The Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History
The University is seeking to appoint The Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History from October 2020, at the latest. This is a new and prestigious position, and possibly the first advertised Professorship of its kind anywhere in the English-speaking world. Its establishment as a Statutory Professorship reflects the importance the University attaches to women’s history, especially in the year of the commemoration of a century of women’s admission to the University of Oxford.
The inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History will be undertaking outstanding, pioneering research. You may specialise in any aspect of women’s history from any period and region after 250 CE, and you will have: broad interests in the field; an excellent record of innovative research and publications; the capacity to lead and inspire others; and an ability to communicate the importance of women’s history to a wide public. Above all you will be a major historian and intellectual with outstanding publications. Further, you will be a champion for women’s history both externally and internally. You will be expected to lead the development of major new projects in the future which will support the growth of the field, including funded grant applications, workshops, course design, public events and outreach, broadly defined.
In Oxford there are many historians and others who work in women’s history and related areas. The Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair will have a crucial role in drawing this outstanding cluster together. Women’s history is taught throughout our syllabus in outline, specialist and theme papers, as well as in historiography and methodology options; it is taught as part of social, political, cultural, intellectual and economic history; it features alongside the history of gender, sexuality, and the body, and also alongside the histories of work and living standards, the histories of power and family life; the histories of identity and subjectivity. It is a central topic of interest for many undergraduates, as well as being a focus for the research of significant numbers of postgraduate students and early career researchers. You will be a source of inspiration and support for all these people.
The inaugural Professor can be expected to represent women’s history on a global stage, in a role that draws together the diverse strands of related research activity from across Oxford’s divisions, faculties and research centres. As a Statutory Professor, you will also demonstrate capacity for institutional leadership, supporting administration of the Faculty of History and playing a leading role in shaping the trajectory of the Faculty’s Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity.