English and Modern Languages is a course designed to give students the opportunity to investigate and reflect on the literary and linguistic relations between Great Britain and the continent.
Professor Katrin Kohl is the overall co-ordinator for English and Modern Languages. In this role she discusses subject choices with each undergraduate in order to ensure that the two sides of the course complement each other in accordance with the student’s interests.
Both the English and the Modern Languages Faculties at Oxford are among the largest in the country, and include major scholars in all areas of the respective subjects. Students thus have the opportunity to receive teaching from a range of expert tutors.
Library provision at Oxford is excellent: all students have access to the English Faculty Library, the Taylor Institution Library (for modern languages), the Bodleian Library, and their own college libraries. Both faculties have well-equipped computer rooms and all colleges have computing facilities.
Teaching takes the form of tutorials and classes, which will usually be organized and taken by the Fellows and Lecturers of the College (although those pursuing some of the more specialized options may receive tutorials from an outside tutor). Attendance at, and production of work for, tutorials and classes is compulsory, and must be given priority over all other activities. The University organizes courses of lectures which cover the syllabus, but which are not compulsory. Tutors will, however, be happy to advise undergraduates concerning which lectures are likely to prove most beneficial.
Two main courses are available for the English section of the syllabus; Course I (which most candidates will take) offers the usual range of literary options, while Course II allows more specialization in early periods of languages and literature.
The Preliminary Examination is taken after three terms. On the Modern Languages side, candidates are required to offer two language examinations (‘papers’), and two literature papers on prescribed books. On the English side, two papers must be offered. The first of these is An Introduction to Language and Literature. For the second paper, candidates may choose Victorian Literature, Modern Literature or Early Medieval Literature. All papers are taught through a mix of tutorials, small classes, and faculty lectures.
The third year of the course is spent abroad, with most students taking a posting as an ‘assistant’ in a foreign school. On your return, you may choose from options including special author papers and special topic papers in both English and your modern language.
The Final Examination, taken at the end of four years, allows great flexibility on both sides of the course. On the Modern Languages side there are compulsory papers in translation from and into the language, as well as an oral examination. Two further Modern Languages papers must be offered, again chosen from a wide range of literary and linguistic options. Candidates also select three subject papers from the English side; one of these may be an interdisciplinary paper.
All candidates also complete a dissertation, which can be on an interdisciplinary topic.
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 events. All English and Modern Languages students are, by default, members of the Herbert English Society, which 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 Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri, Marina Warner, Philip Pullman, Bernard O’Donoghue, Craig Raine, Hermione Lee, Sally Shuttleworth, William St Clair, Blair Worden, and the acclaimed poet Geoffrey Hill.
Fellows
Professor Paulina Kewes
Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College. Her research interests are in early modern literature, history, and politics, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Among her recent publications are edited volumes on Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations (2019) and Ancient Rome and Political Culture in Early Modern England (2020), and articles on the iconography of Mary Queen of Scots and her son James, and representative assemblies in the political thought of Jean Bodin. Paulina leads an international project on parliamentary culture in the early modern world, and is completing a monograph Contesting the Royal in Reformation England, funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2021-24). Paulina teaches English literature from the Renaissance to the Romantics, including Shakespeare.
Professor Dirk Van Hulle
Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET) and of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. With Mark Nixon, he is director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge UP series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’, editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and curator of the Bodleian exhibition Write Cut Rewrite (Oxford, Feb 2024–Jan 2025). His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016), the Beckett Digital Library, Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (OUP, 2022), and Write Cut Rewrite (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024, with Mark Nixon).
Professor Katrin Kohl
Professor Katrin Kohl is a Fellow and Tutor in German. She teaches German literature from 1750. Her research focuses on poetry and poetics, and on the theory and practice of metaphor. She recently led an interdisciplinary research project on Creative Multilingualism for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.
