Announcing the first Hillary Rodham Clinton Professor of Women’s History

The Faculty of History is delighted to announce the appointment of Brenda E. Stevenson, currently Nickoll Family Endowed Professor of History at UCLA, to the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History.

Professor Stevenson is an internationally leading historian of race, slavery, gender, family and conflict.  Her many books and articles have explored the intersections of sex, race and politics, placing women – and particularly women of colour – at the centre of accounts of political and social developments.  In this way, and in her sensitive reconstructions of women’s lives, her examinations of family dynamics and her interest in intersectionality, Professor Stevenson is just the kind of scholar we wished for as the first holder of this new and transformative chair.  We look forward to welcoming her to Oxford in the autumn of 2021.

In this centenary year of the admission of women to degrees at Oxford, the Faculty is very glad to be able to establish a chair which will do so much to advance the cause of women’s history.  We are profoundly grateful to the donors who made the chair possible, to Secretary Clinton and her team, especially Allida Black, for their active support and patronage of the campaign.  We are also very grateful to three women in the History Faculty whose imagination and determination was fundamental to this achievement: to Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History, who has championed women’s history and women historians throughout her career; to Deb Oxley, Professor of Social Science History, who has done so much to promote the study of women and to extend the conceptual range of economic and social history in Oxford; and to Ruth Harris, whose wide-ranging work on culture, medicine and society in nineteenth-century Europe has consistently signalled the centrality of women’s lives and experiences.