoral Fellows, like graduate students, were largely left to structure their own intellectual and social lives. St Hilda’s provided a formal setting, if not an especially collegial one, and neither the History of Art unit nor Rhodes House organised regular scholarly gatherings. History of Art at Oxford at that time had very limited institutional presence. Although women had by then been admitted as Scholars, there was a sense that Rhodes House did not quite know what to do with its women members, let alone with a small group of postdoctoral Fellows. At the time, this distance was experienced as isolating; with hindsight, it appears a missed opportunity for intellectual exchange."

Nermeen Varawalla was Somerville’s last Visiting Fellow in 1989: “I was treated as a Junior Research Fellow and had membership of the Senior Common Room and was part of the community of Somerville academics. It was a real privilege to be exposed to all the other academic subjects, particularly in the humanities, which I had never had this close interaction with before. I had the privilege of being allowed to attend governing body meetings, not to vote, but to attend, which was specially designed for the Rhodes Visiting Fellow [at Somerville] so that she could appreciate all the intricacies of Oxford academic life. Thus I was at the historic governing body meeting when the Fellows of Somerville voted to become a mixed college.”

“I was considered to be postdoctoral because of my second degree in medicine. I came to Oxford as a qualified obstetrician gynaecologist and used my time there to get my DPhil. But academia wasn’t my calling – although my thesis went well and I had several publications, I didn’t seek an academic post. I joined the NHS as an obstetrician gynaecologist, then moved into what I was then calling ‘the business of medicine’”. Nermeen is now the Chief Medical Officer of Scancell, a biotechnology company in the Oxford Science Park.

1990-2005: the end of the Fellowship

By the 1990s, St Hilda’s was the last women’s college at the university and the only one offering the Fellowship. There were also clear signs that the terms of the Fellowship had failed to keep pace with a changing world. Mindy Chen-Wishart arrived in Oxford in 1992 with her husband and two young children. “You’re very brave admitting you have children, I haven’t admitted I have children” one of her fellow interviewees said to Mindy. “What are you going to do?” Mindy replied. “Oh I’ll just leave them at home”.

“The post was very much designed for a single person. We had quite a difficult time even in immigration because they said I couldn’t bring a dependent spouse. I said to Rhodes, ‘you should have put in your advertisement that married women shouldn’t apply’. They had to move me into some category where you could bring a dependent spouse. The idea was you lived in college, you ate in college. We were renting a house in Headington and the entire stipend went on the rent. I think they designed it on the basis that we'll pay for it, but your life should be in college.”

Like her predecessors, Mindy had little contact with the Trust. “My sole contact with Rhodes was one dinner when I arrived. And during that dinner, no one spoke to me. They all went and wished my husband well, and that his future would be good. They all assumed I was accompanying him. I tried to engage with Rhodes, but they never wrote back. And when I got my job at Merton, I wrote a lengthy letter expressing my appreciation and saying what Rhodes had done for me. It just disappeared into the ether.”

Despite this, and despite experiencing perpetual racism, Mindy stayed in Oxford for 30 years, becoming Dean of the Faculty of Law, before moving to be Provost's Chair and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore.

The archives show that the problems highlighted by Mindy did lead to discussions between St Hilda’s and the Trust about making the Fellowship more inclusive for married women, although without any entirely conclusive resolution. The issue of funding for computers was also contentious, and the college did take on more of the cost of the Fellowship than before, as noted in November 2004 when St Hilda’s wrote to the Trust to discuss a successor to the final Visiting Fellow, Puleng Thetla from Lesotho.

“Although the Trust pays the stipend of the Fellow, and some other costs, the Fellowship is also a charge on the College, which is why we have had to let some time elapse since the last holder”

The reply from Rhodes House admitted some surprise – the programme was by this point unknown to most staff and required a check of the archives to learn the history. The Warden, Sir Colin Lucas, felt that:

“it would be right for the Trustees now to review this funding, after nearly forty years and a changing world. The costs of the scholarships, which are our core business, do and will rise inexorably.”

At the March 2005 meeting of the Trustees, they agreed with Sir Colin’s analysis, and the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship programme went “out of existence” with a somewhat dramatic rhetorical flourish:

"I am writing to follow up on our earlier correspondence concerning a Rhodes Research Fellowship at St. Hilda's. This was discussed at the recent meeting of the Trustees. As I suggested in my earlier letter […], they do feel that this is a grant for which the historic reason has now disappeared. Women are now eligible for Rhodes Scholarships and women Rhodes Scholars do come to St. Hilda's. The Trustees are glad that their relationship with St. Hilda's now flourishes on this basis and so think that the Rhodes Research Fellowship should now go out of existence."

However, the impact of these 33 women has long outlived the programme, with many of them going on to long and distinguished careers receiving recognition from their academic peers and national honours. Read our profiles of these remarkable women to learn more about their achievements after their Rhodes Visiting Fellowships.

Reflections on the Fellowship

"My two years as a Rhodes Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall was an extraordinary experience and I remain grateful for the opportunities it offered. My confidence as a scholar developed – so crucial for a woman, especially one working in a field that until recently was male-dominated. As I have explained, I made contacts with other academics that were of lasting significance for my academic career. And LMH itself was an intellectually enriching and socially supportive community."

Elizabeth McLeay, Lady Margaret Hall 1976

The election to the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship in 1976 could not have come at a better time for me as a Russian historian. I could readily fly from England to the USSR. The archives were steadily opening up. The so-called Third Wave of Soviet immigrants had begun to arrive in Oxford, providing links and contacts with a host of scholars still in the Soviet Union. St. Hilda’s also gave me a unique opportunity. Even though I was a 19th century Russian intellectual and cultural historian, the college needed a tutor in Soviet politics, I jumped right in. I have been publishing in that field ever since.

Alexis Pogorelskin, St Hilda's 1976

"The most enduring impact of the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship was not simply the publications or professional contacts that emerged from it, important though those were, but the way it expanded my sense of what art history could be. Oxford exposed me to an unusually wide intellectual terrain and to debates that were reshaping the discipline, from reception theory to interdisciplinary approaches linking art, literature and history. The Fellowship also gave me the time and confidence to take intellectual risks, including leaving an established academic position in the United States to pursue research opportunities in Europe."

Susan Siegfried, St Hilda's 1982

“I would say that Rhodes was fantastic because it held me in a very vulnerable period of my life when I would have given up academia. I realized, going to conferences, that I could foot it with the best of them.”

Mindy Chen-Wishart, St Hilda's 1992

Celebrating the Rhodes Visiting Fellowships for Women, 1968-2005