Professor Jonathan Bate CBE FBA, Provost of Worcester College and Professor of Literature, was knighted for services to literary scholarship and higher education.

Professor Bate is a biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Vice-President (leading the Humanities) of the British Academy and from 2007–2011 sat on the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.