2026 Programme

Saturday 17th January at 3:00pm:   Professor Laura Swift 

'Greek Tragedy in Performance'

St Mary Magdalene Church.

Tragedy was the most important art form in ancient Athens and is still regularly staged for modern audiences. Yet ancient drama diff ered from our modern assumptions about the genre in terms of both performance, conventions, and cultural context. This talk will look at Greek tragedy in its original contexts (religious, civic and performative) and as a part of this the role played by the Chorus will be examined. No detailed knowledge of any particular tragedy will be assumed, although the speaker will draw examples from Euripides’ Bacchae. 

Professor Laura Swift is Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College.

Saturday 21st February at 3:00pm:  Professor Emma Smith

'Going up-market: the Theatre in the Jacobean period'

St Hugh's Centre.

Who went to the theatre in the age of Shakespeare? This talk discusses writers, audiences and their theatres: Shakespeare alongside other contemporary writers such as Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Thomas Middleton; and also the Globe theatre alongside private playhouses such as Blackfriars. Changes in the social and cultural place of drama in the early seventeenth century began a process of gentrification that continues to shape the theatre today, and this talk will discuss the ways in which Shakespeare did, and did not, embrace these changes.

Professor Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College.

Saturday 21st March at 3:00pm:  Dr Daniela Omlor 

'The Spanish Civil War and Beyond'

Woodstock Town Hall. 

The Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 marked a defining moment in modern Spanish history, giving rise to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Unsurprisingly such a divisive history has left its mark on literary production. This talk will look at three differing novels which together demonstrate the divergent streams of modern Spanish fiction: The Island (1960) by Ana Maria Matute; All Souls (1989) by Javier Marias; and Soldiers from Salamis (2001) by Javier Cercas. Together, these novels explore in their different ways the role literature has to play in remembering past trauma. 

Dr Daniela Omlor is an Associate Professor in Spanish in the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Lincoln College.

Tuesday 21st April at 8:00pm:  Carolyn Kirby

'A Georgian Journey' 

St Hugh's Centre.

Tales of travel were the bestsellers of the early 18th century, and many successful Georgian writers including Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett wrote travelogues alongside their accounts of fictional journeys. In researching her own recent novel Ravenglass, set in Northern England and Scotland at the time of the Jacobite up-rising of 1745, Caroline Kirby turned to contemporary accounts of journeys by land and sea. This talk will explore the importance of travel writing in the evolution of the novel. 

Carolyn Kirby is the author of the award-winning The Conviction of Cora Burns (2019) Her novel Ravenglass was published in 2025.

Wednesday 20th May at 8:00pm:  Professor Simon Horobin 

'From Oxford to Narnia: the Worlds of C.S.Lewis'

St Mary Magdalene Church.

The fantastical fictional land of Narnia, famously reached via a magical wardrobe, has many connections to the real world in which C.S. Lewis lived. The influence of Oxford can be seen not only in its medieval buildings and towers but also in the classical, medieval and renaissance literature which Lewis encountered there. Simon Horobin will look at Lewis’ Oxford, its colleges, libraries, chapels, pubs and clubs and then ask the all-important question: how did the writer’s imagination transform Oxford into Narnia?

Professor Simon Horobin is a Fellow of Magdalen College, and the author of C.S. Lewis’ Oxford (2024).

Preceded by our annual Summer Party at 7:15pm 

Please note, visitors admission of £15:00 for this event.

Tuesday 16th June at 8:00pm:  Professor Seamus Perry 

'W.H. Auden: Early and Late'

St Hugh's Centre

W.H. Auden is one of the great English poets of the 20th century. He was a student at Christ Church, returned as Professor of Poetry in the fifties, and retired to Oxford at the end of his life. He was widely travelled, settling in the US in 1939, and spending much of his later life in Austria. This talk aims to give a sense of his career, his striking and often criticised development as a poet from the English left in the thirties to an Anglo-American internationalist in the fifties and sixties. No poet appears to be so different early and late: this talk explores the great changes in the Auden manner, along with some interesting continuities. 

Professor Seamus Perry is Master-Elect of Balliol College Oxford, and the author of a forthcoming biography of W.H. Auden.

Tuesday 22nd September at 8:00pm:  Professor Jennifer Yee

'Proust and the Visual Arts' 

St Mary Magdalene Church.

Proust explores the nature of individual experience and draws pessimistic conclusions: our experience of the world and ourselves is so unstable and fragmentary, so limited by pre-conceived ideas, that we can never fully grasp what we are. And yet, In Search of Lost Time is a profoundly positive even triumphant work: Proust sees art as a medium for transforming reality. Using examples from the visual arts - Monet’s paintings, Gothic sculpture and architecture -this talk will suggest ways in which Proust invites us to understand art, ourselves, and our experience of the world. 

Professor Jennifer Yee is Professor of Literature in French in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Christ Church.

Saturday 24th October at 3:00pm:  Jane Thynne

'Tales from Trent Park: How Life Becomes Fiction'

St Hugh's Centre.

Trent Park has been described as ‘the Bletchley Park that nobody knows’. In the 2nd World War it held top-ranking German prisoners of war, and the house was carefully wired to enable their conversations to be heard by listeners in the basement. The resulting intelligence proved crucial to the course of the war. The novelist Jane Thynne sees Trent Park as an ideal backdrop for a detective novel, and the long-secret war project as a perfect metaphor for historical fiction. Her illustrated talk will discuss real life sources, and the boundaries between history and fiction.

Jane Thynne’s many novels include her latest, Appointment in Paris (2025).

Saturday 21st November at 3:00pm:  Dr David Grylls

'Elizabeth Gaskell: Pioneering Novelist'

St Hugh's Centre.

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a major Victorian novelist who combined gritty realism with emotional empathy. She pioneered the ‘condition of England‘ novel, focussing on northern industrial life, setting romance at war with class conflict in Mary Barton and North and South. She also wrote perceptively about love, marriage and sexual prejudice in novels such as Ruth and Wives and Daughters. 

Dr David Grylls is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, whose publications include books on Dickens and Gissing.