Oxford English Faculty English Teachers’ Conference 2026
The annual English Teachers' Conference, hosted virtually by the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, will take place online on 7 February 2026 from 11am - 3pm. The conference is free to attend but booking is required. We will circulate the link to the talks after registration closes.
Register for your free ticket.
Programme
11:00 – 11:05: Introduction and welcome from Professor Kirsten E. Shepherd , Director of Schools Liaison.
11:05 – 11:35: Taster Lecture and Q&A
Dr Mantra Mukim - ‘Trouble in the Archive’
In what ways can exploring the archival trajectories of a modernist poem inform our reading of the poem? How do archival markings — cancellations, alternative drafts, marginal notes, and ink blots — reorient our reading of a poem? Is archive the preserved past of the poem, or its future? This short talk will offer three transnational case studies that open up questions about the literary archive as a space for generating ‘trouble’.
Mantra Mukim is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. He was educated, and has taught, in Delhi, Warwick, and Paris. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Lyric Failure (2025), and with Derek Attridge, the co-editor of Literature and Event: 21st Century Reformulation (2022). His current work investigates line and lineation in global modernist practices.
11:35 – 12:05: Taster Lecture and Q&A:
Professor Nicholas Perkins - 'The Gaze of the Dead'
Ghosts, corpses, the grateful and ungrateful dead: all these and more haunt medieval art and literature. In this talk I'll briefly explore some motifs and narratives in which the dead interact with the living in the Middle Ages. Our sources will include gorgeously illustrated books; paintings and verses on church walls; and a strange Arthurian poem. I'll ask how medeival readers might have viewed these figures, but also what happens when the dead look back at us.
Nicholas Perkins is a Professor of Medieval Literature and Tutor in English at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. He teaches language and literature from early English to the 1500s. His recent books include The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England, and (accompanying a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford) Gifts and Books: From Early Myth to the Present. His son is in year 10, currently getting to grips with Macbeth for GCSE.
12:05 – 12:20: 15 minute break.
12:20 – 13:00: Resources Showcase
Featuring
13:00 – 13:45: The Oxford Admissions Process:
Talk and Q&A with Professor Sos Eltis , Director of Undergraduate Admissions.
13:45 – 14:00: Break of 15 minutes.
14:00 – 15:00: Panel discussion
'AI and English Education'
Featuring:
Peter McDonald
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-making the Reader (2024), Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009), British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (1997), and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (2021). He is currently working on a book about re-imagining a literary education in the age of artificial intelligence.
Fran de Garis
Fran de Garis is AI Lead at Elizabeth College and UCL MA candidate researching AI governance in independent schools. She's particularly interested in how schools can build infrastructure to develop and deploy AI tools responsibly. She is happy to connect and share thoughts on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-de-garis.
Clarissa Ford
Clarissa Ford is the Head of English at a large sixth form college in Essex, where she leads GCSE and A-level provision for around 800 students each year and coordinates the College’s work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Clarissa brings together English leaders, teachers, and university partners across Essex and Suffolk through a regional English HOD Network she established in 2022, creating opportunities for shared professional collaboration from KS3 through to higher education. Alongside 24 years in the classroom, Clarissa contributes to national subject organisations and research and holds postgraduate qualifications in both education and creative writing. https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarissa-ford-152661263
15:00: Conference ends.
