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St Hugh’s College welcomes Marchelle Farrell to its annual Lady Ademola Lecture

We were delighted to welcome psychiatrist, psychotherapist and writer Marchelle Farrell to our annual Lady Ademola Lecture on Saturday 1 November where she discussed her thoughts about the relationships between internal and external landscapes with the St Hugh’s College community.

Marchelle is curious about the relationships between internal and external landscapes. She has written powerfully on what nature and gardens teach us about ourselves and how they affect our inmost lives. Writing for The Guardian in 2023, Marchelle reflected on the psychological impact of city life in the light of her professional knowledge of the incidence of schizophrenia in second-generation Black Caribbean people born in the UK and of her move to a village in Somerset: ‘There would be so much about the maddening experience of growing up in the UK as a Black person that I would be unable to improve for my wide-eyed, sensitive, curious children, but how urban a childhood they had was one crucial factor that I could influence.’ She explores this at greater length in her book Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden (2023), which won the Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing. She has also contributed to By the River: Essays from the Water’s Edge (2024) and This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing (2024).

Kofoworola Ademola (née Moore) (1913–2002) arrived at St Hugh’s College in 1932 to study English and in 1935 became the first Black African woman to achieve a degree at Oxford. Lady Ademola, as Kofoworola would become, was a lifelong advocate for women’s education and social reform.

You can watch Michelle in conversation with St Hugh’s staff and students by clicking on the YouTube link below: