Discover All Souls College

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies may be broadly defined as the application of one or more disciplines of the Humanities or Social Sciences to an area that includes Asia and Northern Africa. Historically, the College has been linked most strongly to South Asia: Max Müller was the earliest Professorial Fellow of All Souls, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Vice-President and later President of India, was the first to hold the Spalding Chair. Besides, T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) wrote his Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the College. 

At present, the involvement of the College in the scholarly study of Asia and Africa is richer and more diverse than ever, with Fellows working in disciplines including history, philology, religious studies, anthropology, development studies, literature, political science, and musicology.

Classical Studies encompasses, in a holistic and integrated manner, the study of every aspect of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The research interests of the current Fellows range from history to archaeology, cultural history, literature and language, philology, from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity.

All Souls College has a long and distinguished tradition in Classical Studies, especially in ancient history (Arnaldo Momigliano, P. M. Fraser, A. H. M. Jones, Peter Brown, Fergus Millar, Nicholas Purcell, Angelos Chaniotis, Simon Hornblower, John Ma, Peter Thonemann, Benjamin Gray), philology (J. N. Adams, Martin West, Wolfgang de Melo, Alex Mullen), literature (Richard Jenkyns, Patrick Finglass), archaeology (Ian Richmond, Sheppard Frere, Martin Harrison, Margareta Steinby, and Lisa Lodwick) and philosophy (Edward Hussey, Myles Burnyeat).

All Souls has a distinguished tradition in economic research and policymaking. The Drummond Professorship of Political Economy has been associated with the College since the late 19th century; Francis Edgeworth is a previous holder, as are three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics - John Hicks, Amartya Sen, and Joe Stiglitz. John Vickers, the current Warden, was formerly the Drummond Professor. Beata Javorcik, a Professorial Fellow, is currently Chief Economist at the EBRD. The College has also had numerous Examination and Postdoctoral Fellows in Economics. Former Fellows in Economics include Mark Armstrong, Tim Besley, Vince Crawford and Jim Malcomson.  

The College is also a major centre for economic and social history. Sheilagh Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History and Meredith Paker holds a University post attached to All Souls.  Former Fellows in the subject include Paul David, Charles Feinstein, John Habakkuk, Jane Humphries, Peter Mathias, Avner Offer, Kevin O’Rourke and Tony Wrigley.

All Souls College has a long and distinguished record in the study of history, and many current and former Fellows, as well as Visiting Fellows and Lecturers, either do historical research or have extensive interests in history. The College provides Fellowships for the holders of several University posts in the subject. 

The Chichele Professors of the History of War, of Medieval History, and of Economic History are Fellows of the College, and the Fellowship also includes a Professor of Economic History. The research of Fellows and Visiting Fellows is supported by the holdings of the College Library, which has a particularly fine collection of books on the history of France, and military history, as well extensive materials for the study of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The study of Law has been a central part of the life of All Souls College since its foundational statutes stipulated that sixteen of the forty fellows were to be Jurists. It has pioneered university legal education in a number of areas. Roman law has been studied at the College since the foundation of the Regius Professorship of Civil Law by King Henry VIII. All Souls also played a pivotal role in establishing the academic study of English law, when William Blackstone was appointed the first Vinerian Professor in 1758. Since 1859, the College has been the home of the Chichele Professor of Public International Law. All Souls also played a significant role in initiating the study of criminology in Oxford, helping the refugee German criminologist Professor Max Grünhut to find a scholarly home in 1938. In 1973, the University Readership in Criminology became linked to All Souls and the University Professorship in Criminology is now attached to the College.

The College has traditionally maintained a strong connection with the wider legal community, seeking to maintain an exchange of ideas between the academy and the profession. The JUSTICE/All Souls Review of Administrative Law, chaired in the 1980s by the Warden of the College, Lord Neill of Bladon, helped to influence the development of English public law.  In celebration of his Wardenship, an annual lecture is delivered by leading academics and Justices of the United Kingdom Supreme Court. The current Fellowship includes a number of eminent barristers and judges, as well as leading academics with particular expertise in jurisprudence, criminal law and criminology, the history of English law and the continental civilian tradition, international law and English public and private law.

