Speaker
Dr Stuart Lee's current research is on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, fantasy literature, WW1 Poetry, and also digital humanities. Stuart has worked extensively on Tolkien's fiction and manuscripts of publishing on his interactions with the poem 'The Wanderer', 'The Battle of Maldon', interviews with the BBC, and editing the Blackwells/Wiley Companion to J R R Tolkien (2014; revised edition scheduled for 2021), and two editions (with E. Solopova) of The Keys of Middle-earth. Stuart has also edited the Routledge Major Works four-volume set on Tolkien.
Speaker
Michael Ward is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He presented the BBC1 television documentary, The Narnia Code (2010).
Speaker
Dr Mark Atherton is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at Regent's Park College, Oxford University. His publications include There and Back Again: J.R.R.Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012/2014), which covers the literary and linguistic interests of J.R.R. Tolkien and their influence on his fictional writings. Mark has also contributed a chapter ‘Tolkien and Old English’ to A Tolkien Companion, ed. Stuart Lee.
Speaker
Margaret Kean is the Dame Helen Gardner Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and an Associate Professor in the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on the poetry of John Milton; the epic tradition and its reception history; children’s literature and YA fiction. Her most recent publication is an edited volume, Essays and Studies: The Literature of Hell (2021). Her current research is on the work of the contemporary author, Philip Pullman. For a taster of her current research, please visit https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/philip-pullmans-his-dark-materials.
Speaker
Dr Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English at University College, Oxford. She is the author of The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture (2018) and the co-editor of Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe (2021). She has also published on Harry Potter, medievalism, Daphne du Maurier, and is working on a poetry collection inspired by the women of Beowulf.
Chair
Dr Ben Grant is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. He has a research background in postcolonial studies and cultural translation. His first book, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009), was about the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton, who began his career as a spy in British India. Ben is also interested in all forms of brevity in literature, and his second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (2016), aims to give a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms, such as the proverb and the fragment. Ben is currently working on life writing and autobiographical fiction, particularly in the work of Jenny Diski.
