Recognition of Distinction Inaugural Professorial Lectures

This inaugural lecture event showcases the work of Professor Maia Chankseliani and Prof Velda Elliott, following the award of their professorships in 2025 by The University of Oxford.

The schedule for the event will be:
5pm: Welcome Address
5.10pm: Lecture by Professor Maia Chankseliani and Q&A
5.55pm: Lecture by Professor Velda Elliott and Q&A
6.40pm: Drinks reception

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Professor Chankseliani will deliver her lecture titled “Seeing Otherwise: International Higher Education and the Possibility of Change”.

This inaugural lecture examines international higher education as a formative process that reshapes how individuals learn to judge, act, and remain engaged in public and institutional life. Drawing on a large global body of qualitative research with returnees, it asks how experiences of international study are later carried into contexts marked by constraint. The lecture argues that international higher education works less through transfer or measurable impact than through formation, cultivating comparative judgement and sustained engagement. It introduces the concept of presence to explain how learning abroad becomes consequential after return, even when systemic change is slow or resisted.

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Professor Elliott will deliver her paper titled “Considering context through Shelley’s ‘England 1819’, or, How to Murder a Poem and Get Away With It.”

In this paper I use the example Shelley’s (fairly obscure) ‘England in 1819’ to explore how we think about context when analysing and interpreting poems. The current assessment objectives for GCSE English Literature include AO3: ‘Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written’ (DfE, 2013, p.6). As well as playing whack-a-mole the historical allusion, I will consider the types of context that illuminate or obscure the poem and its meaning, and think about how and when we should be introducing context in the English classroom, drawing on Barbara Bleiman’s metaphor of ‘door-opening knowledge’ (2020). It is all too easy to murder a poem with context: the question is whether we really can get away with it.