English
Academic Staff
Fellows
Dr Paulina Kewes, Fellow and Tutor in English, took her DPhil at Jesus College, Oxford in 1996. She was the J. A. Pye Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford (1995-97) and held positions as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (1997-2003) before returning to Jesus College as a Tutorial Fellow in 2003. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate Member of the Centre for Early Modern British and Irish History at Oxford. Paulina’s research interests are in early modern English literature, especially drama, historiography, and ideas of authorship and plagiarism. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford University Press, 1998) and two edited volumes: Plagiarism in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and The Uses of History in Early Modern England (Huntington Library Press, 2006) as well as numerous articles on Shakespeare, Dryden, literary translation, and early modern drama. Her current projects include a monograph on Drama, History, and Politics in Elizabethan England for Oxford University Press, and two co-edited volumes: The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed’s Chronicles and The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (MUP). Paulina teaches English literature from the Renaissance to the Romantics, including Shakespeare, as well as contributing to interdisciplinary courses for Classics and English and History and English.
Dr Marion Turner, Fellow and Tutor in English, read English at Oxford before reading for an MA in Medieval Studies at York. Marion returned to Oxford to study for a doctorate, focusing on Chaucer, which she gained in 2002. Marion was a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, and she also taught at King’s College London before returning to Oxford in 2007 to take up a fellowship at Jesus. Marion teaches the Old and Middle English papers (roughly the 7th to the 16th centuries), and has particular interests in late-medieval secular literature, especially Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and political texts. Her first book – Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth Century London – was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She has also published numerous articles in journals such as New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer and the Chaucer Review, and in edited collections, including Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (OUP, 2004), Chaucer and the City (Boydell and Brewer, 2005), Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English (OUP, 2007), and A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Blackwell, 2006). She is currently working on a book about the idea of the literary in the late-fourteenth century, and on an article about literature and medical discourse in the same period. Marion is also editing a major volume for Blackwell’s on the relationship between theory and Middle English literature (forthcoming, 2012). In 2006, Marion was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and in 2011 she was awarded research funding by the Wellcome Trust. She has appeared on several television programmes on Channel 4 and the BBC, talking about Chaucer and other aspects of late-medieval literature and history, and has also been interviewed on Radio 4’s Front Row about adaptations of the Canterbury Tales. Dr Turner will be on leave for the academic year 2011-2012.
Lecturers
Dr Helen Brookman is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English. Helen read English at Wadham College, Oxford, and stayed there to take an MSt in Medieval English. She moved to Cambridge to do her PhD, which explored translations and editions of medieval English literature by nineteenth-century women scholars, including Anna Gurney (1795-1857), Lucy Toulmin Smith (1838-1911), and Jessie L. Weston (1850-1928). Helen teaches the Old and Middle English papers, and Course II.
Ms Alys Moody, DPhil candidate at Jesus, is a Career Development Lecturer in English. She has research interests in twentieth-century British, American, European and Anglophone literature, particularly modernism and its aftermaths, and the relationships between literature, philosophy and literary theory. She is writing a DPhil thesis on the aesthetics of starvation in Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Alys teaches Mods Paper 1 and special authors/topics in the field of C19 and C20 English and American Literature.
Dr James Williams is a Career Development Lecturer in English. He teaches in the period 1740 to the present, and has research interests in eighteenth- to twentieth-century poetry, prosody, bibliography,translation, the English Bible, and the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Mr Kelsey Jackson Williams, DPhil candidate at Balliol College, is a Retained Lecturer in English teaching early modern literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. His research interests include the history of scholarship (particularly the relationships between antiquarianism, philology, and history), classical reception, British philology (both classical and post-classical), and the Neo-Latin poetic tradition. He is currently preparing studies of a donation of learned Swedish books to the Bodleian in 1683 (with William Poole) and the interpretation of the ruins of the near eastern city of Palmyra during the eighteenth century.
English at Jesus College
Jesus College currently has 24 undergraduates reading English, including 7 in the joint schools with Classics, History, and Modern Languages. There are also 14 graduates studying for Masters and doctoral degrees (please see below for further information on Postgraduate Studies and Careers).
