User:Brigade Piron/sandbox9
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Somerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is located in the north of Oxford, England at the junction between Woodstock Road and Little Clarendon Street. It has approximately 500 students, of whom around 100 are studying for postgraduate degrees, who are known as "Somervillians". Since 2010, its Principal is Alice Prochaska.
Somerville College | ||||||||||||||||||
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Oxford | ||||||||||||||||||
Location | Woodstock Road, Oxford | |||||||||||||||||
Coordinates | 51.75951°N 1.26232°W / 51.75951; -1.26232 | |||||||||||||||||
Latin name | Collegium De Somerville | |||||||||||||||||
Motto | Donec rursus impleat orbem ("Until it should fill the world again") | |||||||||||||||||
Established | 1879 | |||||||||||||||||
Named for | Mary Somerville | |||||||||||||||||
Colours | ||||||||||||||||||
Sister college | Girton College, Cambridge | |||||||||||||||||
Principal | Alice Prochaska | |||||||||||||||||
Undergraduates | c.400[lower-alpha 1] | |||||||||||||||||
Postgraduates | c.100[lower-alpha 1] | |||||||||||||||||
Website | College website | |||||||||||||||||
JCR | JCR website | |||||||||||||||||
MCR | MCR website | |||||||||||||||||
Boat club | Boat club website |
Somerville was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall exclusively for educating female students. It was named in honour of the pioneering female mathematician, Mary Somerville, who had died a few years before the college's foundation. From its creation, Somerville was officially non-denominational, deliberately unlike the first women's college in Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall, founded a year earlier, which was strictly Anglican. In 1894, the institution was raised to college status and was re-named. Although the college was permitted affiliation to the University of Oxford, women's education were subject of official discrimination in the university. Originally, female students across the university were not allowed access to university libraries and were forced to study separately from males. It was only in 1920 that female students were allowed to receive degrees and became full members of the university. The college rapidly expanded over the course of the twentieth century. Somerville remained a exclusively female college until 1993 and its first male students were admitted in 1994. Today, the gender-balance of students at the college is roughly equal.
Former students include Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel Prize-winning Chemist who both studied and later taught at Somerville; Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female Prime Minister; Dorothy L. Sayers, a noted Crime Writer and Indira Gandhi, twice Indian Prime Minister. As of 2011, Somerville had a financial endowment of £39.3 million.[1]