All Souls College, Oxford University’s most selective graduate college, is holding two Examination Fellowship open evenings at the end of term targeting women and gender minorities, an annual initiative since 2008, and ethnic minority students, introduced in 2019.
Students from these backgrounds remain underrepresented among candidates for All Souls’ highly competitive Examination Fellowships, which cover seven years of graduate tuition, research fees, and room and board for outstanding scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Typically, two Fellows are elected each year from a pool of over 150 candidates.
Out of the 33 Examination Fellows elected since 2006, twelve (36%) are female; the percentage of female candidates has significantly increased over this time, from 25.9% in 2006 to 48% in 2023. While All Souls has not historically tracked the ethnicity of candidates, four (33%) of its twelve current Fellows are from BAME backgrounds, and the proportion of BAME candidates exceeded 40% in 2023.
In recent years, All Souls has also taken steps to address its historical links to the Atlantic slave trade: Christopher Codrington, a former Fellow and a key benefactor of the College, was a prominent slaveholder in the Caribbean. The College Library, formerly known as the Codrington Library, was renamed in 2020 to All Souls College Library, with contextual plaques and displays subsequently installed around the Library, including a digital projection of enslaved people’s names onto the statue of Codrington inside the building.
The College now funds three All Souls Hugh Springer Scholarships each year, which cover full tuition and living expenses for Black Caribbean graduate students studying at any Oxford college, and contributes to the university-wide Black Academic Futures Programme and the Caribbean Oxford Initiative, which support graduate students of Black or Black Caribbean heritage. Moreover, the College provides annual grants to Codrington College, an Anglican theological college in Barbados founded by a bequest in Codrington’s will.
