Apple’s Chief Design Officer and renowned historian elected as Honorary Fellows of Jesus College
Sir Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer at Apple, and Professor Robert Evans, one of the foremost historians of our time, have been elected as Honorary Fellows of Jesus College.
Sir Jonathan Ive
Sir Jonathan read Industrial Design at Newcastle Upon Tyne Polytechnic, now Northumbria University. Shortly after graduating in 1989, he co-founded the London-based design consultancy Tangerine. In 1992 he moved to the United States and joined Apple’s headquarters, where the founder Steve Jobs subsequently referred to him as ‘his creative partner’.
Now Apple’s Chief Design Officer, Sir Jonathan leads the team that has been credited with introducing elegance, purity and beauty to the design of personal computers. His work has earned him many plaudits and six of his products appear in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Winner of the Inaugural Medal for Design Achievement in 1999 and then in 2004 the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, he is a Royal Designer for Industry and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2005).
Sir Jonathan was made a Knight Commander (KBE) in 2013 for services to design and enterprise. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford in 2016. His most recent visit to the College was in June 2016 before attending the University’s honorary degree ceremony.
Professor Robert Evans
Professor Robert Evans is Regius Professor of History (retired), University of Oxford, and a former scholar of Jesus College.
One of the foremost historians of our time, he is renowned for his work on the history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Habsburg lands, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. His book The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700 transformed our understanding of Central Europe in the pre-modern era and was awarded the prestigious Wolfson prize in 1980.
His numerous publications cover many different aspects of history in this region, from the famous Cabinet of Curiosities of Rudolf II to the rise of Fascism. His work is characterized by a persistent interest in the development of states and languages, and their interrelation, during the early modern and modern eras. Nowadays he studies mainly English local history, ecological history, and the history of Wales.
Born in Cheltenham in 1943, Evans came to Jesus College to study Modern and Medieval Languages in 1962. He graduated in 1965 with a starred First and was awarded his PhD on ‘The court of Rudolf II and the culture of Bohemia (1576-1612)’ in 1968. He was appointed a Lecturer in History at Oxford University in the same year.
From 1997 to 2011, Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford; he is a Fellow of Oriel and Brasenose Colleges and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984.
