History and English is a Joint School which allows undergraduates to inform themselves about, and to participate in, many of the most exciting theoretical and practical debates in historical and literary studies.
It is a challenging course covering many of the areas where the latest research is transforming the parent Schools. Both the History and English tutors are committed to interdisciplinary teaching and research, and to the expansion of the Joint School.
Teaching takes the form of tutorials and classes, many of which will be organized and taken by the Fellows and Lecturers of the College. You will also receive tuition from Fellows and Lecturers of other colleges, especially on the History side of the course. 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, and which are not designed to prepare candidates for a particular examination paper. Tutors will, however, be happy to advise undergraduates concerning which lectures are likely to prove most beneficial.
The first year examination is taken in June at the end of the first year. On the History side, candidates must offer a period of British history, and either an optional subject, chosen from a wide range of options; or a paper on historical methods Historiography: Tacitus to Weber. On the English side, two papers must be offered. The first of these is An Introduction to English Language and Literature which also includes an interdisciplinary component. 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 examination is intended only to consolidate your work at the end of the first year and the result does not count towards the final degree classification. In your second year you will study one interdisciplinary paper (chosen from two options) which enables you to bring together the literary and historical approaches to evidence. This paper is taught by historians and literary specialists in shared university classes. One such course offered at present is Representing the City, 1558-1640, which is co-taught by Professor Paulina Kewes and Dr Ian Archer. The five other papers have to include a history period and a period of literature and then more specialist options drawn from one or other side of the syllabus. Students may include options from English Course II which specializes in early language and literature.
You will also write an interdisciplinary dissertation. The Final Examination (FHS) is taken at the end of three years. Candidates take seven papers in total.
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. Students reading for the joint school of History and English enjoy the benefits of two subject societies: 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 the 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.
Jesus College students also run a lively History association, the J. R. Green Society, which is the oldest student history society in Oxford. It hosts informal talks and organises a number of social events each year. Recent speakers have included Ian Kershaw, Lyndal Roper, Peter Heather, Quentin Skinner, Rana Mitter, Hew Strachan, Julia Smith, and Faramerz Dabhoiwala.
Fellows
Dr Alexandra Gajda
Dr Alexandra Gajda is a Fellow and Tutor in History at Jesus. She has published on the political, religious and intellectual history of early modern Britain and Europe. She is currently writing a book about the evolution of the parliaments of the British Isles during the Reformation and other projects on early modern historiography. Alexandra teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth- century British and European history, with specialisms in Tudor politics and religion, and literature and politics in the early modern period.
Dr Matthew Kerry
Dr Mathew Kerry is Zeitlyn Fellow and Tutor in History and Associate Professor of European History since 1870. Matthew is a social and cultural historian of modern Spain. His work examines the meaning and practice of politics in everyday life. He has written on the revolutionary insurrection in the Asturias in October 1934, during the Spanish Second Republic, and essays and articles on secularisation, anticlerical violence, antifascism and boycotts as a form of popular justice. He is currently working on the history of political engagement in in twentieth-century Spain, primarily through a history of sound and mass politics from the 1890s to the Second Republic. Matthew teaches European and Global history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Professor Susan Doran
Professor Susan Doran is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Jesus College. She teaches early modern (c1400 – 1700) British and European undergraduate papers, and her research specialism is in Elizabethan religion and politics.
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).
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.
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, 8 are offered places in a typical year to read History and related joint schools.
Academic requirements
Academic requirements for this course can be found here.
Selection criteria
The specific selection criteria are given on the Faculty of History and Faculty of English websites.
Admissions tests
All candidates must take the History Admissions Test (HAT) 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 here.
Written work
All candidates are required to send one piece of written work for History on an historical topic, and one piece for English. The deadline to submit written work is 10 November 2024. Further information on the written work requirements can be viewed here.
Interviews
Candidates will usually be given at least two interviews, one with the College’s History tutor or tutors, and one with the English tutor or tutors. In the English interview, the candidate may be asked to discuss a piece of prose or verse, provided before or at the interview.
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.
Joint Schools
History and English can both be studied as a single discipline and are also available as a joint course as follows:
The Faculty of History offers a range of taught graduate courses at master’s level and two research programmes leading to the degrees of Master of Letters or Doctor of Philosophy. In addition to the traditional fields of historical research, in political, social, and cultural history, History at Oxford embraces more specialised areas, such as medieval history, economic and social history, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and the history of art. For a full list of the postgraduate courses offered by the Faculty of History, please click here.
Jesus has a thriving community of graduate students in English, and we are actively expanding our postgraduate intake. For the last few years, we have been co-funding a number of full scholarships for MSt and DPhil students and we are committed to continuing to do all we can to support our students financially, as well as intellectually.
We welcome applications for the following postgraduate courses in English:
- 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
Although the History and English degree is not vocational in any strict sense (and many students undertake the course for reasons of sheer intellectual pleasure) it does equip students with a set of transferable skills applicable to many careers. Historians are used to the sifting of large quantities of often conflicting information; they are skilled in the evaluation of differing interpretations; they are trained in presenting complex issues in a lucid and convincing fashion; their verbal and critical skills are highly developed. These qualities have enabled generations of Oxford historians to excel in a wide range of careers. Oxford historians typically move on to careers in business, the law, investment banking and consultancies, advertising, accountancy, the civil service, publishing, journalism and the media, global charity work, museums, librarianship and archive work, and teaching.
Please use the links below for further information:
- The University of Oxford undergraduate admissions
- Faculty of History
- Faculty of English
- Suggested subject resources
One good way of broadening your historical horizons is to read one of the History magazines below:
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