English Faculty, University of Oxford

Prof Michèle Mendelssohn has co-authored an essay with Dr Charlie Tyson for the The Guardian on joyless decadence: ‘Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure’

“The problem with contemporary culture isn’t that we’re too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence – luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display – but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure.”

Read the essay: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/26/age-of-decadence-pleasure-ai

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Congratulations to Professor Laura Ashe who has been awarded the New Chaucer Society’s 2026 Publication Prize for her book, Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2025). The prize recognizes Professor Ashe’s book as Best Monograph on Chaucer published in 2024 or 2025.

During the congress’s closing event, outgoing society president, Professor Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University) recognized Professor Ashe’s winning book. The committee applauded Ashe for her enormous argumentative verve, which is clearly the product of long teaching of Chaucer. Her book’s unabashedly personal approach yields exhilarating and intense engagement with key philosophical questions that Chaucer’s poetry raises by way of two unusual interlocutors, Wittgenstein and Hegel. With its convincing arguments, delivered with force and supported by masterful close readings, the book attests to how such traditional methods of analysis, in concert with ideas that matter to us now, continue to yield groundbreaking contributions to Chaucer studies.

Professor Ashe commented: “I’m absolutely delighted with this honour, and tremendously grateful that my work has been recognized by such an impressive judging panel.”

The New Chaucer Society, a global academic organization founded in 1977, provides a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age, a period roughly defined as 1300-1500. Its biennial congresses attract hundreds of members from around the world who share the latest scholarship and pedagogical techniques with one another. In addition, the 2026 Congress included plenaries on recent editions of Chaucer’s works, Professor Barrington’s Presidential Address, “Welcome the Stranger,” and Professor Holly Crocker’s NCS Biennial Lecture, “Chaucer’s Enchanted Subjects.”

After a short summer break, our Shakespeare webinar series continues with The Winter’s Tale on 7 September.

In this webinar, Professor Emma Smith will be joined by Dr Harry Newman (Royal Holloway, University of London) to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Winter’s Tale which offers fresh readings of the play’s provocations on genre, psychology, game-play, gender, and the role of the non-human.

The webinar will take place online via Zoom on 7 September from 6-7.15pm.

All welcome! The webinars are free to attend but registration is required via Eventbrite: https://shakespeare-webinar-the-winters-tale.eventbrite.co.uk

This event is part of our free webinar series, the English Faculty / Oxford World’s Classics Shakespeare Webinar Series. Shakespeare expert Professor Emma Smith discusses a different Oxford World’s Classics Shakespeare title each month in conversation with the writers of the new introductions specially commissioned for this series, discussing the play and how we might approach it differently in the twenty-first century.

The event is run by Oxford University’s English Faculty in collaboration with Oxford University Press, the publishers of the Oxford World’s Classics series.

You can see recordings of previous webinars and register for upcoming events on our website: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/shakespeare-webinar-series

We’re delighted to announce that Professor Leah Price has been appointed to the Professorship of Bibliography and Modern Book History.

Professor Price has a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge, she returned to Harvard as a tenured professor. In 2019 Leah was appointed Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. Her publications include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge, 2000); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading (Basic, 2019). Her current research project, Victorian Books and their Servants, which draws upon housekeeping manuals, library catalogues, missionary biographies and cheap fiction, was the subject of her 2025 Lyell Lectures.

Professor Price commented:

“Oxford has always played an outsized role in thinking about what books can do that other media can’t. I’m thrilled to join colleagues in the Faculty as well as the Libraries who are finding such creative ways to understand an evolving object. While I have a daunting amount to learn about what bookish activities are already underway, one project that I hope to undertake right away is a “manual humanities space” in which students and community members can make and repair books, to strengthen existing bridges between the Schwarzman Centre’s new makerspace and the embarrassment of riches that is the Bodleian.”

Professor Price will take up the post in Trinity term 2027.

Professor Elleke Boehmer and DPhil candidate Luan Staphorst have recently been awarded the George Parkin Distinguished Service Award for their work on an inscription acknowledging the difficult Rhodes legacy, which has been carved into a stone arch at the back of Rhodes House. The award recognises extraordinary volunteer service to the Rhodes Trust.

They words now inscribed on Rhodes House were crafted by a cross-generational group of Rhodes Scholars from around the world, working in response to the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter movements. The words are: ‘Remembering and honouring with our work, now, the labour and suffering of those who generated this wealth’.

The statement has been translated into the southern African language ǀxam, a sleeping language spoken until the early 1900s by descendants of the Khoesan peoples and Afrikaners of the Northern Cape. It was translated in consultation with speakers and teachers of related languages that are still used.

Elleke and Luan were commended for their contribution to the project which permanently and visibly addresses the Trust’s history: “Their collaboration has left a profound and enduring legacy, embedding acknowledgement and inclusion into the very fabric of Rhodes House for future generations.”

We interviewed Elleke and Luan to find out more about the project and their contribution (link in bio): https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/article/rhodes-house-inscription-interview-with-george-parkin-award-winners-elleke-boehmer-and-luan

Congratulations to Professor Nandini Das who has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Das is one of 92 scholars elected to the Fellowship in 2026 in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Das commented:

“I am delighted and honoured to have been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. It’s a real privilege. I am also conscious, however, that it comes at a sobering moment for our sector in general. UK higher education, and the humanities in particular, face an existential crisis. Without sustained investment in these disciplines, and in the next generation of scholars, we risk impoverishing our intellectual and cultural life for decades to come. The humanities matter because they help us understand ourselves, our past, and the challenges we face together. I therefore see this Fellowship not only as a personal honour, but also as a reminder of the importance of making the case for these disciplines, at a time when that case needs to be made with renewed clarity and conviction.”

Writers Make Worlds has published a new profile on Kit de Waal. The profile includes a biography of de Waal, plus links to helpful resources, including a new interview by Professor Elleke Boehmer.

https://writersmakeworlds.com/kit-de-waal/

Writers Make Worlds is a free resource hub for Black and Asian British writing today. It features profiles on over 50 writers, including Aminatta Forna, Andrea Levy, Daljit Nagra, Kamila Shamsie, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Bernardine Evaristo.

Writers Make Worlds asks how our reading of British literature shapes our sense of identity in Britain today. It explores how Black and Asian writing in Britain works as a dynamic cultural and imaginative medium through which new ways of thinking about Britain, and Britain in the world, can be worked out.

The writers featured on the site draw us as readers into exciting new worlds and invite us to ask particularly interesting and often difficult questions about ourselves. Their work asks us to think about whether we identify as mainstream or marginal, national or international, local or global, north or south. And they ask us about how and when we might flip these opposites over, how we might look at the world in a more heterogeneous and expanded way.

Explore now (link in bio): https://writersmakeworlds.com/



Photo of Kit de Waal by Paul Crowther

Congratulations to Professor Ankhi Mukherjee who has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL). She is one of 22 new Fellows announced this week.

Professor Mukherjee commented:

“The RSL is an allied but non-identical group of writers for whom literature is profession and vocation, madness and mission. Being elected to this society takes me back to first principles: reading deeply and widely, writing like your life depends on it, bringing new readerships into being, and protecting books.”

The RSL is an organisation led by writers which promotes the value of literature, encourages great writers, and engages people in reading.

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It’s Day 2 of the Oxford Uni Open Days! Come and visit the English Faculty today in our new home, the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities!

We’ll have taster lectures, info talks and our wonderful student ambassadors will be on hand to answer all your questions about studying English at Oxford.

No booking needed - just turn up!