Professor Caroline Warman
Professor Caroline Warman is Fellow and Tutor in French. She teaches and researches eighteenth and nineteenth-century French literature and thought, and has translated novels and essays from French. She has just finished a book about Enlightenment philosopher Diderot and co-organised a congress on the Enlightenment for 1500 people from all over the world. She teaches French literature and thought and also translation to all years.
Lecturers
Professor Rachel Burns
Rachel Burns is Associate Professor of Old English in the Faculty of English, and Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College. Her research centres on Old English verse and manuscript culture, with interests in materialism/the material and Christian theology. She has published on a range of texts in Old English, and her two monographs (A History of Old English Verse Layout and A Theology of Things) will be published in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Rachel will teach you on the medieval paper (Old and Early Middle English) across Michaelmas and Hilary Terms. When she began her own undergraduate degree, Rachel had never studied literature from such an early period of history, and developed a love for it. She hopes to share some of that enjoyment with you!
Dr Harry George Daniels
Dr Harry George Daniels is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English Literature, who teaches the Romantic, Victorian, modern, and theory papers across Oxford. At Jesus, he will introduce you to the history of aesthetics and critical theory in Paper 1b. He is currently revising his monograph on conceptions of the therapeutic and ethical value of art in the late nineteenth century, and his work further studies the history of psychoanalysis in Britain.
Professor Peter Davidson
Professor Peter Davidson, is Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance and Baroque Studies at Campion Hall and Curator of the Collection of Old Master paintings there. He teaches and researches literature in Latin and European languages as well as English, and writes extensively on art history. Much of his work has concerned the cultural life of the Recusant Catholic Community and the achievements of the Society of Jesus, especially the monograph The Universal Baroque, and the edition of the complete verse of St Robert Southwell in both English and Latin for OUP. His collected essays on baroque, Relics dreams voyages, is out in 2024. He also has an identity as an original writer about landscape and the art: The Idea of North (2005), Distance and Memory (2013), cultural history of twilight The Last of the Light (2015), and a meditation on places seen on evening walks, The Lighted Window (2021). He’ll be teaching FHS Paper 5: Literature in English, 1740-1830.
Dr Amanda Holton
Dr Amanda Holton is a lecturer at several of the Oxford colleges. She teaches Old and Middle English and the English language. Her research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and sixteenth-century love lyric, and poetics. Her publications include The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics (2008) and the Penguin Classics edition of Tottel’s Miscellany (2011). Her new book Rhyme and the Construction of Love in English Lyric 1300-1579 will be published by Oxford University Press early in 2025. Amanda will be teaching you the English language section of Prelims 1 in Hilary and Trinity Terms.
Kate McLoughlin
Kate McLoughlin is a Professor in the Oxford English Faculty and Official Fellow and Tutor in English at Harris Manchester College. She is the author of Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (2007), Authoring War; The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015 (2018) and editor of books including The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009), The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity (2018), with Santanu Das, and British Literature in Transition: 1960-1980 – Flower Power (2019). She is currently completing a literary history of silence, funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Kate will be teaching Prelims Papers 3 and 4 at Jesus.
Dr Ole Hinz
Dr Ole Hinz, is a German Lektor at Jesus College. His research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, with an emphasis on 20th-century German literature and critical theory.
Dr Elena Lombardi
Dr Elena Lombardi, a Fellow of Balliol College, is a Lecturer in Italian for Jesus College. Her teaching interests focus on Dante, early Italian poetry, and Medieval Studies.
Dr Daniela Omlor
Dr Daniela Omlor, Fellow in Spanish at Lincoln College, also looks after Jesus students. Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish literature, with a particular emphasis on memory, trauma and exile. Her first book examined the role of memory and self-representation in the works of Jorge Semprún. Currently, she is exploring the interaction between memory and fiction in recent novels by Javier Cercas, Javier Marías and Antonio Muñoz Molina and others, in order to investigate how the recovery of historical memory in Spanish novels increasingly extends beyond the Spanish Civil War.
Professor Margarita Vaysman
Professor Vaysman teaches most Russian undergraduate literature papers and specifically those focussing on the nineteenth century, gender and Russophone culture.