The College has an excellent record of academic achievement in English and the Joint Schools, with a tradition of fostering a love of literature and independent thought. Theatre trips, poetry readings, and English society events (detailed below) all contribute to a densely textured intellectual life at Jesus. Jesus College is located a two-minute walk from the Bodleian Library, an eight-minute walk from the English Faculty Library and itself offers excellent library and computer facilities.
The Undergraduate Course
All degree courses should help students to learn how to think, and the English course at Oxford is particularly well equipped to do so. Each student will study different texts, pursue personal interests, and shape his or her degree in exciting and challenging ways. The study of English starts from a love of literature and language, and branches out to encounter or encompass other subjects and fields of enquiry. History, philosophy, languages, anthropology, art, architecture, politics, theology, and classics all make their claims heard. English is a subject which lends itself to diverse approaches and theories of interpretation, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Derridean deconstruction. Here at Jesus we encourage students to work in interdisciplinary ways, and to explore a range of approaches to literature, while never forgetting the centrality of the text. Studying English involves the development of analytical skills and the accumulation of a great deal of knowledge: you need to be able to read widely but also in close detail; to understand the sweep of historical change while also being able to meditate on the nuances of a single word.
The English course is extremely demanding, and you must be ready to work hard. Our students think in original and imaginative ways, and are willing to pursue ideas, themes, and approaches to texts independently. Much of our teaching is conducted in tutorials (one or two students with the Tutor) and small groups, and you must be prepared to discuss your ideas and reading with tutors and other students, and to respond spontaneously to criticism or new ideas introduced by them. You must be excited by the challenges of literary study, and dedicated to developing the skills of reading, writing, interpretation, and research.
Your tutors will be experts in their particular field of research and committed to providing you with an excellent educational experience. You will read widely across authors, periods, and genres. For example, in the first year you will study Old English and Victorian, modern and contemporary writers. You will also spend a term learning basic critical approaches to literature which will prepare you for good close reading of the texts. Tutors are looking for students who are able to take risks: to think and interpret texts beyond the obvious demarcations of their period, and to seek out (with the help of tutors) work and authors beyond the established canon: the richly surreal opening passages of Dickens’s Bleak House, for example, might fruitfully be compared with the techniques of more modern writers, or the imagist poetry of the lesser known Hilda Doolittle read beside that of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In sum, our students are encouraged to forge their own way through what is a rich and varied syllabus.
We all share a concern and enthusiasm for our students' work, their aspirations, and their general welfare. We hope that the study of literature will continue to be an important part of their life. Our graduates go on to a great variety of careers, including academia, writing, acting, broadcasting, publishing, journalism, teaching, advertising, administration, librarianship, management and law.
Cultural and Intellectual Life
Students at Jesus find themselves welcomed into a serious, lively, and good-humoured academic community with every opportunity to discuss their thoughts in tutorials, seminars, and College English events.
The Herbert English Society provides a forum for exchange of ideas and discussion of literature, criticism, and the arts. The Society invites poets, playwrights, novelists, academics, journalists, and cultural historians. Our recent speakers have included Marina Warner, Philip Pullman, Bernard O’Donoghue, Craig Raine, Hermione Lee, Sally Shuttleworth, William St Clair, Blair Worden, and the acclaimed poet Geoffrey Hill.
There is an active tradition in student drama at Jesus. Many of our undergraduates produce, direct, and act in plays and musicals as well as participating in the Turl Street Arts Festival each Hilary Term. In 2011 one of our second-year students wrote a play which went on to be staged for a week at one of Oxford’s theatres to great acclaim, under the direction of another Jesus student.
The College also offers opportunities for students to attend performances of plays they may study, and so field trips to see Shakespeare performed at Stratford and London’s Globe as well as productions of other Renaissance plays or more modern drama are incorporated into one or two terms. In recent years students have seen Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Tom Stoppard's most recent play, Rock and Roll, and a production of Antony and Cleopatra directed by one of our undergraduates. We have arranged for our students to visit the Ashmolean Museum to look at Anglo-Saxon artefacts as part of their work on material culture and Old English literature, and held classes on early modern book history and print culture in the Jesus College Fellows’ Library where they viewed, inter alia, the folios of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and a range of historical chronicles and travel accounts.
