The heart of the Oxford Summer Seminar is the teaching and learning involved in small classes led by the Seminar's distinguished staff. The following brief biographies provide some indication of the outstanding academic or artistic achievements of the Seminar's faculty.
Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley completed her first degrees at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied British, American, and European literatures. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Mysore University, India, where she wrote a dissertation on Sylvia Plath. Now a lecturer in modern literature at Balliol College, Oxford, she has also been a tutor in English at Wadham College.
Andrew Beaumont
Andrew Beaumont is currently College Steward at Lincoln College, Oxford. He completed a doctoral thesis at this same college on British colonial administrators in pre-revolutionary North America, in which he examined crown and proprietary governors in the mainland colonies from the late 1740s to the mid 1760s. In his research he has continued to explore the role of the Board of Trade in forming imperial policy and the pressures incumbent on individual governors when asserting the crown's prerogative there.
Helena Chance
Helena Chance, M.A., is a graduate of the University of Reading and a lecturer in European art, architecture, and design history at Stanford University in Oxford, the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, and Buckinghamshire University. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis at Kellogg College, Oxford on the industrial support for green space in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The topics she is exploring include the relationship of buildings to landscape in the making of place, and the potential for designed landscapes to enhance the quality of life and to shape a corporate identity.
Richard Coggins
Currently a lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, Richard Coggins has taught not only at several other Oxford colleges but has also been a research associate at the University of Zimbabwe. His prime fields of interest are British political history in the era of decolonisation, especially the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) Democratization, failed democratic transitions in Africa, and the influence of external mediators, and non-governmental actors, on democratic transition.
Clare Connors
Currently a lecturer in English at the Queen's and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford, Clare Connors read English at Hertford College, where she was an academic scholar, before undertaking doctoral research in critical theory. She has several publications forthcoming on nineteenth - and twentieth-century literature, including a study of George Eliot.
Valentine Cunningham
A Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Valentine Cunningham, M.A., D. Phil., is also University Professor of English at Oxford. He is the author of Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975); The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. (1980); Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War, ed. (1986); British Writers of the Thirties (1988); In the Reading Gaol: Texts, Postmodernity and History (1994); and Adam Bede, ed. (1996). He reviews widely in British and American periodicals, and broadcasts frequently for BBC Radio on literary and cultural topics.
Ralph Hanna
A Fellow of Keble College and University Professor of Paleography, Ralph Hanna holds degrees from Amherst College and Oxford and Yale universities. His recent publications include Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (1996), an edition of Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves, (1997), "Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England," in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (1996), and "Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, ca. 1390-1440," in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (1996).
Simon Horobin
Simon Horobin is University Lecturer in Medieval English Language and Tutorial Fellow in Medieval English, Magdalen College Oxford. He has published widely on the history of English, with a particular focus on the medieval period. His publications include Introduction to Middle English (2002), The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (2003) and Chaucer’s Language (2006).
Clare Morgan
Clare Morgan earned her M.Phil. in twentieth-century English literature from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before earning an M.A. in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She then completed her D.Phil. at Oxford with a thesis on post-World War II literature and art. Currently affiliated with the creative writing program at Kellogg College, Oxford, she is working on a book on existentialism and British culture of the 1950s.
Nicholas Owen
A praelector and tutor at the Queen's College, Nicholas Owen is also a University Lecturer in Politics. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Christ Church College, Oxford as an undergraduate, then completed a doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford on the politics of British decolonization. He is the author of several chapters and articles on the end of the British empire and on contemporary British politics. His first book, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947, was published in the Oxford Historical Monographs series in 2007.
Sarah Poynting
Sarah Poynting earned double first honours in English and Drama for her B.A. at London University and earned her M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in English from Oxford. Her edition of Walter Montague's The Shepherds Paradise was published by the Malone Society in 1997. She has held a lectureship at Lady Margaret Hall, where she taught Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and has also taught at Mansfield and Wadham colleges. She is currently a Research Fellow at Keele University.
Lydia Rainford
Lydia Rainford studied as an undergraduate and graduate in Oxford, and was awarded her D. Phil. from the University. She was a Lecturer in English at Balliol College and Merton College before becoming a Junior Research Fellow at St. Hugh's College. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is co-editor of 'Literature and Visual Technologies' (2003), author of 'She Changes By Intrigue: Irony, Femininity and Feminism' (2005) and has long-standing research interests in Irish Literature, and, in particular, Samuel Beckett.
Martins Paparinskis
Martins Paparinskis is currently an AHRC and Commercial Bar Scholar at the Queen's College, Oxford. He is writing a doctoral thesis on standards of investment protection in customary international law, in which he examines the historical development of customary law on the treatment of investors and its place in the sources structure of international law. He has also researched, published and spoken in conferences about other topical issues of international law, in particular investment protection law.
SEMINAR STAFF
Jenny Adams – Seminar Director
Jenny Adams, Assistant Professor, holds a PhD and an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and a BA in English Literature and French Language and Literature from UCLA. She specializes in later medieval literature and has taught Old English, Chaucer, Arthurian Literature as well as several surveys of the medieval period. She has articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, the Journal of English Germanic Philology, Essays in Medieval Studies, The Chaucer Review, and the Journal of Popular Culture. Her book, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published in 2006. Her edition of William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse is forthcoming in the TEAMS Middle English Texts series.
Mike Munger – Junior Dean
Mike Munger is a senior double degree Biology and English Pre-Med at UMass Amherst. Mike attended the Oxford Summer Seminar in 2007 and studied Modern Irish Literature, as well as British Perspectives on the American Revolution. At UMass Mike is an RA in Orchard Hill and a campus tour guide. Mike’s favorite part of his summer at Oxford was experiencing the ambiance of local culture. Mike won the Hofer prize for best essay in history in 2007.
Tejasi Thatte – Junior Dean
Tejasi Thatte is a Political Science major pursuing certificates in International Relations, as well in Public Policy and Administration at UMass. Tejasi attended the Oxford Summer Seminar in 2007 and studied International Law and British Perspectives on the American Revolution. Tejasi is a campus tour guide as well as an active member of the Political Science Undergraduate Advisory Board. Tejasi’s favorite part of Oxford was the contagiousness of the academic atmosphere in combination with the unlimited historical and social opportunities.
