Oxford Faculty 2026

Jeri Johnson, Head Tutor. BA, Brigham Young University; MA, MPhil, University of Oxford. Fellow in English Emerita, Exeter College; Academic Director of the Exeter College Summer Programmes; Professor of English Emerita, University of Oxford.

Stephen Berenson, BFA, Drake University. Founding Director of the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA Programs in Acting and Directing.

Stephen Berenson is Founding Director of the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA Programs in Acting and Directing. As Professor of the Practice at Brown, his major areas of instruction were Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, and contemporary dramatic texts. A member of the Resident Acting Company at Trinity Rep for 30 years, his roles have included Willy Loman, Shylock, Feste, Puck, Fagin, Grendel, and Scrooge. Recognition includes the New England Theatre Conference Teacher of the Year Award, the Providence Mayor Citation for Excellence, and a Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship at Ten Chimneys. A long-time member of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble in Vermont, this will be his eighth summer on the faculty at Lincoln College. He lives in New York City.

David Dwan, BA, MA (Oxford); PhD (London); Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History, University of Oxford; Tutorial Fellow in English, Hertford College. 

My work examines the links between literature and its wider intellectual history – particularly moral and political philosophy – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a particular interest in Irish writing. My publications include The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland, The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (co-edited with Chris Insole), Liberty Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals. The Good Life and Other Fictions is soon to be published by Princeton University Press.

Gwyneth Lewis, BA, University of Cambridge; DPhil, University of Oxford. Former Welsh Poet Laureate. 2014 Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer in Poetry and English, Princeton University. Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for Services to Literature.

Gwyneth Lewis was National Poet of Wales 2005-06, the first to be awarded the laureateship. She is an award-winning poet in both Welsh and English. In 2010 she was given a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors. Gwyneth’s two memoirs are Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Harper Perennial, 2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Rite of Passage (Fourth Estate, 2005). Gwyneth was made MBE in the Queen’s Jubilee Honours List for services to literature and mental health. Gwyneth lives in Cardiff and she was the 2016 Robert Frost Professor of Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English. Her latest books are the memoir Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (Calon 2024) and a collection of poems, First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe, 2025).

Brian McEleney, BA, Trinity College; MFA, Yale School of Drama. Founding Director of the Brown University/Trinity MFA Programs; Associate Director and Acting Company Member, Trinity Repertory Company. 

Brian is Director of the Theatre Program at the Bread Loaf School of English. Since 1984 he has performed in over two dozen Bread Loaf productions, including Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, Measure for Measure, Uncle Vanya, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Merchant of Venice. He has directed Bread Loaf productions of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blues for Mister Charlie, U.S.A., Othello, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Johnny Eyre, and The Tempest. As a long-time member of the Trinity Rep Acting Company, he has played over 75 roles, including King Lear, Richard II, Richard III, Cassius, and Malvolio. He has also directed over 25 productions, including Hamlet, Our Town, All the King’s Men, A Raisin in the Sun, The Grapes of Wrath, House and Garden, Twelfth Night, and Ivanov.

Mark Rasmussen, BA, MA, Harvard University; PhD, Johns Hopkins University. Charles J. Luellen Professor of English Emeritus, Centre College.

Mark Rasmussen received a BA and MA from Harvard and a PhD from Johns Hopkins. From 1989 to 2024 he taught at Centre College, offering courses in medieval and early modern literature (including Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare), literary theory, history of the English language, interdisciplinary humanities, museum studies, and Bob Dylan. He has published essays on a range of topics in his fields and has edited two landmark collections: Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), which helped refresh attention to questions of form in English Renaissance literature, and Life in Words (2014), the collected essays of the distinguished medievalist, Jill Mann. His two most recent essays are on David Lowery’s film The Green Knight, published in 2024 in the journal Arthuriana, and on Euripides’ Alcestis and Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale,” published in 2025 in the journal Arion. 

David J. Russell, BA, University of Oxford; PhD, Princeton University. Associate Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles. 

David Russell is associate professor of English at UCLA. He has taught at Oxford University and King’s College London. He is the author or Marion Milner: On Creativity (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Mark Turner, BA, Hampden-Sydney College; MA, PhD, University of London. Professor of English, King’s College London.

I am a Professor of English at King’s College London, where I have been based since 2000. I teach courses in literature and culture since 1800, with a particular emphasis on the 19th century, urban writing and queer studies. My research and publications fall into two broad areas: the relationship between literature, media and culture since the 19th century, and Anglo-American queer studies. I have published widely on various aspects of literature, journalism, photography, film, painting and popular culture. Publications include the books Trollope and the Magazines and Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London and a 2-volume edition of Wilde’s journalism for Oxford University Press’s ‘Collected Works’ series.