Announcing the Professor Michael Rogers Fund for the study of Asian and Middle Eastern languages

Date Published: 31.10.2024

We are pleased to introduce the Professor Michael Rogers Fund for the study of Asian and Middle Eastern languages. This new fund provides grants to our undergraduates or postgraduates who are interested in pursuing the study for scholarly purposes of any of the languages taught within The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford.

Applications are invited from students reading for a degree within AMES, and from students in other disciplines with intellectual ambitions the pursuit of which would require language acquisition.

Applications must be submitted by the Friday of 5th week. They will be considered on a termly basis by the Loans and Grants Committee. Find out more and apply for the Professor Michael Rogers Fund here.

Michael Rogers (1935-2023) came to Oxford in the mid-1950s from a grammar school in the north-west to read PPE, having spent his period of compulsory national service learning Russian. He was a brilliant linguist and loved the imaginative worlds opened up by language. He started his academic career as a philosopher, teaching briefly at Wadham, before changing direction entirely, taking a university post in Cairo and becoming a hugely distinguished historian of Islamic art. He always recalled with gratitude the travel award which he received as an undergraduate and spent on his first visit to Turkey. Istanbul was already a romantic - almost mythical – destination for him. Russian poetry was one introduction; another was offered by his mother, a school teacher who in the 1920s had applied for a job in Turkey but had not been permitted by her family to take it up. Michael’s life was dedicated to the exploration of different cultures through language, and he wanted to leave a legacy to enable others to do the same.