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Introduction

Laura did a BA (2008) and MPhil (2009) at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, before completing a PhD in Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck, University of London (2015). She has previously taught at Birkbeck, Bath Spa, Royal Holloway, and St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a fellow of the HEA.

Research

Laura’s research focuses on neurodivergence and early modern literature. Her second book, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity, a guide to teaching Shakespeare in an inclusive way is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on a new book project called Early Modern Neurodiversity: a Europe-wide study of neurodivergence in literary texts, and neurodivergent ways of reading these texts. Her research has recently been supported by the British Academy and Oxford University John Fell Fund. With Professor Siân Grønlie she founded and currently co-leads the project Neurodiversity at Oxford (neurodiversityoxford.web.ox.ac.uk).

Publications

For a full list of publications, see Dr Laura Seymour | Faculty of English (ox.ac.uk)

Introduction

Dr Hankinson studied English at Balliol College, completing his DPhil in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Matthew Reynolds. He has since taught at St Hilda’s College, St Anne’s College, and Jesus College, and worked as the Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), based at St Anne’s, where he currently leads a research strand on Comparative African Literatures.

Teaching

To Queen’s English undergraduates I teach both Prelims Paper 3, on nineteenth-century texts and contexts, and Prelims Paper 1b, an introductory paper on literary theory.

Research

Dr Hankinson’s research explores the relations between nationalism, belonging, foreignness, and style, with a particular focus on the period 1860-present. His work routinely involves the tracing of relations which proliferate beyond temporal and geographical boundaries, and the development of innovative comparative methodologies—two activities united in a forthcoming monograph which stages an encounter between the Victorian poet Robert Browning and the contemporary Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing. 

Publications

Please visit: https://www.josephhankinson.com/articles.

Courses

  • BA (Hons) English Language and Literature
  • BA (Hons) English and Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) Classics and English
  • BA (Hons) History and English

Admissions

The College normally admits six or seven students per year for the courses involving English: English Language and Literature, English and Modern Languages, History and English, and Classics and English. Please note that though deferred applications (i.e. for two years ahead of when you apply) are not accepted for the English Language and Literature course, they are for all the joint courses.

The course

The BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature at Oxford is a three-year degree. Its distinctive feature is its historical breadth: you will finish your degree having studied the full range of English literature, with compulsory papers on literature from 650 to the present day and the opportunity to specialise in the areas that interest you most in your final year. There’s more detail about the course on the Faculty website.  If you are taking English with another subject, you’ll study roughly half the English degree, and there is the opportunity to combine your two subjects in some of the papers.

English is a very rewarding subject to study at university level. You will develop a deep knowledge of individual authors, literary movements, historical periods, and theoretical approaches that you will draw on for the rest of your life. You will gain skills that will equip you for a wide variety of careers: skills of written and spoken communication, analysis, and interpretation at the highest level. In recent years, students who have studied English at Queen’s have gone into teaching, journalism, publishing, arts administration, marketing, law, acting, public relations, international relations, social policy, and the Civil Service. A significant proportion have loved their course so much that they’ve gone on to Master’s and PhD study. The Faculty website has more information about careers for English students.

Teaching

Studying English at Queen’s means joining a friendly and lively community of students and tutors who will encourage and support you as you encounter new texts and ideas.  Most English papers are taught through a combination of Faculty lectures (with students from across the University), and Queen’s classes (with the rest of your Queen’s year group) and tutorials (with one or two other Queen’s students).  For example, a typical first-year paper will be taught over one term, and is made up of six tutorials, for which you will write a weekly essay, four classes on historical and critical context, for which you will be asked to prepare reading and perhaps a presentation, and lectures in the Faculty, which you choose yourself, with guidance from your tutor. If you are taking English with another subject, you may take a paper over two terms, alternating between your subjects weekly. You will meet with a tutor every week in the term, and this close attention means that we can provide exactly the support you need to get the most out of the course.

Most of your classes and tutorials will be taught by the Queen’s English tutors: Rebecca Beasley, Joe Hankinson, Amanda Holton, Daniel Thomas, and Laura Seymour.

At Queen’s we are very lucky to have one of the most beautiful libraries in the world—no exaggeration!—in which to study. The Library has an exceptionally rich collection of rare books, and we regularly use these books for teaching (some of our English students recently curated an exhibition in the Library). You will be able to spend time with first editions of works by some of the greatest writers in English, including Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, and the Library also holds the manuscript of Thomas Hardy’s last volume of poetry, Winter Words. Queen’s is situated close to the Faculty of English, where you will have your lectures, and the Bodleian, the University’s main library.

There are plenty of opportunities for students to explore their literary interests beyond their tutorials. Many of our students have contributed to the Queen’s creative writing journal, The Rambler, and played a central role in our literary and film societies, and our drama society, The Eglesfield Players. Queen’s students are often involved in creative writing, student journalism, and drama at the University level too. At Queen’s we pride ourselves on creating a friendly, supportive, and inspiring community for students studying English. All the students and tutors in English get together as a group for several events during the year, including our annual play reading and our medieval Yule Feast, which features music, games, food, and drink from the Middle Ages. We are passionate about literature, and we are sure you will enjoy the course here if you feel the same way.

Interviews

The entry requirements for English are the same across the University. We decide who to shortlist for interview on the basis of your UCAS form, your written work, and your mark on the Oxford English Literature Admissions Test (ELAT). We are looking for students who are enthusiastic and thoughtful readers, and we look for future potential as well as current achievement. Queen’s students are ambitious and committed: the majority of students studying English Language and Literature achieve First Class degrees.

