Balliol College, Oxford
For other meanings of Balliol, see Balliol (disambiguation)Balliol has produced four Nobel Prize winners: Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (Chemistry), Sir John Hicks (Economics), Baruch S. Blumberg (Medicine), and Anthony J. Leggett (Physics). Seven more have been Fellows of the College: George Beadle (Medicine), Norman Ramsey (Physics), Robert Solow (Economics), John Van Vleck (Physics), Gunnar Myrdal (Economics), and Linus Pauling (both Peace and Chemistry). It has also produced three British Prime Ministers (Edward Heath, H. H. Asquith, and Harold Macmillan), several Archbishops of Canterbury (Tait, Stanley, Morton, Lang, Temple, and Abbott), two cardinals (Heard and Manning), the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith (Shoghi Effendi) and the most prolific hashish dealer in Britain's history (Howard Marks).
As with all Colleges, Balliol has a more or less permanent set of teaching staff, known as Fellows. These include both Tutorial Fellows and Professorial Fellows, many of them with international reputations (e.g.
Joseph Raz). These are supplemented by
academics on short term contracts. In addition, there are distinguished visiting international academics who come to Oxford for periods of up to a year. The official list of current senior members of the College can be found
here. There is an incomplete
list of Balliol College academics past and present.
Main article: Balliol College in fiction
Balliol has featured in fiction since the 19th century. This may be because it has historically been regarded as the college of the intellectual elite. The college has been regarded as typifying a whole range of attributes for good or ill. On the one hand it is positioned as the ultimate target for any educationally ambitious school boy (or girl - but only relatively recently). It is also selected as the typical college of a superior sort of person. Having placed the fictional character at the college the author may then endorse its academic excellence or alternatively take a swipe at its intellectual pretensions.
* Balliol, especially the Master,
Andrew Graham, played a major role in 2000 and 2001 in setting up the
Oxford Internet Institute. This was the world's first multidisciplinary research and policy centre in a university devoted to examining the impact on society of the Internet. It is a department of
Oxford University, but is located in Balliol, and its Director is a Professorial Fellow of Balliol.
*
Junior Common Room website (undergraduate students)*
Middle Common Room website (graduate students)*
A virtual tour of Balliol College (360° photographs)*
The Oxonian Review of Books (Oxford's postgraduate review, based at Balliol)* J. Jones,
Balliol College: A History,
Oxford University Press, 2nd edition. 1997.
