Welcome to the Spotlight Newsletter.
We've had a busy start to this academic year with both the Clarendon Lectures and Oxford Wells Lecture Series taking place this Michaelmas term. The 2024-2025 Clarendon Lectures were given by Professor Teju Cole (Harvard University) on the theme of ‘Understatement’, exploring the poems of Emily Dickinson, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Layli Long Soldier across four lectures. The following week, we welcomed Professor Kathryn Schwarz (Vanderbilt University) to the English Faculty for the Oxford Wells Lectures on ‘Mortal Shakespeare: Death, Debt, Love, Plague’. We were also delighted to announce the appointment of Stephen Fry as this year's Visiting Professor of Creative Media.
A.E. Stallings, our Professor of Poetry, gave a talk on 'Upping the ante: how word choice, quotation and allusion in poems raise the stakes'. You can watch a recording of the lecture on the Oxford University podcast site. Professor Stallings also launched a poetry newsletter, 'Echolocations: Reflections on Poems', in which she explores a contemporary poem from a new book, anthology, or journal and explains what she admires about it. You can subscribe to the newsletter on the English Faculty website, and also browse past issues.
In November, we launched a multi-disciplinary storytelling competition in conjunction with the management and production company, 42. The Oxford/42 New Writing Prize is open to aspiring novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. We are looking for talented new voices in fiction and welcome experimental writing as well as work that would appeal to a broad audience, whether on the printed page, the stage, radio, television or the big screen. Find out more on the English Faculty website.
Throughout 2025, Professor Emma Smith will be holding a Shakespeare webinar series where she will be discussing a different Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare title each month. Emma will be in conversation with the writers of the new introductions specially commissioned for the series, discussing the play and how we might approach it differently in the twenty-first century. Registration is now open via Eventbrite.
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