Linguistics involves the humanistic and scientific study of language structure and language use. As such it has many overlaps with Philosophy, Philology, Anthropology and Psychology. All Souls College has supported research across these disciplines for centuries. The first research appointment specifically in Linguistics was made in 2020, however a number of Fellows conduct research on modern and ancient languages, while others advance the study of language structure and use through fieldwork, empirical reflection, and theory-building.

The College supports research in literature of all periods and in different cultures and languages. That includes a wide range of literature in English, from the Middle Ages, through the early modern period and modernism, right up to today, including colonial and postcolonial writing. The several Fellows working on literature in English span different career stages. Some Fellows focus on literature in other languages and on comparative literature, from the early modern period to the present. (See also under ‘Modern Languages’.) Some Fellows have extended their study of literature into wider public life, for example through media work, criticism, or creative writing (the latter with not just Marina Warner, but others such as Quondam Fellow Katherine Rundell).

The College has a distinguished tradition in mathematics. Recent research of the College mathematicians has centered around low dimensional geometry and topology, mathematical aspects of quantum field theory, algebra, and combinatorics.

There are presently several mathematicians in the College. Francis Brown, who works on problems at the intersection of algebraic geometry, number theory, and quantum field and string theory, was elected to a Senior Research Fellowship in 2014. Jane Tan, who works in combinatorics, was elected to a Post-Doctoral Research fellowship in 2023.

The two Emeritus mathematics fellows are active researchers in mathematics: Dan Segal works in group theory and related topics in Lie algebras, commutative algebra and Diophantine decision problems; Graeme Segal’s recent work has mainly been in quantum field theory and geometry. There is a thematic connection with the work of physicists at the college, including Emeritus Fellow John Cardy and current Senior Research Fellows Gavin Salam and Paul Fendley.

Former mathematicians holding Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships include: Simon Donaldson, Marcus du Sautoy, and Michael McQuillan.  Visiting Fellows in mathematics have included Jonathan Alperin, Samuel Gitler, Walter Feit, Tony Joseph, Leonard Scott, Avinoam Mann, Aner Shalev, Geoff Robinson, Graeme Wake, Yuri Berest, Martin Barlow, Gus Lehrer, Fernando Rodriguez-Villegas, David Ben-Zvi and Steve Smith.

The College has a community of Modern Languages scholars who study a diverse range of languages in their regional and national settings across the world.

Lesley Wylie, Fellow Elect, is a scholar of Latin American literature and culture, with particular interest in writing from Colombia, Cuba, and the Peruvian Amazon. Syamala Roberts works on German modernism in its European and transnational dimensions, with particular emphasis on media, the senses, and the relationship between German and Indian/South Asian culture. Julia Moore and Shaw Worth both work with English and French-language material in their research. Moore is writing on the relationship between literature and movement in twentieth-century North American and French contexts. Worth examines artmaking at the courts of England, France, and Burgundy in the long fifteenth century. Neil Kenny and Catriona Seth are chiefly scholars of French culture. Kenny specialises in the literary, social and intellectual history of early modern France. Seth holds the Marshal Foch Professorship of French literature—the University’s only Chair in French—which is attached to All Souls, and has published extensively on the literature and cultural history of the eighteenth century. Marina Warner, writer and cultural historian, turns her degree in French and Italian to investigate culture, myth and society in award-winning books of criticism, history and fiction.

In addition to the Fellows listed here, several others conduct research at All Souls informed by the study of languages, working within the subjects Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Linguistics, Social Anthropology, History, and English Literature.

As well as being researchers in Modern Languages, several of us teach languages and their related cultures in the University. We are committed to promoting language study and literacy in the UK and further afield, including with schools and in the context of educational policy.

Although the College has never advertised a fellowship specifically in musicology (nor is it one of the subjects for Fellowships by Examination), it does have a small but very distinguished record in the subject, and is open to applications from musicologists for several categories of fellowship. The late Alan Tyson won his original fellowship in Classics and pursued a psychiatric training; he then became a leading expert in the manuscripts and chronology of Mozart and Beethoven; the musicologist Margaret Bent won her fellowship in an open competition. 

A long tradition of musical connoisseurship among the Fellows most famously reached a wider public with the late Isaiah Berlin, and with Bernard Williams (On Opera, 2006). Noel Malcolm wrote George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990); Martin West wrote Ancient Greek Music (1992); Peregrine Horden edited Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (2000) and maintains an interest in twentieth century musical modernism. 

