Jane Griffiths
Fellow in English
Biography
Jane Griffiths joined Wadham as Fellow in English in September 2012. Matriculating in 1988, she was an undergraduate and graduate at Magdalen, and taught for four years as a lecturer at St Edmund Hall. She subsequently held posts at Edinburgh and Bristol.
Jane works primarily on the poetry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Her two monographs, John Skelton and Poetic Authority (2006) and Diverting Authorities: The Marginal Gloss from Manuscript to Print (2014), are both published by Oxford University Press, and together with Adam Hanna she co-edited the volume Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave, 2020). She is now working on Middle English lyrics, especially macaronic (multilingual) lyrics, as part of a project that explores verbal memory and creative process.
Jane has also published six collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books, most recently Little Silver (2022); Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008, and Silent in Finisterre (2017) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is increasingly keen to find ways of allowing academic research and poetic practice to speak to one another.
Outside her academic career, Jane formerly worked as a bookbinder and as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary. She is a jeweller and painter; her work can be found at https://poetandcat.design and on Instagram @poet.and.cat