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FAMOUS OXFORDIANS

Gifted men and women have studied or taught at the University throughout its history. Among them are 28 British Prime Ministers, at least 30 international leaders, 55 Nobel Prize winners, and 120 Olympic medal winners.

20th and 21st Centuries

Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia

HM King Abdullah II of Jordan

Sir Grantley Adams, former Premier of Barbados and Prime Minister of the West Indies

J M G (Tom) Adams, former Prime Minister of Barbados

Sir Roger Bannister, neurologist and athlete

Dame Josephine Barnes, first female President of the British Medical Association

Sir Isaiah Berlin, philosopher

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, former President and Prime Minister of Pakistan

Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister

Baruch S Blumberg, Nobel Prize-winning scientist

Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States

Bill Clinton, former President of the United States

Sir John Eccles, scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology

T S Eliot, poet

William Fulbright, politician, founder of the Fulbright Scholarships

Indira Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India

William Golding, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Hugh Grant, actor                   

Graham Greene, author

Harald V, King of Norway

Professor Stephen Hawking, physicist

Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

Edwin Hubble, astronomer

Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, current British Prime Minister

Felicity Jones, actor

T E Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia

C S Lewis, writer and scholar

Rt Hon Theresa May MP, former British Prime Minister 

Philip Pullman, author

J R R Tolkien, author and academic

David Vitter, United States Senator

19th Century

Sir Richard Burton, explorer

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), author and academic

William Ewart Gladstone, British Prime Minister

John Keble, theologian

William Morris, artist

Cardinal John Henry Newman, theologian

Edward Pusey, theologian

Cecil Rhodes, colonial pioneer, founder of the Rhodes Scholarships

Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet

Oscar Wilde, playwright, poet and author

 

17th and 18th Centuries

Edmund Halley, astronomer

William Harvey, scientist discovered the circulation of blood

Thomas Hobbes, philosopher

Dr Samuel Johnson, lexicographer

John Locke, philosopher

Sir Richard Lovelace, poet

James Oglethorpe, founder of the US state of Georgia

William Penn, founder of the US state of Pennsylvania

Adam Smith, political economist

James Smithson, scientist, founder of the Smithsonian Institution

Jonathan Swift, author and satirist

Jethro Tull, agriculturalist and inventor

John Wesley, founder of Methodism

Sir Christopher Wren, architect

 

15th and 16th Centuries

Cardinal William Allen

Erasmus, scholar

Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor and martyr

Sir Walter Raleigh, explorer

Sir Philip Sidney, poet

William Tyndale, translator of the Bible

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor and churchman, founder of Christ Church

“The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)

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