[17] The current master is Dame Helen Ghosh, former Director-General of the National Trust and Home Office Permanent Secretary, and an alumna of St Hugh's and Hertford colleges.

A former student of the college, Baruch Blumberg, was the first American master and the first Nobel Laureate, receiving his prize in medicine for the identification of the hepatitis B virus.

[20] The college provides its students with facilities including accommodation, the Hall (refectory), a library, two bars, and separate common rooms for the fellows, the graduates and undergraduates.

[citation needed] The majority of undergraduates are housed within the main college or in the modern annexes (Jowett Walk buildings) around the sports ground.

The first portrait of a woman in hall since that of the co-founder, Dervorguilla of Galloway, was unveiled in 2012, depicting benefactor and Oxford Internet Institute founder Dame Stephanie Shirley.

Grey devoted much care to the collection of manuscripts, and wherever he lived constantly employed scribes to make copies of books he could not otherwise obtain.

It was his desire to make his collection the nucleus of a library for Balliol College, to the building of which, as well as to that of the master's lodgings and of the old buttery and hall, he contributed largely.

Of these, many were destroyed in the reign of Edward VI and during the great rebellion, and by Wood's time few of the miniatures in the remaining volumes had escaped mutilation.

Continuing the west-side Stc XII–XIV dates from 1826, by George Basevi, and marks the beginnings of the college's academic renaissance being required for the increasing number of Commoners applying for places.

[citation needed] Underneath part of the Garden Quad and extending into Trinity were the Balliol-Trinity Laboratories, the most prominent Oxford physical and chemical laboratories in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which physical chemist Henry Moseley (originator of the atomic number) and Nobel Laureate Cyril Hinshelwood worked.

[citation needed] The majority of research and post-graduate students are housed in the Holywell Manor complex, a Grade II listed building acquired by Balliol in 1932 under the direction of Kenneth Norman Bell.

[citation needed] From 2010, St Cross Church, next to the Manor, has been the college's Historic Collections Centre, an extension to the library's services.

[41] In 2017, the college entered into a specialised financial arrangement which enabled it to project a new 200 plus 'study-bedsits' accommodation range at the Master's Field/ Jowett Walk/ St Cross Road site which would also replace the Eastman Professor's House, Martin and Dellal buildings there.

In the first phase, work began on the south of the site, at the corner of Jowett Walk and St Cross Road, to provide the accommodation for undergraduates and the new pavilion.

[citation needed] Balliol College, and its previous Master Andrew Graham, played a major role in 2000–01 in setting up the Oxford Internet Institute.

This dinner is held in memory of John Snell, whose benefaction established exhibitions for students from the University of Glasgow to study at Balliol (the first exhibitioners were matriculated in 1699) one of whom was Adam Smith.

[citation needed] A college society which no longer survives is the Hysteron Proteron Club, which aimed to live one day of each term backwards.

However, on 29 April 2007, Chris Skidmore, a graduate of Christ Church working at the House of Commons, donated a pair of tortoises - one to his own college, and one to Balliol, where he had attended an open day in 1999.

[citation needed] For many years, there has been a traditional and fierce rivalry shown between the students of Balliol and those of its immediate neighbour to the east, Trinity College.

[44] In college folklore, the rivalry goes back to the late 17th century, when Ralph Bathurst, President of Trinity, was supposedly observed throwing stones at Balliol's windows.

[45] In fact, in its modern form, the rivalry appears to date from the late 1890s, when the chant or song known as a "Gordouli" began to be sung from the Balliol side.

The shouting of chants over the wall is still known as "a Gordouli", and the tradition continues as the students gather to sing following boat club dinners and other events.

[49] The contrast between the radical tendencies of many Balliol students and the traditional conservatism and social exclusivity of Trinity gave the rivalry an extra edge.

'"[51] Sayers also alludes to the rivalry in Murder Must Advertise (1933): Mr Ingleby, a Trinity man, comments, "If there is one thing more repulsive than another it is Balliolity.

and also of the response, by the Balliol-educated Catholic theologian and Bible translator Ronald Knox, which more accurately reflects Berkeley's own beliefs: Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad.

In 1880, seven mischievous Balliol undergraduates published The Masque of B-ll--l, a broadsheet of forty quatrains making light of their superiors – the master and selected fellows, scholars, and commoners – and themselves.

[citation needed] William Tuckwell included 18 of these quatrains in his Reminiscences in 1900, but they all came out only in 1939, thanks to Walter George Hiscock, an Oxford librarian, who issued them personally then and in a second edition in 1955.

The height of Baliol's literary influence came in the Victorian era, when virtually all major poets had some connection with Balliol:Of 20th century writers: Among contemporary writers: In terms of critics, Balliol has produced A.C. Bradley, writer of Shakespearean Tragedy, described as probably the most influential single work of Shakespearean criticism ever published,[68] the "polyglot and polymath" George Steiner,[69] and Christopher Ricks who has been acclaimed as the "greatest living critic"[70] Philosophy Notable Balliol philosophers include: Like most philosophy faculties in the Anglosphere, contemporary thought at Balliol is firmly grounded in the so-called analytic tradition: Other notable contemporary philosophers include J. R. Lucas, R. M. Hare, Michael Sandel, Joseph Raz, Peter Geach, Michael Otsuka, Michael E. Rosen, and Timothy Williamson.

[75] In 2024, Karma Phuntsho, who finished his doctor of philosophy degree in 2003, became the first Bhutanese to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award which is widely acclaimed as Asia's Nobel Prize.

[76] Tim Hilton, art critic and Guardian journalist whose books include The Pre-Raphaelites and a two volume biography of John Ruskin.