Unlike New College, All Souls was not a choral foundation, but even by 1500, Fellows were cultivating music in Chapel on their own initiative. Occasional concerts now often have a scholarly dimension and present little-known repertory. An album of music connected with the medieval and early sixteenth-century college, Music at All Souls, Oxford - The Lancastrians to the Tudors, was curated by Margaret Bent and recorded by ‘The Cardinall’s Musick’ and is available for downloading or streaming at most major music sites. Visiting Fellow musicologists have included Iain Fenlon, Andrew Wathey, Nicholas Kenyon, Thomas Schmidt, Ardis Butterfield (medieval English, French, and music), Jessie Ann Owens, and Peter Wright.

All Souls has been the home of a number of distinguished scientists in the past, including Sir Christopher Wren (an astronomer and a founder of the Royal Society, as well as a famous architect), Thomas Linacre (founder of the Royal College of Physicians), Dennis Sciama (cosmology), and Richard Dalitz (particle theory).

Highlights of recent years include the award of the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to John Cardy and the appointment of Angela McLean as UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser.

The College has supported the study of philosophy since its foundation and many distinguished philosophers have been Fellows, including Isaiah Berlin, J. L. Austin, Bernard Williams, Michael Dummett, Susan Hurley, and G. A. Cohen.

The College provides fellowships to the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory (currently Professor Amia Srinivasan, who works in epistemology, ethics, metaphilosophy, and social and political philosophy), and to the University Lecturer in Medieval Philosophy (currently Professor Cecilia Trifogli, whose research focuses on the reception of Aristotle and other topics in the philosophy of the Middle Ages).

Three Senior Research Fellows work in philosophy: Susanne Bobzien, whose research interests include ancient philosophy and the philosophy of logic and language, Cécile Fabre, who works in moral, political, and legal philosophy, specializing in the ethics of war, and Ian Rumfitt, whose current research is in the philosophy of language, focussing on the relationship between truth and meaning.

The College also provides a Visiting Fellowship to the lecturer chosen by the Faculty of Philosophy to deliver the annual John Locke Lectures, and regularly supports other Visiting Fellows working in philosophy.

While many if not all of the College’s fields of research (such as history, law, economics, philosophy) have a bearing on the study of politics, politics has been pursued as a discipline in its own right at All Souls for nearly a century. All Souls established the first fellowship in the subject at Oxford in 1910. It is home to the University's Gladstone Chair of Government and the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory.

The Chichele Chair has been held by G.D.H. Cole, Sir Isaiah Berlin, John Plamenatz, Charles Taylor, Jerry Cohen, and Jeremy Waldron. The Gladstone Chair has been held by Sir Kenneth Wheare, Max Beloff, Samuel Finer, Peter Pulzer, Alfred Stepan, and Christopher Hood.

Politics is one of the College’s subjects for Examination Fellowships and Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships; the College has had many Visiting Fellows in politics over the years (including figures such as Joe Nye and the late Samuel Huntingdon); and a number of its Fellows (such as John Redwood, Lord Waldegrave, and Edward Mortimer) have had practical experience in politics and international affairs.

It sponsors various lectures and periodic conferences in the subject, including the annual Carlyle Lectures and the Lee Lecture in Political Science and Government.

The College’s approach to the study of politics up to now has been wide-ranging, with a strong emphasis on historical and philosophical approaches and considerable interest in comparative government and public policy, but it welcomes applicants from across the discipline for its Examination Fellowship and Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship competitions.

All Souls’ association with social anthropology dates from 1937 when the first Professor of Social Anthropology, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, became a Fellow. Some of the leading figures in the field have held the position subsequently: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (1946-70), Maurice Freedman (1970-75), Rodney Needham (1976-90), John Davis (1990-95)(subsequently Warden of All Souls 1995-2008), David Parkin (1996-2008), and David Gellner (2008-2024). The current holder is Professor Alpa Shah (2024- ).

The College is host to the annual Evans-Pritchard Lectures which are intended to provide “an empirical analysis of social relations based on fieldwork or other indigenous primary materials concerning Africa, the Middle East or the Mediterranean”.