The tutors are always available to help students develop their individual research plans and discuss any problems they might encounter during their course.
Joint Schools
Admissions
We are looking for students who combine academic excellence and ambition with intellectual curiosity and the determination to read as widely as possible. Our successful applicants usually read extensively beyond the school syllabus while maintaining strong analytical skills in close reading. Enthusiasm and a love of the subject are vital.
In a total College entry of about 100 undergraduates, 6-8 are offered places in a typical year to read English and joint schools with English. Offers made to pre-A level candidates will be conditional upon A level results (normally AAA, with an A in each subject the candidate is applying to study to degree level, or equivalent). Offers made to post-A level candidates will usually be unconditional. It is essential to study A2 Level English Literature (or English Language and Literature), or equivalent in other qualification systems.
Written test: Candidates for English (including the Joint Schools with Classics or Modern Languages) will be required to sit the English Literature Aptitude Test (ELAT) in schools on 2 November 2011. [Candidates for History and English will instead be required to sit the History Aptitude Test on the same date]. The ELAT is administered by Cambridge Assessment, and the registration deadline is 14 October 2011. For further details please see the ELAT website.
Written work: Candidates are required to submit one recent example of writing. This should be a marked essay produced in the normal course of your school or college work. It should not be rewritten and it should not be a short timed essay, piece of creative writing, or critical commentary. The essay should be on an English literature topic.
Interviews: There will be two interviews of approximately 20 minutes. In one interview, candidates will be asked to discuss a poem which will be supplied about half an hour earlier. In the other interview, candidates will be asked about their reading interests, the written work they have submitted, and the authors and texts they have studied at A-level.
Prospective students are warmly invited to attend one of the College's Open Days, at which the English tutors will be very glad to answer any questions. For further information please contact the Schools Liaison Officer.
Deferred Entry: Applications for deferred entry to Jesus College are welcomed. You must apply for deferred entry at the time of application to Oxford: you cannot change your mind after an offer has been made. Please refer to departmental web sites for subject-specific advice. You should be aware that applicants who are offered places for deferred entry will generally be among the strongest of the cohort for their subject. We would not usually offer more than one or two deferred places per subject in order not to disadvantage the following year's candidates. In some cases, an applicant for deferred entry may be offered a place for non-deferred entry instead. If you require any further advice, please contact the Admissions Officer.
Postgraduate Studies
Jesus has a thriving community of graduate students in English, and we are actively expanding our postgraduate intake. Current postgraduates’ interests range from Scottish saints’ lives and early modern drama to creative writing. We welcome applicants for the following postgraduate courses in English:
- MLitt or DPhil in English Language and Literature
- MSt in English Language and Literature
650-1550
1550-1780
1780-1900
1900-present day - MPhil in English Literature and Language 650-1550
Prospective graduate students are welcome to contact the English fellows for an informal discussion about the College.
Why choose Jesus for graduate study?
The College is unique in its financial provision for postgraduates: it provides generous allowances for research trips and book purchase, and its housing and food are heavily subsidised and among the best-value in Oxford. There are also other funding opportunities available – for example, an English postgraduate was recently awarded a generous Old Members’ bursary. English postgraduates are allocated one of the English tutors as a College advisor, who will serve as a pastoral and intellectual point of contact within Jesus College.
Our graduate students take an active part in the intellectual life of the College and participate in the English Society meetings and poetry readings. These involve dinner for students, tutors and guests, a talk or reading, questions, and then informal drinks. Thus they offer an opportunity to socialise with tutors and students, while also engaging with speakers of the highest calibre (including novelists, cultural historians, poets, and literary critics). There are also numerous other social and intellectual events based in College such as joint speaker evenings with members of the Senior Common Room or annual Graduate dinners to which students invite their supervisors.
Preliminary Reading and Further Information
Further information about English at Oxford can be found on the Faculty of English website. Information on admissions is available on the University's Undergraduate Courses pages.
You can download the Reading List for the first-year courses in Adobe PDF format. Please note this list is revised annually.