College Record 2017

Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
104
The Centre organizes public events and currently hosts ten Visiting Scholars and
four DPhil students, match-funding one studentship with the AHRC and covering
College Fees and maintenance for another. The Director, Dame Hermione Lee, will
retire the end of this academic year, but will remain intimately involved in the new
capacity of Advisory Director. She will meet weekly with Dr Kate Kennedy, the
Assistant Director, who will be replaced during maternity leave in June–September
2017 by Dr Sandra Mayer (VS).
This year we have developed ‘strands’ to reflect the work of individual Visiting
Scholars. Dr Katie Collins has built up ‘Life-writing as Enquiry’, which links lifewriting
to the social sciences. She has devised an afternoon colloquium on Self-
Knowledge to bring together graphic artists, biographers, psychiatrists and medieval
scholars, and is exploring the possibility of a collection of essays edited by the
Centre, entitled Self-Knowledge: Scholarship and Subjectivity.
Dr Sandra Mayer has developed ‘Celebrity and Life-writing’, and is applying for
a major AHRC grant to continue her work with the Centre. She is proposing a
publication endorsed by us, entitled Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary
Celebrity and Politics. She has also organized a day colloquium on ‘Cele-biography’,
an evening panel dedicated to the ‘Celebrity Interview’, and a day of speakers (27
May) on the ‘Lives of Houses’. Hermione Lee, Kate Kennedy and Sandra Mayer are
now working on a major OCLW book to be entitled The Lives of Houses, which will
include essays, poems and miscellaneous contributions from scholars and writers
looking at the ways in which the houses of famous artists, musicians and writers
are preserved and presented to the public, and how these spaces reflect and tell the
stories of the lives of their owners.
The ‘strand’ theme will continue next year with a ‘Fame and Shame’ season of
events. Other ‘strands’ being developed include ‘Letters and Lives’ by John Francis
Davies (VS) and ‘Working-Class Biography’ by Professor Peter Ackers (VS).
The Centre now has a mailing list of 1,500, and advertises widely. Most of its events
are free and open to all, with regular attendees ranging from professional writers
to local residents. We also attract schoolchildren: Magdalen College School, for
example, sends groups of sixth-formers to our lectures. These are podcast on our
website, and are heard by thousands across the world. We receive many enquiries
about lectures that people cannot attend but want to hear, so the podcast archive has
become a valuable resource.