Jose Harris

Jose Ferial Harris, ( Chambers; 23 January 1941 – 13 September 2023) was a British historian and academic. She was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2008, and a fellow and tutor at St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1997.

Early life and education Born Jose Ferial Chambers in 1941 at Bedford, she attended the Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford before going up to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1959. She placed in the first class of both parts of the Historical Tripos, graduating in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts degree (proceeding by convention to Master of Arts in 1966). She won the Helen Gladstone Scholarship (1962), Dr Ethel Williams Prize (1962) and the Gamble Studentship (1963) and went on to complete a doctorate at Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Richard Titmuss of the London School of Economics; her PhD was awarded in 1970. In 1969, she left Oxford and was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Promotion to senior lecturer followed in 1974. In 1978, she was elected to a fellowship at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where she was also a college tutor. She was appointed Reader in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 1990, and was promoted to Professor of Modern History in 1996. She retired from her professorship in 2008 and was made an emeritus professor at the university; she was also an emeritus fellow at St Catherine's (where she had been the vice-master from 2003 to 2005). Together they had one son. Her husband predeceased her in 2004.

Harris died in her sleep on 13 September 2023, at the age of 82.

Honours According to the historian Lawrence Goldman, Harris was "the foremost historian of the welfare state in Britain and the biographer of its architect, William Beveridge ... Many historians have written about the social institutions that formed the welfare state; many have written biographies of key contributors to public welfare. But very few have understood and explained the intellectual history of modern social policy, and none did it so fluently and with such a sure grasp of modern philosophy".

Harris was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1993. As of 2021, she was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She gave the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 1996–1997 on "A Land of Lost Content? Visions of Civic Virtue from Ruskin to Rawls". She was the subject of a festschrift, Lawrence Goldman (ed.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).