College news

The latest updates from St Antony’s.

The Antonian | October 2024

Honorary Fellow Rashid Khalili

We are delighted to announce that Professor Rashid Khalidi (DPhil Modern History, 1970) has accepted the nomination for an Honorary Fellowship at St Antony’s. The College’s Governing Body elected him to celebrate his distinguished career, exemplifying everything St Antony’s stands for in terms of pursuing the very highest standard of scholarship, contributing to the policy world with the benefit of research knowledge, engagement with the critical issues in the world today, and inspiring through teaching and supervising future generations of scholars and policy makers.

Read a full profile of Professor Rashid Khalili

Dr Tim Vlandas awarded British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

Dr Tim Vlandas, Associate Professor of Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

These prestigious Fellowships are designed to support outstanding individual researchers and to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences.

This award will allow Tim to carry out his research project ‘Ageing Democracies: Grey Power and Economic Performance’. The project will theorise and explore the political consequences of ageing for economic performance.

Nearly one in ten people in the world is now aged 65 and over. As countries age, the political priorities of a growing share of the electorate might shift, and elected governments may be forced to prioritise certain policies at the expense of others, which could in turn affect economic growth.

Quantitative methods on a wide range of datasets will examine these political economy consequences of ageing.

Find out more on the British Academy website

Professor Leigh Payne receives funding from the British Academy

Professor Leigh Payne has been awarded funding by the British Academy as part of the Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research programme.

The programme is designed to fund projects that bring together innovative, interdisciplinary, and international ideas from across the humanities and social sciences to offer valuable insights and perspectives of relevance to the questions of global (dis)order.

Leigh is the Principal Investigator on the project ‘The Rise of the Right-Against-Rights and Global (Dis)Order in Latin America and Beyond‘. By combining history, law, sociology, gender, and area studies, it broadens knowledge of, and develops strategies to reduce, the right-against-rights’ threat of disorder on fragile democracies in Latin America and beyond. The project is conducted in collaboration with Dr Sandra Botero (Universidad del Rosario), Dr Simón Escoffier (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Dr Gabriel Pereira (Universidad Nacional de Tucumán/CONICET).

Professor Leigh Payne

Professor Leigh Payne

Professor Neil Ketchley recognised in Recognition of Distinction Scheme 2024

Each year, the University of Oxford recognises academic excellence with the Recognition of Distinction Scheme. We are delighted to announce that the title of full professor has been conferred upon Neil Ketchley, Governing Body Fellow of St Antony’s College and Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is also a member of the Middle East Centre.

Neil’s primary research focuses on social movements and collective protest in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa.

Professor Neil Ketchley

Professor Neil Ketchley

SDG Impact Fund awarded to Governing Body Fellows

Governing Body Fellows Professor Rachel Murphy and Professor Leigh Payne have been awarded Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding through the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Impact Fund. This Fund is awarded to projects from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University that support SDG-focused knowledge exchange activities with non-academic partners in Oxford, the wider UK and internationally.

The projects are:

Empowering Social Workers and Caregivers in China’s Small Cities, Towns and Villages to Support Children Who Are Living Without Their Parents. Rachel Murphy, School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, partnering with Guiyu Academy and Le Qun Social Work Service Centre.

Reducing Extremists’ Threats to Democracy in Latin America. Leigh Payne, School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, partnering with Chilean Human Rights Secretariat and National Human Rights Institute, Chile.

Professor Rachel Murphy (left) and Professor Leigh Payne

Professor Rachel Murphy (left) and Professor Leigh Payne

In Memoriam: Allan Taylor

We are sorry to announce that our Emeritus Fellow and former Bursar, Allan Taylor, passed away on 8 August following a stroke at the age of 77.

Allan took a degree in History from the University of Bristol. He briefly worked at the Post Office, before joining the Inland Revenue where he was an HM Inspector of Taxes for 18 years. He then worked at KPMG for 12 years as a Partner overseeing the work of several teams in its Tax Division. This role included advising several universities, one of which was Oxford, and it was this experience which led him to apply for the role of Bursar at St Antony’s.

Allan took up the position of Bursar in January 2001 and it is no exaggeration to say that in the following few years he turned around the college’s finances. Allan was also instrumental in reorganising the College’s administrative structures as well as designing and introducing the model of the Management Executive Team which is still in place today. When he retired in 2011 and was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship, the College’s finances, administration and management were almost certainly in their best shape since the College was founded in 1950. Allan’s legacy will be fully recorded in the official history which is being prepared for the College’s 75th anniversary in 2025.

