Lady Margaret Hall has welcomed 11 new visiting fellows including actors Emma Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch and Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant.
The appointments were announced in an online statement by Alan Rusbridger, Principal of LMH. Rusbridger wrote, “Today we welcome 11 new visiting fellows to Lady Margaret Hall. They are people drawn from a variety of backgrounds, callings and professions and we want them to form a bridge between our own academic community and the worlds they inhabit and represent.”
Other appointments include the author and former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman; Beeban Kidron, known for her role as director of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason; the chief constable of Thames Valley police, Francis Habgood; High Court judge Rabinder Singh and clarinetist and winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 2006, Mark Simpson.
A provisional list of visiting fellows was constructed by Lady Margaret Hall’s governing body, and was then narrowed down by a smaller committee. Only one of the appointments that the College proposed turned the position down. The visiting fellows are appointed for a term of three years.
Rusbridger, himself a former editor of The Guardian who took up his post at LMH in September 2015, stated, “We hope they will occasionally come and eat at College as well as tutors, alumni, students and support staff . One or two have already come up with other ideas for how they might use their relationship with LMH to develop other projects and thinking.”
Rusbridger, in a post on his blog, mentioned that the appointment of non-academic visiting fellows in Oxford was originally the idea of Lord Nuffield, who invited people from a variety of backgrounds to his college. Rusbridger commented, “Alongside the students and tutors [visiting Nuffield] there would be bishops, bankers, spies, journalists and economists. Lord Nuffield, it seemed to me, was on to something: this was a way of enriching the life of a college and its students, and of blowing oxygen through the corridors.”
This is not the first time celebrities have walked the corridors of Oxford colleges: the Cameron Mackintosh visiting professorship at St Catz has been filled by personalities such as Stephen Fry, Patrick Stewart and Diana Rigg. Rusbridger, indeed, celebrated the non-academic nature of the appointments, stating, “The obvious thing to note is that – deliberately – only one is an academic. “The College already has many very distinguished honorary fellows, most of whom have had notable careers of scholarship.”
“Our visiting fellows bring a different kind of experience. They have all, in their different ways, achieved great distinction in their chosen fields, professions or calling. LMH is already a deeply interesting place. “It just got even more interesting.”
