Obituaries
Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.
James Daniel O'Flaherty served as a public policy figure at think tanks and on the U.S. Senate staff, and was an expert on South Africa and U.S. foreign trade.
Dan was born in Chicago on November 4,1942 to James C. O'Flaherty, a scholar of German philosophy and history at Wake Forest University, and Lucy Maupin Ribble, an accomplished painter. He grew up in Winston Salem, NC.
Dan won a scholarship to Williams College, Massachusetts, majoring in government and history, later serving on its board. He arrived at Oxford in 1965 as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, later earning a doctorate at Harvard and teaching for a year at The University of the South at Sewanee.
He was recruited by Senator Frank Church as a senior research analyst. Dan contributed to the Church Report on democratic reforms to U.S. intelligence agencies. His work on Capitol Hill led to an appointment at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in NYC, as a senior fellow specializing in national economics with a concentration on Wall Street, and then to a position at The Group of 30, focusing on international monetary and economic policy.
Dan served as Vice President of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) in D.C., while also directing the U.S.-South Africa Business Council. His work included U.S.-China trade relations, Vietnam normalization, and commercial relations with the former Soviet Union. Dan was a key figure in the Rhodes Scholar Alumni Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of The Cosmos Club.
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of the Honourable Gérard Vincent La Forest, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick in 1926, Justice La Forest went to the University of New Brunswick to study law and graduated with his BCL in 1949. He was called to the bar of New Brunswick shortly after, and named a King’s Counsel in 1968. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he continued his studies at Oxford University, where he earned a BA in Jurisprudence in 1951 and an MA in 1956. He also completed an LLM in 1965 and a JSD in 1966, both at Yale University.
Following a short period in private practice, Gérard served in the federal Department of Justice before embarking on a teaching career, notably as Dean of Law at the University of Alberta. He returned to government in 1970, serving as Assistant Deputy Attorney General of Canada until 1974 and later a member of the Law Reform Commission of Canada for five years.
Justice La Forest was appointed directly to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in 1981 and elevated to the Supreme Court of Canada on January 16, 1985. He served on the Supreme Court for more than 12 years, retiring on September 30, 1997.
“My colleagues and I mourn the loss of Justice La Forest — an exemplary jurist whose compassion deeply informed the Court’s decisions on issues that touched the lives of all Canadians,” said the Chief Justice of Canada, the Right Honourable Richard Wagner, P.C. “As a distinguished appellate judge, legal scholar and public servant, he brought unmatched intellect and experience to the Supreme Court of Canada. His eloquent judgments, spanning many areas of the law, have left a profound and enduring legacy in Canadian jurisprudence. He will be remembered with great respect and admiration.”
Read full obituary here.
We were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Vivienne Gray.
Born in 1947, Vivienne grew up in Onehunga and was educated at Onehunga High School, where her academic promise was already evident. She went on to study at the University of Auckland before completing a PhD at New Hall, University of Cambridge. In 1978, she was awarded a Rhodes Visiting Scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, a formative period that further shaped her scholarly trajectory.
Vivienne returned to the University of Auckland, where she spent the greater part of her career, rising in 1987 to Professor of Classics and becoming only the second woman to hold such a chair in New Zealand. She was also the University’s Public Orator, renowned for her eloquence and judgement in conferring honorary degrees. Internationally respected as a leading authority on Xenophon, Vivienne published a series of influential monographs and edited the Oxford Readings in Xenophon, playing a central role in restoring Xenophon to serious scholarly attention and redefining his importance as historian, philosopher, and literary artist.
A committed teacher and mentor, Vivienne inspired generations of students through her insistence on close engagement with Greek and Latin texts, her intellectual rigour, and her generosity of spirit. She retired in 2011 as Professor Emerita, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship, leadership, and example that continues to shape the study of the ancient world.
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Bruce Stewart KC, who passed away peacefully after courageously facing a long and debilitating period of illness.
A New Zealander, he came up to Oriel in 1975 as a Rhodes Scholar to read for a BCL. During his 2 years at Oxford, he played rugby and squash for the college, as well as playing cricket for OUCC and the Authentics, although he never got a Blue.
Upon successfully being awarded his BCL, he returned to Auckland to pursue a career in law. Bruce was a brilliant legal mind, and was widely respected and admired for his deep love for the law.
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of Neil Huxter, at the age of 91.
Born in Bombay, Neil studied at Diocesan College and subsequently University of Cape Town. He arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1955 to study English, and was a writer by profession.
We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Anthony Gibbs, literary critic and biographer.
Born in 1933, Tony, who published as A.M. Gibbs, grew up in Ballarat, Victoria, and developed an early love for literature amid a vibrant family life shaped by stories of his father's service at Gallipoli. He excelled at Ballarat Grammar, and after a distinguished undergraduate career at the University of Melbourne—where he was celebrated for his intellect, drama, and athleticism—Tony was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1956.
At Oxford, Tony furthered his studies in English and completed a thesis on Sir William Davenant, marking the beginning of a lifelong fascination with seventeenth-century literature. His academic journey included appointments at the Universities of Adelaide, Leeds, and Stirling, before leading the Department of English at the University of Newcastle and later joining Macquarie University, where he became Emeritus Professor.
