Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton will be among six honourands to receive an honorary degree from Oxford at the annual Encaenia ceremony on September 22nd.
Secretary Clinton is being honoured for her five decades in public service as an “advocate, attorney, activist, and volunteer, First Lady of the United States, First Lady of Arkansas, the 67th United States Secretary of State, and presidential candidate.” During her time as First Lady and Senator for New York she championed human rights, democracy, and opportunities for women and girls as she travelled to more than 80 countries before becoming the first woman to earn a major party’s presidential nomination ini 2016. She went on to receive 66 million votes.
She will be honoured alongside Professor Dame Sally Davies, Professor Linda Colley CBE, Professor Anna Deavere Smith, Baroness Ruth Lister CBE, and Jeanette Winterson CBE.
Professor Dame Sally Davies was “installed as 40th Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 2019, following a distinguished global career as a clinical academic and public servant.” She has served in roles within the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and the UK government as Chief Medical Officer, championing combatting antimicrobial resistance throughout her work. She’s also known for establishing the National Institute of Health and Genomics England Ltd. She has been named both Dame Commander of the British Empire and Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
Professor Linda Colley CBE is an “award-winning historian, Princeton’s Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, and a Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.” She has written seven books in addition to having delivered the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University, the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast, the Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland, and the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture. She has received the Wolfson Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the CBE for her services to history.
Professor Anna Deavere Smith is a “renowned access, playwright, teacher, and author.” She pioneered the style of ‘verbatim theatre,’ which consists of perceiving current events through the interpretation and performance of interviews. This has earned her the status of a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a nominee for a Tony Award. She has won two Drama Desk Awards, a MacArthur Award, and a National Humanities Medal from President Obama, and can be seen in Nurse Jackie, The West Wing, and, most recently, Notes from the Field.
Baroness Ruth Lister SBE serves as Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University. She has, throughout her career, fought poverty and inequality, publishing “influential social texts” and serving on “several prestigious commissions, such as the National Equality Panel.” She remains Honorary President of the Child Poverty Action Group and has served as a Labour peer since 2011.
Jeanette Winterson CBE is an acclaimed British Writer. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, won the Whitbread Prize and went on to win a BAFTA for its BBC adaptation. Her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, is an international bestseller, and her latest novel, Frankisstein: A Love Story, was long listed for the 2019 Booker Prize. She has recently published a collection of essays entitled 12 Bytes at Al: How we got here and where we might be going next, and is currently working on a television adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and is currently Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.
Image: Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
