Professor Stuart Lee

My current research is on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, fantasy literature, WW1 Poetry, and also digital humanities. In the Tolkien/fantasy area I am assisting in the development of a research cluster in this area. In War studies I have explored, through many projects, crowd-sourcing of war memories and objects (especially WW1) and completed a major online project on WW2 ('Their Finest Hour' dealing with memory, objects, and digitization).

My PhD was in Old English (Ælfric's Old Testament Homilies - see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/kings). In 1991 I began work in elearning and applying these to the arts (hence humanities computing) developing my first package to teach online based around Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches'.

This led to major digital humanities projects around the War poets - most notably the First World War Poetry Digital Archive (see The First World War Poetry Digital Archive | War Collections (ox.ac.uk)) but also major crowd-sourcing initiatives across Europe (e.g. Europeana 1914-1918 World War I | Europeana). I have also contributed the chapter on 'The British Canon' as part of A History of First World War Poetry (ed. J. Potter, CUP, 2023). I ran the 2013 Tolkien and 2014 WW1 Poetry Spring Schools at Oxford, and co-organised (with Professor Carolyne Larrington) the 2018 Summer School on Fantasy Literature. I organised the Tolkien 50th anniversary seminar series in 2023 and running further seminar in 2024. In 2025 I am working with Prof Larrington on a forthcoming Bloomsbury Summer School on Fantasy Literature.

Moving from Old English into medievalism I developed my research on the writer J. R. R. Tolkien. I have worked extensively on his 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. I also edited the Routledge Major Works four-volume set on Tolkien.

I teach (or have taught): Old English, WW1 & WW2 Poetry, Tolkien, Fantasy Literature, and digital humanities.

My current areas of interest are:

• Tolkien's WW1 Poetry
• The Fantastical Reaction to WW1 in Literature
• Use of AI in Metadata Creation
• The hidden stories of WW1 and WW2 revealed through Crowd-sourcing

I was the University's Reader in Digital Libraries and eLearning and was appointed a Professor of English in 2024. I am an associate member of Exeter College (having been an SCR member of Merton College and Somerville College in the past).

I am the Acting CIO for the University running the main central IT department (c.350FTE).

I am also a published playwright having written several award-winning plays.