October 2025

'Once again, the annual cycle has delivered fresh faces and fresh impetus. Even while it reminds us that we are another year older, we rejoice in welcoming our new students. Many of our rituals of welcome are familiar, but this year we also have novel ways of connecting our past with our present purpose. Thanks to a generous donation, a statue of Dervorguilla, co-foundress of the College in 1263, now presides over St Cross Road - as the public artwork that was a requirement of being permitted to build student accommodation on the Master’s Field. Also new is the advent of ChatGPT Edu, released specifically for Oxford and accessible to all with single sign-on. It was a Balliol student of English Literature who went on to imagine a dystopia in Brave New World (1932) and a utopia in Island (1962). I hope that among our current cohort there are scientists and mathematicians who will develop the technologies of the future and, alongside them, an Aldous Huxley who will show us what the new tools mean for us – for good or ill.'

Nicola Trott, Senior Tutor

COLLEGE NEWS

ALUMNI NEWS

BALLIOL ON THE WEB

• Obituaries:
  · The Rt Hon the Lord Taverne (1947): BBC
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• Professor Faisal Devji (Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History): 'Prof. Faisal Devji and Dr. Abdul Qadeer to Receive Sir Syed Excellence Awards 2025', The Hindustan Gazette
• Sudhir Hazareesingh (1981, Coolidge Fellow and Tutorial Fellow in Politics): 'Slave resistance was not exceptional', Prospect
• Installation of Balliol's new Dervorguilla sculpture is covered in 'A new public statue for Oxford', The Oxford Sausage

PUBLICATIONS

• William Booth (1999), The revolutionary road not taken: what the 1920s did to the Mexican Left (Radical Americas 10, 1, 2025) and José Revueltas and the temporalities of the Mexican 1956 (Twentieth Century Communism 29, 2025)
• Paul Shrimpton (1977), ‘The Most Dangerous Man in England’: Newman and the Laity (Word on Fire Academic, 2025)
• Natalya Din-Kariuki (2013), Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms (punctum books, 2025)
• Professor Veronica Rodríguez-Blanco (1999), Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective and Civic Maturity (Oxford University Press, 2025)
• Professor John Helliwell (1974), Certifying Central Facility Beamlines for Biological and Chemical Crystallography and Allied Methods (Springer, 2025) and Precision and Accuracy in Biological Crystallography, Diffraction, Scattering, Microscopies, and Spectroscopies (Oxford University Press, 2025) 

If you would like us to mention any significant work published this year or last, please send details to Yingying Jiang. Previously submitted publications are listed on the alumni publications page.