On appointment, Allan, together with his wife Rosalind, moved to Hamilton Road in Summertown (a mini-St Antony’s ghetto at the time) and they threw themselves into Oxford life.

Allan was a keen participant in college seminars, particularly those put on by the Parliamentary Visiting Fellows. On retirement, he took on various voluntary roles, including acting as a steward at Kelmscott Manor which he particularly enjoyed. Even after he and Rosalind moved back to Surrey to be nearer their children Allan continued to visit the college regularly to attend events.

Allan was a superb administrator. He was a hands-on manager who respected, and enjoyed the respect of, his team. He was a true champion of the student body and greatly improved the college facilities for them. He enjoyed interacting with the Fellows and academic visitors; he was genuinely interested in their work and extraordinarily tolerant of their foibles and occasional intransigence as he tried to introduce long-needed reforms. His stint as Bursar was transformational for the college.

Allan was a kind, thoughtful and generous colleague with a terrific sense of humour and the ability to get on with anyone from any walk of life. He will be much missed by all those who had the privilege to know him. Our thoughts are with Rosalind and the rest of the family at this very difficult time.

It is fitting that the College flag should fly at half-mast in Allan’s memory since this was an act that, when he was in office, he always oversaw himself.

Roger Goodman, Warden

In Memoriam: Robert Barnes

We are sorry to announce the sad news that Emeritus Fellow, Professor Robert H. Barnes, passed away on 6 July at the age of 79 in New Haven, Connecticut, following a fall.

Bob, as he was always known, was a mainstay of the Oxford anthropology community for almost four decades and a Fellow of the College for 25 years.

Bob was born in Jacksonville, Texas, and received his B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College before going on to obtain his B.Litt. and his D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Rodney Needham. He became a lecturer in the University of Edinburgh from 1974 to 1977 before taking up a lectureship in social anthropology back at Oxford in 1978 which he held until 1998 when he was awarded the title of Professor of Anthropology. On retirement in 2012, Bob moved to be with his wife, Ruth, in New Haven where she has been the Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale Art Gallery since 2010. He became an affiliate of Yale University’s Council of Southeast Asia Studies.

Bob was an anthropologist of kinship and Eastern Indonesia (where he carried out fieldwork over five decades), with a worldwide reputation in both fields. His best known publications include: Kedang: A Study of the Collective Thought of an Eastern Indonesian People (OUP, 1974); Josef Kohler, On the Prehistory of Marriage, Totemism, Group Marriage, Mother Right (University of Chicago Press, 1975).Two Crows Denies It: A History of Controversy in Omaha Sociology (Nebraska University Press, 1984); Sea Hunters of Indonesia: Fishers and Weavers of Lamalera (OUP, 1996); A Dictionary of the Kedang Language (Brill, 2013); Excursions into Eastern Indonesia: Essays on History and Social Life (Yale University, 2013).

Together with his colleagues Barry Cunliffe, Howard Morphy and Vernon Reynolds, he helped establish the undergraduate degree in anthropology and archaeology in the late 1980s. The degree quickly became one of the most popular courses in the University and he continued an active role in teaching and examining in it until his retirement.

When Bob was appointed to his position in Oxford in 1978, he was one of a small number of academics in Oxford who held a permanent teaching position which did not have an attached college fellowship. He was part of a campaign to rectify this clear anomaly and, as a result, was invited to join the Governing Body Fellowship of St Antony’s in 1987. He quickly became a key member of the College community, filling multiple important roles, most notably acting several times as Director of the Asian Studies Centre and as a particularly engaged and committed Dean, during which he dealt skilfully with a very wide range of student problems. As a community we were very much in his debt.

Bob will be much missed by all those who were taught by and worked with him over his many decades in Oxford. Our thoughts are particularly with Ruth and his family. In 1969, Bob took Ruth to the top of the Kedang volcano in eastern Indonesia, where they saw the hole from which, according to local legend, mankind emerged (as the original twins) and spread over the globe. They enjoyed an incredibly rich and deep personal and professional relationship that lasted for many decades; when Bob suffered his fall, it was on the date of their 56th wedding anniversary.