In the admissions interviews we want to get a sense of how you think about the literature you’ve read, and about literature that you are seeing for the first time. You’ll have two interviews. If you’re applying for the English Language and Literature course, one interview will be based on discussion of a short literary text supplied shortly before the interview. The other interview will be a general discussion of why you have chosen to read English, and of literature you have read. If you’re applying for English with a modern language or with History or Classics, you will have one interview with the English tutors and one with the tutors in your other subject. The English interview will include both discussion of a short text and a general discussion of your reading in English. We encourage you to think of this as a conversation rather than a test: there are no trick questions in our interviews. We simply want to get the best out of you and we aim to make the interview as rewarding and enjoyable as possible.


Introduction

I grew up in London before coming up to Oxford to read English at Lady Margaret Hall. After graduating, I moved to Jesus College, Oxford for my Masters in medieval literature and subsequently for my DPhil. I have taught medieval English language and literature, and the English language, at a variety of Oxford colleges since 2008. Most recently, I have been working as a researcher on the EU-funded project CLASP: A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry located at the English Faculty here in Oxford. 

Teaching

I teach medieval language and literature, covering the period from the earliest written records of English in the seventh century until the reign of Henry VIII in the mid-sixteenth century. My teaching focuses, however, particularly upon the early medieval period. I also teach the history and development of the English language.

Research

My research focuses on Old English literature (roughly anything written in English before the twelfth century). I have particular interests in vernacular poetics, cultural constructions of space and place, and architectural metaphor. I am also peculiarly interested in the conceptualization of prisons in early medieval prose and verse, which is the focus of the book on which I’m currently working.

Publications

  • ‘The Gates of Hell: Invasion and Damnation in an Anonymous Old English Easter Vigil Homily’, in Leeds Studies in English: Special Issue – Architectural Representation in Early Medieval England (forthcoming).
  • Landes to fela: Geography, Topography and Place in The Battle of Maldon’, in English Studies 98:8 (2017), 781–801.
  • ‘Associative Memory and the Composition of Ælfric’s Dominica in Quinquagessima (Catholic Homilies I 10)’, Notes & Queries 64:1 (2017), 5–10.
  • ‘Rewriting Gregory the Great: the Prison Analogy in Napier Homily I’, Review of English Studies 68 (2017), 203–23.
  • ‘Incarceration as Judicial Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England’, in eds. Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti, Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 92–112.
  • ‘Literal and Spiritual Depths: re-thinking the ‘drygne seað’ of Elene’, Quaestio Insularis 10 (2009), 27–44.


Introduction

I grew up in Kent, and after attending the local state grammar school I read English at Oxford, where I took my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I have taught at Oxford since 1999, and have also worked at the universities of Reading and Southampton.

Teaching

I teach English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the sixteenth century. I also regularly teach the history, theory and use of the English language.

Research

My principal research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and sixteenth-century love lyric, and poetics, with an emphasis on how form precedes and generates meaning. I am interested in interrogating the agendas which drive the taxonomy of poetic form, and in challenging the division still made between medieval and early modern literature. I have recently completed a book on the role of rhyme in late medieval and early Renaissance love lyric. This book shows that decorum in the choice of vocabulary, combined with the limited rhyme resources of English, render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable, particularly in complex poetic forms demanding large rhyme-groups. As a result, the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme comes to generate features of the experience of love in poetry, and the impression of subjectivity in love lyric is a side-effect of the necessities of rhyme.

Publications

  • ‘Chaucer’s presence in Songes and Sonettes’ in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Ashgate, 2013), pp. 87-110.
  • ‘An obscured tradition: the sonnet’s relationship to its fourteen-line predecessors’, Review of English Studies 62 (2011), 373-92.
  • Edition of Tottel’s Miscellany (Penguin Classics, 2011). Co-edited with Tom MacFaul.
  • The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics (Ashgate, 2008).
  • ‘Resistance, Regard and Rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’, English 57 (2008), 42-64.

Introduction

I grew up on the Isle of Wight, and in Yorkshire and Hampshire. After attending my local comprehensive and sixth form college, I studied English at Cambridge. For my Master’s degree, I went to the University of California, Berkeley, and then returned to Cambridge to write my PhD on the twentieth-century American poet, Ezra Pound. Since 1998, I have taught in the English departments of the University of Liverpool, Queen Mary, and Birkbeck (both University of London), before coming to Queen’s in 2009.

Teaching

I teach literature from the Victorian period to the present day, and have particular interests in early twentieth-century literature, literature and visual culture, and the relationship between different national literatures. I have supervised graduate students on a broad range of twentieth-century topics, particularly in the field of modernist literature.

Research

My first two books — Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Theorists of Modernist Poetry (Routledge, 2007) — were on modernist poetry and its contexts, and I continue to research and publish in that area, particularly on topics relating to Ezra Pound, art criticism, and periodical culture.

More recently my research focused on the impact of Russian culture on early twentieth-century British literature, resulting in two co-edited collections — a special issue of Translation and Literature, Translating Russia, 1890-1935 (2011), and Russia in Britain, 1880-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2013) — and a monograph, Russomania (Oxford University Press, 2020). I am now beginning a book on the popularisation and institutionalization of modernist culture in Britain.

Publications

Please see my faculty profile page for research updates and a full list of publications. 

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