Deborah Margaret Lavin, FRSA[1] (born 22 September 1939), is a South African academic and historian, resident in the United Kingdom for most of her career.
[2] She attended Rhodes University, South Africa and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating in 1961.
Lavin has lectured at the University of Witwatersrand as well as Queen's University Belfast and was a Senior Associate of St Antony's College, Oxford.
[3] In 1980 she relocated to Durham where she was co-director of the Research Institute for the Study of Change,[4] and a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, as well as Principal of Trevelyan College from 1979 to 1995.
[3] She was President of the Howlands Trust and from 1995 to 1997[1] was Principal-elect of the new College to be developed at the Howlands Farm, which eventually became Josephine Butler College.