English and Joint Schools

• St John's normally accepts eight students per year for English and Joint Schools; in some years we have admitted as many as ten.
• Our students are naturally eager to engage with the most innovative and challenging aspects of modern and contemporary literature. But they also understand that the unique opportunity presented by the Oxford English degree is to rediscover and renew, in the light of their own experiences and insights, the manifold intellectual and imaginative possibilities within literature’s long history.
• Most fundamental to our approach is that we encourage students to explore the various ways in which literature does not merely reflect, but also creatively transforms, the various ideas and ideological frameworks which so powerfully structure our world. Our students therefore become avid readers of many kinds of writing, encompassing not only those texts traditionally defined as literary (poems, novels, plays), but also those which are normally associated with the disciplines of philosophy, religion, history, and politics.
• Students of English at St John’s therefore need to be the kind of people who are passionate about reading widely, and who want to be intellectually challenged. In return for your enthusiasm and ambition, we ensure that you can exchange and debate your ideas in an environment which supports and encourages venturesome freedom of thought.
• The entry requirements for English and Joint Schools are determined by the University’s Faculty of English.
• More information about applying to study English at Oxford can be found on the Faculty’s website.
• General advice about applying to St John’s can be found here.

Teaching, Learning, and Research

• At St John’s the teaching of undergraduates is the responsibility of three Official Fellows in English, each with different research specialisms: Professor Patrick Hayes (modern literature, from the Romantic period to the present day), Professor Noël Sugimura (the early modern period, including Milton and Shakespeare), and Professor Gareth Evans (medieval literature, including Old English and Old Norse). The College is also home to the Drue Heinz Chair in American Literature, Professor Lloyd Pratt, and a group of graduate students who pursue advanced research through masters and doctoral degrees in all areas of the subject.
• Thanks to this major investment in our subject we are able to teach all the periods of literature covered by the Oxford syllabus within St John’s. Doing so enables us to ensure that our high academic standard, and the core educational values outlined above, are maintained throughout your whole experience of the course.
• Our teaching takes place through a mixture of small group seminars and tutorial work. We take special pleasure in the way in which year groups at St John’s have often formed close ties both within and beyond the course, working together in journalism, in the staging of plays, and in the production of films and other kinds of visual art. In recent years our students have been particularly active in drama, taking advantage of the College’s 180-seat auditorium to present plays for a university-wide audience
• All the Professors of English at St John’s are actively involved in research. Our publications encompass a wide range of subjects which you can explore in more detail by following the links to our profiles (see below). At present our research interests are chiefly in the following areas: the articulation of emotion and gender identity in the very earliest forms of writing in England, and from across the medieval world, including the Nordic countries and the Viking diaspora; the seventeenth-century epic poet John Milton, and his transformative impact on traditional ideas about aesthetic value; the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the many readers of his work who shaped American life in the nineteenth-century and beyond; the concept of aesthetic education, from its modern origins in the Romantic period down to the present day; the ideal of authentic self-knowledge as explored across life-writing, literature and philosophy; the relationship between literature and religious experience. While these various topics may or may not interest you right now, you can be sure that the teaching you receive will be informed by our dialogue with innovative scholarship from across the world.
• Read two profiles from St John's students studying English here and here.

Reading in the College Library

• At the heart of St John’s is the Library and Study Centre, which is devoted to the needs of students and researchers who are enrolled at the College
• With its extensive collection of manuscripts, and its superb collection of editions and teaching materials for the full range of Humanities subjects, our library is a fabulous resource for studying English in its widest intellectual contexts.
• One of the ways in which more remote periods of literature come to life is by looking at the very different shapes and forms that books, manuscripts and writing itself have taken through the ages. Our Library is home to a wide range of texts from the medieval period, including several early medieval manuscripts, a marvelous thirteenth-century Bestiary (St John's, Manuscript 61), and a copy of William Caxton's second edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, dating from 1483, illustrated with hand-coloured woodblock prints.
• The library’s collection of books from the early modern period bears witness to the College's significance as a centre of learning and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the more famous is a copy of the second folio of Shakespeare’s works, alongside many other early copies of Renaissance plays—one of which was recently revived by St John’s students in a performance at the College Auditorium to celebrate the opening of the Study Centre.
• From the later periods the library includes a range of important texts, including Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755); an album of prints by William Hogarth; and several first editions of Charles Dickens, including The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37), Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837-38), and The Tale of Two Cities (1859). Our archival collection also includes letters and other written materials by such figures as Jane Austen, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Spike Milligan, and Samuel Beckett.
• In more recent times St John’s has been home to a range of poets and novelists, including A.E. Housman, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and John Lanchester, all of whom took their undergraduate degrees at the College. The poet Seamus Heaney was an Honorary Fellow of the College.

• The main reason to do a degree in English is of course because you wish to learn about the nature and value of literature for its own sake. But it is well worth thinking about the kind of life an English degree might help you to pursue.
• Each year some of our students carry on into graduate research, and several have become Professors of English in their own right. Former students of St John’s are to be found teaching at universities across the world. But employers of various kinds, well beyond academia, recognize that students of English at Oxford acquire a range of highly desirable skills. These are mainly to do with powers of creative intelligence, written and verbal articulacy, and critical thinking of a humanistic kind. While no-one can read the future, in a world in which Artificial Intelligence is bound to take over many of the core routinisable functions of calculation, programming and design which are central to STEM subjects, we think that the kinds of creative intelligence, imaginative openness, and historical understanding cultivated by humanities degrees in general, and by English in particular, are likely to become more rather than less valuable in the jobs market in the years to come.
• Whether or not this proves to be the case, students of English from St John’s are presently to be found in a wide range of careers. Over the last decade these include, in rough order of popularity: law (both barristers and solicitors); journalism (including Private Eye, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Tatler, as well as various kinds of freelancing); advertising and marketing; new media and communications; the Civil Service; finance and business (including the graduate intake of leading FTSE 100 companies); publishing (academic, literary, and children’s books); broadcasting, screenwriting and theatrical management; teaching and secondary education.