Over decades, Tony established himself internationally as a leading authority on George Bernard Shaw, with landmark publications such as George Bernard Shaw: A Life, and was recognized for his service to the humanities with election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the award of a Commonwealth Centenary Medal. Tony’s enduring legacy lies in his wide-ranging scholarship—from Davenant and Shakespeare to Yeats and Shaw—his editorial work, and his mentorship of countless students.
Read full obituary here.
We were saddened to hear that Bryan died on 23 May at the age of 68, surrounded by his family, wife Joanne, four daughters and their partners, and one grandson.
After graduating from the Luther College at the University of Regina in 1978 as the first student in Religious Studies, Bryan arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1979. He returned to Luther College as a professor in 1989 and was appointed Dean in 1995, a role he served until 2005. He later became President in 2010, a role he served until 2020. Bryan’s vocation always went beyond the job title, no matter which one he held.
Bryan served his community with unwavering energy and leadership, and he will be missed deeply.
We were grieved to hear that Leslie Epstein died in Brookline, Massachusetts at the age of 87.
Born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers, Leslie left California for an undergraduate degree at Yale. He arrived at Oxford in 1960 to study Anthropology. Initially aspiring to write plays, he later pursued Theatre Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles and eventually returned to Yale for his doctorate in Playwriting.
He published thirteen works of fiction, along with reviews and essays in the Globe, the Times, and many other publications. His best known novel, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction that has been published in eleven foreign languages. His teaching career, meanwhile, was often the more prominent role to many who knew him. He began teaching in New York at Queens College, where he met Ilene Gradman, whom he married in 1969.
He was the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for thirty-six years, mentoring several prize-winning authors. He had a rare gift for spotting a story’s flaws and guiding writers he mentored through “that mystery of taking what you had put together and making it stand on its own two feet,” said Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had studied with him at BU. “He could diagnose a weakness in a way that, honestly, felt miraculous, and I don’t use that word lightly,” she said. “That’s the kind of lesson that lasts you for your whole life. Because of that, he will remain my teacher for as long as I live and as long as I write.”
Leslie augmented his writing critiques by playing Bach concerto recordings in his classroom, assigning students to watch Ingmar Bergman movies on weekends, and suggesting museum visits to strengthen their artistic foundations. “He was a terrific observer of the world and his mind was always churning,” said his son Theo, who added that those closest to his father sometimes noticed a hint of a smile as a thought formed. “He was delighting himself and couldn’t wait to share it, and then he’d find just the right words that either cracked up the room or made people think in a new way, and quite often elevated their world.”
Read full obituary here.
It is with sadness that we have learned that Justice David Souter, who spent nearly two decades on the United States Supreme Court from 1990 to 2009, died at age 85.
Born in Massachusetts, David spent most of his childhood — and his life — on his family's farm in Weare, New Hampshire. After attending New Hampshire public schools, he matriculated at Harvard University and earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1961, before accepting a Rhodes Scholarship that brought him to Magdalen College, Oxford. Here, he earned a Bachelor of Arts (later promoted to a Masters of Arts degree) in Jurisprudence in 1963, after which he returned to Harvard Law School for a three-year period of study to earn a Bachelor of Laws.
Souter was admitted to the bar and began practicing law at New Hampshire firm Orr and Reno as an associate attorney. He turned to public service in 1968, when he accepted a job as an Assistant Attorney General of the Granite State. Three years later, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General, and by 1978 he was the Attorney General of New Hampshire, the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
His meteoric rise through the profession continued when he was selected to be an Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1978. He would spend the next 12 years on that court, including the last seven as Chief Justice, before then-President George Bush nominated him to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He took his seat on the Boston-based court in May 1990, but did not remain there for long and was sworn in in October 1990.
At first, Souter’s output on the court placed him firmly in the court’s growing conservative bloc. However, he made a marked shift towards the center by voting with the court’s liberals, particularly in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. His decision to keep Roe v. Wade in place led to efforts by the Federalist Society and other right-wing legal groups to ensure that future Republican presidents would choose more ideologically reliable legal activists for court seats at all levels. He would remain in the court’s ideological center during the 17 years he spent there following the Casey decision, though the court’s rightward shift meant he voted with the liberal wing far more than his more conservative colleagues over that time period.
Souter was never entirely comfortable living or working in the nation’s capital. While he remained there during the times of year when the court heard cases, he would always rush back to his home on the Weare, New Hampshire farm where he’d lived since childhood. In both places, Souter was widely known to live an analogue, iconoclastic existence. Upon his retirement in 2009, veteran New York Times correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote that focusing on those eccentricities meant one missed “the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings.”
In a statement, Chief Justice John Roberts praised his late colleague as having “served our Court with great distinction for nearly twenty years” and said he had “brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.” Roberts also praised Souter for spending roughly 10 years of retirement as a part-time judge on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and said his former colleague would be “greatly missed.”
Read full obituary here.