Professor Margaret MacMillan

CC, BPhil MA DPhil Oxf, BA Toronto

Professor Margaret MacMillan became the fifth Warden of St Antony’s College in July 2007, and stepped down in October 2017. Prior to taking on the Wardenship, Professor MacMillan was Provost of Trinity College and professor of History at the University of Toronto. She was educated at the University of Toronto (Honours BA in History) and at St Hilda’s College and St Antony’s College, Oxford University (BPhil in Politics and DPhil). From 1975 until 2002 she was a member of the History Department at Ryerson University in Toronto and she also served as Chair of the Department.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and sits on several not-for-profit boards and the editorial boards of International History and First World War Studies. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and has honorary degrees from the University of King’s College, the Royal Military College, Ryerson University, Toronto, the University of Western Ontario, Huron University College of the University of Western Ontario and the University of Calgary. 

In 2006 Professor MacMillan was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2016 she was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada.

In December 2017, Margaret MacMillan was also elected an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

In the 2018 Queen’s New Year’s Honours List, Professor MacMillan was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) for services to higher education, history and international affairs.

Professor MacMillan has a long-standing relationship with St Antony’s. She was a student at the College during the early 1970s, producing a doctoral thesis on the British in India. She returned as a Senior Associate Member in 1993 and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 2003.

Selected Publications: 

Professor MacMillan’s publications include Women of the Raj as well as Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to Make Peace. The latter was published in North America as Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World and won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction (the first woman to do so), the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, the Silver Medal for the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and the Governor-General’s prize for non-fiction in 2003. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice in 2002. She has subsequently written Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World (entitled Nixon and Mao in the US) and The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War (2013). Her most recent book is History’s People: Personality and History (2015).  She comments frequently in the media on historical issues and current affairs.