The Warden

Thank you for your interest in All Souls College. We hope that this website will help you learn about the College and its history, about who we are and what we do today, and about our plans for the future. 

I first set foot in All Souls as a student in 1979 to attend the legendary ‘star wars’ seminar in Philosophy with Derek Parfit and Amartya Sen. Later that year I sat the Prize Fellowship exam, with no expectation of success, but good fortune came my way. Between then and becoming Warden of the College in 2008, I taught Economics at Oxford, and had economic policy roles at the Bank of England and in competition policy. None of this would have been possible without the opportunities that All Souls gave me all those years ago. 

Some values and traditions of the College of the 1970s, such as engagement between academic and public life, endure today, but much has changed altogether. The Fellowship has grown (to 85 or so now) and is more diverse in every way – more international, almost 40% female, more early-career Fellows, and with a wider mix of academic subjects including in the sciences.

You can learn more about All Souls as it is today on this website, but what about the future? Despite all the growth in our academic and public life activities, the College’s beautiful buildings have essentially the same capacity as 300 years ago.  We were therefore delighted in 2020 to acquire the properties along the High Street to the front of Oxford’s Covered Market. A project to transform their interior, while improving the exterior, gets underway this year. This will at last enhance the research and teaching space of the College, and in a way that benefits the University and City as a whole. The building will enable us better to achieve the College’s long-standing purposes of scholarship, education, and engagement with public life.

You can learn more about All Souls past and present on this website. You would also be very welcome to visit the College and its Chapel – we are open from 2 to 4pm most afternoons.

Thank you again for your interest in All Souls.