Lyndal Roper's reflections on her retirement as Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford

 (Pasted from The Oxford Historian. Trinity Term 2025)

It’s hard to believe that it’s fourteen years since I was appointed Regius Chair of History, and it has been a huge honour to be the first woman to hold the post, in either Oxford or Cambridge.

When I arrived, I happened to be the only woman Statutory Chair at the time, and the minute taker and I were often the only women in committee meetings. There were no images of women in the entire building, and one of my first jobs was to oversee the hanging of the pictures of all my predecessors up the stairs to my office. It is hard now to remember how much has changed. Did I really hear it argued, at the first Governing Body meeting I ever attended at Oxford, and as the only woman in the room, that wives should not be allowed to come to guest nights, as it would ‘lower the tone’? And, twenty years later at another college, did a Fellow seriously claim that it was rational to admit more men than women, since they performed better in Finals? Those days have gone. We now have approaching as many women Statutory Professors as men, and women are properly represented on all committees. Soon there will be no-one left still teaching undergraduates who was formed during the world of single-sex-college Oxford, and the memories of what it was like will have faded.

We will also be leaving this September the wonderful building which has housed us for so many years, the Oxford School for Boys, which closed in 1966 and which made for an unfortunate letterhead. But that school, founded by Balliol and the City Council as a ladder of learning for local boys to have access to universities like Oxford, has stood for a moral ideal that has not lost its relevance; and I’ll be sad to leave the building with its quirky architectural extravagances and high ceilings, not to mention the 24 power sockets in my office. It has a personal meaning for me, because it was once the Social Studies Faculty, and when I first came to Oxford, it was where the Women’s Studies Committee met, an intellectual home for me and many others in a climate that wasn’t generally welcoming.

The History Faculty now is a very different place. The arrival of women has meant an expansion of the kinds of history we do. We now have the Hillary Rodham Chair of Women’s History, and the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities, so that we are probably the leading place worldwide to do gender, women’s and queer history and where these approaches are complementary.

Not long ago, the Oxford History syllabus was built around the division between History of the British Isles, and ‘the rest’, General History; now Global history as well as European history are important parts of what we do, and British History is no longer the yardstick against which everything else is measured; indeed we think not just about England but about Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

We have a new emphasis in environmental history with new courses; we work with museums on art and material culture; we have links with local history and community groups; it’s possible to do part time Master’s degrees and part time doctorates after a campaign started by my predecessor Robert Evans. All these changes have come about through initiatives and hard work by many people – the Race and Resistance group has changed the faculty hugely, as has the Disability History group and what is now known as the Women’s, Gender, Identity and Queer History centre.

This hasn’t meant that we aren’t continuing to do outstanding political history, economic history, military history, intellectual history and the kinds of history we have always excelled in; indeed these areas are growing too – Oxford now has its own approach to intellectual history, ‘colonial history’ takes new forms that no longer centre the metropole, we study the history of war in the broadest sense, while economic history challenges us to think about old problems with new methods. This expansion has enriched us all while giving heft to the new approaches.

The new Schwarzmann Building (to which we are moving imminently) offers so many new and wonderful possibilities as we come together with linguists, philosophers, literary scholars, history of art, music and other scholars. At last we will have a theatre space and a concert hall on site, opening up new ways of doing history. And we hope to be able to strengthen our cooperations with colleagues around the world, with partners in Pisa, Berlin, Princeton, Central European University and many more – what we could do together is truly exciting.

I look forward to seeing where the coming generation will take History, and I’ve loved being the Faculty’s Regius and having the chance to work with such an extraordinary, open-hearted group of people, undergraduates, graduates, ECRs, administrative staff and Faculty. True, we face challenges; but I don’t know anywhere else which manages the same combination of respect for colleagues, commitment to teaching, and passionate intellectual engagement.

 

Lyndal Roper

Regius Professor of History