Emerita Professor Gill Hague CBE

Doctor of Laws

Wednesday 15 July 2026 - Orator: Professor Aisha Gill

Pro Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, graduates, it is a privilege to speak today in recognition of a life’s work shaped alongside major social justice movements of the past fifty years. Born in London at the close of the Second World War, Gill Hague came of age with the Welfare State and a growing belief in collective responsibility and social change. From the late 1960s onwards, her path was marked by sustained engagement with movements challenging inequality, injustice, and violence against women and girls. Her years in Montreal placed her in a vibrant field of activism: children’s rights, community organising, women’s liberation, and civil rights. That period established a pattern that would continue throughout her life: Gill has worked where practice, policy, and activism meet, often where such structures were only beginning to emerge.

After returning to the UK in the 1970s, she became involved in radical social work and grassroots initiatives with young people in ‘looked after’ institutions, homeless communities, and women’s organisations. In Oxford, she contributed to developing refuges and rape crisis responses, helping reframe violence against women as a public and political issue. In Bristol in the 1980s and 1990s, her work with Women’s Aid coincided with a formative phase in state responses to domestic violence. Through practice, training, and organisational leadership, she contributed to developing refuges, interagency responses, and professional education – now so embedded they are often taken for granted.

Alongside these achievements, Gill pursued an academic career spanning almost four decades. With the late Dr Ellen Malos, she co-founded what is now the Centre for Gender and Violence Research here at the University of Bristol, helping to shape approaches to research, policy, and practice on violence against women and girls. The Centre delivers national and international research on gender-based violence, spanning domestic and sexual violence, forced marriage, ‘honour’-based violence, perpetrator work, and justice responses. Its projects, grounded in feminist methodologies and collaboration with survivor organisations, have shaped criminal justice practice, family court guidance, and understandings of victim-survivor justice for more than thirty years.

It is important to acknowledge that institutions and movements evolve through challenge and reflection as much as consensus. The field has never stood still. Nor should it. Each generation inherits foundations, but also a responsibility to think critically about culture, leadership, inclusion, and the environments we create. Gill’s research spans domestic violence, housing, policing, health, children and young people, disabled women, and survivor involvement in policy and practice. Internationally, she has worked in South Africa, Iraqi Kurdistan, India, Uganda, and Mexico, and with local organisations on issues including marriage practices and ‘honour’-based violence.

Work of this nature, sustained over decades and across countries and institutions, inevitably leaves a complex legacy. What remains significant is the extent to which it helped establish gender-based violence as a serious public, political, and academic concern when it was widely marginalised. Across all of this, one thing stands out: activism was not an add-on, but the organising principle. Her contributions include over a hundred publications and honours such as the Emma Humphreys Memorial Special Prize and a CBE.

Yet the more enduring legacy is found in what follows: the people who continue, reshape, and carry this work forward. Gill has supervised doctoral researchers across many countries who have gone on to break new ground; in retirement, she continues to support women navigating asylum and justice processes. She also writes poetry, teaches yoga, and undertakes counselling, underscoring the importance of sustaining oneself in this work.

Pro Vice-Chancellor, today is not only about one career; it is about the collective labour that has brought violence against women and girls into public, political, and academic view. This work depends on many, survivors, activists, practitioners, administrators, researchers, and scholars, whose often-unrecognised contributions are indispensable. The next phase will require not only intellectual leadership, but generosity, collaboration, and active support for those entering the field. Institutions are sustained not simply through vision, but through the cultures they create. It is in that spirit that we acknowledge Gill Hague’s place within this history: as someone who helped open doors through which others now walk.

Finally, I have been asked to add something personal: that she is the proud mother of two adult children, and that this achievement remains of profound importance to her. As she reflects on her life’s work and looks towards the next generation, the message is simple: this work matters and taking it on is both a challenge and a responsibility.

Pro Vice-Chancellor, it gives me great pleasure to present Gill Margaret Hague as a most worthy recipient of the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.