Spotlight - May 2018

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

Issue 4

As I write this, spring is finally starting to settle in, with fresh growth and blossom appearing on the shrubs outside the Faculty office windows and colourful bulbs brightening patches of grass around the St Cross Building. New developments are also underway within the Faculty; we have begun to work towards Athena SWAN certification, encouraging us to look at how we promote and encourage equality and diversity within the staff and student bodies. We are constantly involved in recruiting new members of academic and research staff, and are currently expanding our outreach activities to encourage applications from a broader range of students (more on this in a future issue), so this is particularly timely for us and will have obvious benefits in helping us address potential barriers to entry.

New developments are constantly taking place within the Faculty’s numerous research projects, which together cover an incredible range of topics. In this issue we hear more about Dr Elizabeth Solopova’s project to create a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible; Dr Sally Frampton’s ‘Mind-Boggling Medical History’ game, designed to challenge preconceptions about history and show how ideas in medicine change for a variety of reasons; and the links between Medievalism and contemporary fantasy literature. Aspects of Professor Dan Wakelin’s research have been on display in the Bodleian Library’s recent ‘Designing English’ exhibition, which showed a selection of early English manuscripts, with an accompanying display of fascinating modern reinterpretations of medieval books.

We are also very interested in finding out where our alumni go once they leave us, and so we have prepared a graduate destinations survey, for which you will find a link further down this newsletter. Please do complete it, whether you matriculated in 1935 or 2015. (Yes, we do still have readers who matriculated over 80 years ago!)

On a perhaps more prosaic note, there has been a lot of interest in the updated data protection legislation (GDPR) which will come into force later this year. One of the ways this will impact us is that we will need your consent to keep in contact with you. If you would like to continue receiving this newsletter or other news from us in the future, please send an email to We are also very interested in finding out where our alumni go once they leave us, and so we have prepared a graduate destinations survey, for which you will find a link further down this newsletter. Please do complete it, whether you matriculated in 1935 or 2015. (Yes, we do still have readers who matriculated over 80 years ago!)

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 clicking here. 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!