Spotlight - December 2018

Welcome to Spotlight, the Faculty of English Language & Literature’s alumni e-newsletter!

Issue 5

Spotlight on Research

Life-writing and biography takes many different forms, from informal memoirs reliant on personal interaction to weighty tomes built on hours of painstakingly close scrutiny of fragmentary historical documents and archival evidence. Readers are introduced to new facets of well-known characters, or drawn closer to the lives of ordinary people living extraordinary lives, and are offered a transformative understanding of a figure and the time in which they live. Interaction between the mundane and the exceptional, the commonplace and the unusual, the renowned and the obscure bring to life the complexities of individual personalities. Here, three Faculty members talk about their recent work in this area. For Marina Mackay and Marion Turner, their subjects sit firmly within their usual field of research, but for Bart van Es the connection is on a rather more personal level.

 

Graduate Destinations Survey

We would like to find out more about what our alumni go on to do once they leave us – we know that many of you undertake further study, but if it isn’t in Oxford we rarely hear about it. Many of you write books, and we hear about some of those (but not enough! Please keep telling us). We know from researching our older alumni that we have had Bletchley Park cryptographers, publishing and editorial staff who brought us revolutionary newspapers and classic novels among other works, and at least two poet’s muses among our number. What have the rest of you been doing? Take the opportunity to tell us by completing our survey. We’re interested in all of you. And if you’d like to tell us in more detail, please email us your stories. We may be able to include you in a future edition of Spotlight!