One of my favorite parts of writing my first book, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice (Ecco, 2025), was getting to dive back into memories of the years I spent reading in Oxford’s libraries and pubs.
Like many Oxford English literature students, I grew up buried in the pages of books. I was born deaf in the United States in 1990, the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and I became part of the first generation of Americans who received formal accessibility services in school and other places. My hearing parents decided to learn American Sign Language when I was young, and I was raised with both ASL and English, including many years of speech therapy. I gained access to my entire education — from kindergarten to graduate school — through working with ASL interpreters.
Still, because I grew up in a largely hearing environment where not everyone knew how to sign, I found that many spoken conversations were not entirely accessible to me. Reading became a reliable escape for me as a child: I dove into books because their printed letters felt far clearer to me than spoken words ever did, and because they transported me into a vivid world of stories and ideas.
By the time I attended college at Stanford, I had become a proper bibliophile. An opportunity to spend Michaelmas term abroad at Oxford during my junior year felt like a dream come true, especially after reading so many books set in the City of Dreaming Spires as a kid, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the His Dark Materials series. During the fall of 2010, I lived in the Stanford House on the High Street, and I wandered down Merton Street to Corpus Christi College for meals and social events. I did a traditional Oxford undergraduate tutorial on the nineteenth-century British novel, which I greatly enjoyed, and spent many hours in the Corpus Christi library drafting my weekly essays.
A few years later, when I had the opportunity to return to the UK on a Rhodes scholarship, I was thrilled. I’d worked with London-based ASL interpreters for my undergraduate term abroad, since I knew no British Sign Language, and for my postgraduate studies I once again set up ASL interpreting through Oxford’s Disability Advisory Service. These accommodations enabled me to complete my M.St. in English (1900-present) in 2014, followed by a M.Sc. in Higher Education in 2015.
Getting to study English in Oxford was such a treat. I spent hours reading in the English Faculty Library and the Radcliffe Camera, and my courses took me deep into texts like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. I bought many more books from Blackwell’s to read for pleasure, often taking advantage of the bookstore’s enticing “three for the price of two” deals.
Beyond my formal studies, however, Oxford taught me the rewards of shared intellectual conversation. After dinner in my college, St. John’s, I often ended up at a nearby pub, where I’d chat late into the night. Some friends and I started meeting at the Eagle and Child each week to share our writing. Our informal workshops helped me to develop new writing ideas, and they showed me the joys of mutual encouragement.
All my peers in Oxford were hearing, and several friends decided to learn some ASL so we could communicate more easily. By this time in my life, I’d also become more confident in myself: this assurance helped me to ask others for what I needed, from sign language to written notes and quiet well-lit environments for lipreading. Such strategies for shared communication became vital for our discussions, since my interpreters only joined me for coursework and other formally organized activities in Oxford. I sometimes made it into London to socialize with some fellow deaf people, who welcomed me wholeheartedly into their lives. Some of them taught me some BSL.
Many of these themes of communication and human interconnection later surfaced in my book, Articulate, which I wrote after I’d finished my Ph.D. in English literature back in the United States, and while I was doing a fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In this memoir, I was seeking a language to describe my inner experiences of deafness, of the many complications of navigating both Deaf and hearing worlds. I was also seeking a way to express how deafness can expand our understanding of what it really means to communicate.
I’ve since left academia and am continuing in my general-audience writing career, which in recent months has taken me to different bookstores, colleges and universities, conferences, arts residencies, and book festivals across the United States. As I start writing my next book, I continue to credit the years I spent in Oxford, among other experiences I’ve had, for helping me develop my writerly voice. Those libraries and pubs showed me more about how wide the world of literature and ideas truly is, and about how enjoyable it can be to read and think and converse with others.
Rachel Kolb is a writer whose work explores communication, language, and disability as central components of human experience. A graduate of Stanford University, she was the first signing deaf Rhodes scholar at Oxford before receiving her Ph.D. in English literature from Emory University and then completing a junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Her work has been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other venues, and she is the author of the new memoir Articulate (Ecco, 2025).
