STAFF AND COLLABORATORS
Dr Ann Olivarius, Chief Executive Officer & Chair
Dr Olivarius, a member of the second class of female Rhodes Scholars, founded the Rhodes Project in 2004 to investigate the career paths and life choices of highly educated women of her generation. As CEO and Chair, she continues to lead The Rhodes Project.
She is the Founder and Senior Partner of McAllister Olivarius, a transatlantic law firm with offices in greater London and New York City. It is one of the few feminist legal firms worldwide, and is known for representing plaintiffs in discrimination and sexual harassment cases against large institutions, including universities, hospitals, banks, and Big Tech. Dr Olivarius also served as Managing Partner of AO Advocates, which is now part of McAllister Olivarius, a practice that represented survivors of child sex abuse by religious leaders, teachers, and others in positions of trust.
Early in her career, Dr Olivarius was deeply involved in a landmark civil rights case, Alexander v. Yale, which established the legal obligation of American universities under the federal legislation known as Title IX to protect students from sexual harassment and to establish grievance boards. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in San Francisco, and then served as the first CEO and General Counsel of the Sarnoff Endowment for Cardiovascular Science. Before founding McAllister Olivarius, she ran the Corporate Department at Shearman & Sterling's Washington, D.C. office.
Dr Olivarius has a DPhil in Economics and Management (1981, University of Oxford), a joint JD and MBA (Yale University, 1986) and a BA in Political Science (Yale University, 1977). In 2017, the British academic journal Nature named her one of “Nature’s 10” - ten people who matter in science each year - because of her work fighting sexual harassment at universities. She has been included by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in its list of nine most influential people in the history of Title IX, and received the Yale Women Lifetime Achievement Award from the Yale Alumni Association in 2019. She is licensed to practice law in New York, the District of Columbia, Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Idaho. She is also a solicitor of England and Wales. McAllister Olivarius was rated in the top 2.5% of UK law firms by the assessor for Lexcel, which accredits the quality of law firm management.
Dr Olivarius has served on the boards of Autistica, the leading UK charity supporting research into autism, and OpenDemocracy USA, Women Moving Millions, GenerationNext!, (a former UK charity that supported a school in South Africa), and was a founding member of the UK Women’s Equality Party. Dr Olivarius is also a frequent writer whose columns have appeared in The Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg Law, and The Telegraph.
Jef McAllister, Senior Editor
Jef brings his decades of journalistic experience to bear as a consulting editor for the Rhodes Project, advising on all areas of the project's publications, online and offline.
Jef worked for two decades as a journalist, serving as Diplomatic Correspondent, White House Correspondent and London Bureau Chief for TIME Magazine. He wrote over 500 articles for TIME on politics, public policy, diplomacy and law, including many cover stories. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and appears regularly on BBC radio and TV and Sky News.
Jef graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, and with honours from Yale Law School. He obtained a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, worked as a reporter in the Philippines as a Luce Scholar, and is the co-author of The Right Hand of Power, the memoirs of U. Alexis Johnson, a senior US. diplomat. He is also the Managing Partner of the international law firm McAllister Olivarius.
Eric Silverman, Senior Scholar
Eric is a Cultural Anthropologist who spend 25 years in higher education as a professor before joining The Rhodes Project. He received a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University, and then his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. He was the inaugural Edward Myers Dolan Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University, and then taught at Wheelock College, rising to Full Professor in 2014 and then Research Professor of Anthropology in 2017. Eric has also been affiliated with the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
His scholarly research and writing have focused on a Sepik River society in Papua New Guinea - the Iatmul people made famous by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson - and the American Jewish community. He has published four books, most recently, A Cultural History of Jewish Dress (2013) and Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities (with D. Lipset, 2016). He has also published many book chapter, journal articles, and delivered scores of conference and museum presentations in the US, Australia, and Europe. His research has variously been funded by a Fulbright award, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California at Irvine. He is currently writing a book on art, gender, and globalization in Papua New Guinea.
Marina Kosheleva, Finance Manager
Marina was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she qualified as an accountant and held the position of Chief Accountant for a large private company before moving to the UK.
Prior to joining the firm, Marina worked as the Finance Manager of a bio-pharmaceutical company.
At the Rhodes Project Marina keeps the financial wheels turning, alongside spending time with her children and keeping fit.
Kathryn Olivarius, Trustee
Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research and teaching focus on slavery’s rise and fall in the American South and the wider Atlantic World, disease in the nineteenth century, the history of race and ethnicity, and the social upheaval of the Age of Revolutions. Her first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap imprint, 2022) concerned yellow fever, immunity, and inequality in the American south.
Born and raised in New York, Washington D.C., and London, she earned her BA in history (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University in 2011. She received an MSt in US History (with distinction) in 2013 and her DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. She also serves on the board of GenerationNext!, a UK charity that supports the Vuleka School in Johannesburg, South Africa, by providing funds for scholarships for deprived students.