Dr Claire Williams
Dr Claire Williams lectures on Modern literature from the Portuguese-speaking world (from Machado de Assis to Conceição Evaristo) and teach other final year courses such as Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. She also teaches on courses such as Lusophone African Literature, Women’s Writing in Lusophone literature and Latin American Cinema.
The deadline to submit your application for undergraduate study via UCAS is 15 October. Please refer to the University’s webpages for detailed information on how to apply.
Places available at Jesus College
In a total College entry of about 100 undergraduates, 6 are offered places in a typical year to read English or English and Modern Languages.
Academic requirements
Academic requirements for this subject can be found here.
Selection Criteria
The specific selection criteria are given on the English and Modern Languages websites.
Admissions tests
All candidates must take the Modern Languages Admissions Tests (MLAT) as part of their application. The registration deadline and test date are published on the University’s website. We strongly recommend making the arrangements in plenty of time before the deadline. Everything you need to know, including how to register and guidance on how to prepare, can be found can be found here.
Written work
For English, candidates are required to submit one recent piece of written work in English. For Modern Languages, candidates are required to submit one piece of work in the target language to be studied, and one piece in English.
If you have a piece of written work in English that you think would be suitable for both subjects, please send us two copies of this piece of work; you do not need to submit two different pieces of work in English.
The deadline to submit all written work is 10 November 2024. Further information on the written work requirements can be viewed here.
Deferred Entry
Please refer to the Departmental website for subject-specific advice.
The Tutors have no objection in principle to offering a place to a candidate who wishes to defer entry for a year, provided this intention is made known at the outset. You must apply for deferred entry at the time of application to Oxford: you cannot change your mind after an offer has been made.
You should be aware that applicants who are offered places for deferred entry will generally be among the very strongest of the cohort for their subject, and the College limits its offers of deferred places in order not to disadvantage candidates applying in the following year. In some cases, an applicant for deferred entry may be offered a place for non-deferred entry instead.
Candidates are selected on the basis of academic record (e.g. GCSEs) and potential, as shown by their UCAS reference, submitted written work, performance in written tests and in interviews if shortlisted.
Joint Schools
English and Modern Languages can both be studied as a single discipline and are also available as a joint course as follows:
The Graduate School of the Oxford Faculty of English is large and dynamic. The following degrees are offered at postgraduate level:
- DPhil in English Language and Literature
- M.St. English Language and Literature (650 -1550)
- M.St. English Language and Literature (1550-1700)
- M.St. English Language and Literature (1700-1830)
- M.St. English Language and Literature (1830-1914)
- M.St. English Language and Literature (1900- Present)
- M.St. English and American Studies
- M.Phil. English Studies (Medieval Period)
- M.St. World Literatures in English
Oxford has a large, varied, and active teaching and research community in Modern Languages. There are over ninety members of the Faculty, with research interests spread across the full chronological range of the languages and into most areas of linguistics and literary study. The College welcomes applications for the following degrees in Medieval and Modern Languages:
- MSt or MPhil Modern Languages
- DPhil Medieval and Modern Languages
- MSt Women’s Studies
Beyond the subject-specific aims, the undergraduate course trains students’ critical faculties and gives them a wide range of other ‘transferable skills’. Students learn to organise their time and cope with working under pressure, and the course provides intensive training in communication skills: weekly essays demand quick assimilation of material and foster writing skills, while discussion in tutorials and classes develops confidence in presenting an independent view clearly and comprehensibly.
Graduates in English and Modern Languages go on to a great variety of careers, including broadcasting, publishing, teaching, journalism, acting, administration, management, advertising, translation, librarianship and law. Knowledge of a modern language opens up opportunities for internationally focused careers and working with international companies or organisations.
Please use the links below for further information:
If you have any questions about entrance requirements, or about applying to study at Jesus College, please contact the Admissions Officer:
Email: admissions.officer@jesus.ox.ac.uk
Web: www.jesus.ox.ac.uk