Rhodes Visiting Fellows: Profiles
Between 1969 and 2000, 33 women were appointed as Rhodes Visiting Fellows at the University of Oxford, many of whom went on to long and distinguished careers in academia and beyond. Find out more about the history of Fellowship, and read brief profiles of the Fellows below.
Susan Kippax AO FASSA is an Australian social psychologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. She helped establish the National Centre in HIV Social Research (NCHIVSR), was one of four Founding Editors of Culture, Health & Sexuality, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society, and was co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the International Aids Society. In 2000, she was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and in 2019, appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in recognition of her distinguished service to education and community health, particularly through her research into HIV prevention and treatment.
Jaynie Anderson AM FAHA OSI is an Australian art historian renowned for her expertise in Venetian painting and contributions to art history. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Melbourne where served as the Herald Chair of Fine Arts from 1997 to 2014. She was President of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) from 2008 to 2012. In 2015, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant service to tertiary education and art history.
Christine Swanton is a New Zealand philosopher and Retired Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. She is known for her works on virtue ethics.
Pamela Dunbar (St Hilda's 1971)
Joan Leopold (Lady Margaret Hall 1972)
Shashi Arya (Somerville 1973)
Lyndall Gordon is a biographer and writer in English and American literature. She is a fellow of St Hilda's College and the Royal Society of Literature. She has published eight biographies and two memoirs.
Heather Outred was a New Zealand botanist who worked at Massey University. She died in 2025.
Karen Cooper (St Anne's 1974)
Janet Davidson ONZM is a New Zealand archaeologist who has carried out extensive field work in the Pacific Islands throughout Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. She has published widely on the prehistory of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and edited the New Zealand Journal of Archaeology from 1985 to 2008. In the 1996 she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to archaeology.
Claire Couldwell (Somerville 1975)
Jeyaraney Kathirithamby is a Malaysian entomologist and fellow of St Hugh's College. Her workfocuses on a group of insects parasitoids known as Strepsiptera and the peculiar relationship which they develop with their hosts. She has travelled extensively to collect them and has described several new species.
Mary Skinner was a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Buckingham. She died in 2023.
Professor Rita Adiyodi is an Indian biologist, formerly a member of the Department of Zoology at the University of Calicut.
Elizabeth McLeay is a New Zealand political scientist. Since 2019, McLeay she is an Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, researching the politics of prisoners' voting rights.
Alexis Pogorelskin is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where she was the department chair for nineteen years. She was the founding editor of the journal, The NEP Era: Soviet History, 1921-1928.
Kathleen Burk is a Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London. Her field of research is international history, especially politics, diplomacy and finance.
Louise Nelson is a Canadian microbiologist and Professor Emerita at UBC Okanagan Campus. Her career has included reseach positions in government, academic and commercial organisation.
Louise Nicholson CNZM is New Zealand neuroscientist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Auckland, specialising in molecular mechanisms common to neurodegenerative diseases. In 2021, she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to neuroscience and education.
Nancy Davis (Somerville 1979)
Helen Leach ONZM was a New Zealand academic who specialised in food anthropology, and Professor Emerita at the University of Otago. She conducted research for more than 50 years into the history of New Zealand, the archaeology and anthropology of Oceanic culture, and the social history and anthropology of culinary and horticultural practices, and wrote at least 22 books on these subjects. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2004, and in 2018 appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to culinary anthropology.
Sunita Zaidi is an Indian historian, formerly a member of the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia.
Tabitha Kanogo is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the social and cultural history of Kenya, including colonialism, gender, and the history of childhood and youth.
Susan Siegfried is a Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan. Her major research has been on European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially the French art world of the Revolutionary and Romantic periods. Her research interests include the thematisation of gender, social spaces for viewing art, and theoretical models of interpretation.
Saswati Bandyopadhyay (St Hilda's 1985)
Susan Scott FAA is an Australian mathematical physicist whose work concerns general relativity, gravitational singularities, and black holes. She is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University. She was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2016 and in 2020, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2020, she was a winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
Sally McMurry is an Emerita Professor of American History at Penn State College of Liberal Arts. A cultural and social historian with a special interest in agriculture, landscape, vernacular architecture, and food systems. Her previous research has examined the evolution of US agricultural landscapes in their broad cultural and environmental context.
Nermeen Varawalla is Chief Medical Officer of Scancell, a biotechnology company in Oxford. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the University of Hertfordshire, President of the Somerville Association and President of the UK INSEAD Alumni Association.
Mindy Chen-Wishart is Provost's Chair and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. She is Emeritus Professor and previously Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and a fellow of Merton College. She has also taught in UK, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand, Thailand, and Germany.
Heather Bell (St Hilda's 1996)
Puleng Hanong Thetela was a social scientist from Lesotho and Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at University of the Witwatersrand. She was recognized for her work in Critical Discourse Analysis and her analyses focused on representations of Lesotho in the media, on courtroom discourse, and on gender relations within the legal system. She died in 2005.