One Fellowship and three Honorary Degrees have been awarded by the University of Westminster in the 2023 autumn graduation ceremonies in November.
Caroline Criado Perez, Oscar Murillo and Jonathan Ronson have been conferred with Honorary Doctorates for their pro-active and dedicated work, while Chester Barnes has received an Honorary Fellowship for his very substantial contribution to the governance of the University.
During his career, Barnes was the Head of Europe and Head of Asset Management at JER European Funds, before taking on the role as Head of Value Adds Funds of Continental Europe for LaSalle Investment Management. He then went on to become Managing Director at JP Morgan before he retired in 2022.
Barnes has contributed an enormous amount of time to the University, acting as Independent Governor from 2014-2019 and Deputy Chair of the Finance and Property Committee from 2018-2019.
Freelance journalist, author, broadcaster and Westminster alumnus, Jon Ronson, has been awarded with Honorary Doctor of Letters for his services to creative literature and critical journalism. Ronson has an extensive CV that spans film, novels, documentaries and journalism, to name just a few.
His literature, productions and speeches tend to revolve around contemporary controversial fringe politics and science, from which he makes sceptical or investigative commentary. These commentaries cover all forms of media, from popular news publications, such as The Guardian and Time Out, to speeches, as seen in TED Talks online.
His book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was made into a loose film adaptation starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Jeff Bridges in 2009, and was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Along with this, his screenplay Okja competed for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was voted in the New York Times' Top 10 most influential films of the decade.
Author and campaigner Caroline Criado Perez has been awarded Honorary Doctor of Arts for her services to equality. Through her work she has exemplified Westminster’s values of being compassionate, progressive and responsible and has been committed to equality, diversity and inclusion.
Criado Perez’s high-profile campaigns have resulted in tangible changes to representation of women in the UK, including landing a female historical figure on Bank of England banknotes, getting Twitter to introduce a report abuse button on tweets and getting a statue of British political activist and writer Millicent Fawcett put up in Parliament Square - the first statue of a woman in the political hub. What is more, her continued campaigns to expose data bias have led to more calls for sex disaggregation of data in clinical trials and how they are reported in the media.
Caroline's 2019 exploration of that subject, Invisible Women, has sold over one million copies and was translated into over 30 languages. It was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller and is the winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize, the 2019 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, and the 2019 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Choice Award. Caroline's Invisible Women newsletter goes out to over 40,000 subscribers and she is currently working on a new book alongside her updates to Invisible Women.
Oscar Murillo has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts for his contribution to the arts. Since graduating from the Fine Art BA Honours course at Westminster in 2007, he has amassed an impressive body of work which has been exhibited across the globe.
He pushes the boundaries of materials with his art, involving drawing, sculpture, video, live events, painting, among other disciplines. He delves into issues such as community and migration in his art and embeds his own history into his work.
In 2019 he became the joint winner of the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious fine art award. He was nominated by an independent panel of judges based on two recent exhibitions of his work: Violent Amnesia, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and Oscar Murillo l Zhang Enli, at chi K11 art museum in Shanghai. Murillo presented a new site-specific installation of unstretched canvases and effigies in the Turner Prize exhibition.
Learn more about Honorary Degrees and Honorary Fellowships at the University of Westminster.
Photos by H.Tempest
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