Julia Flynn Siler's Blog

After a long plane flight from California, I reached the house in Norham Gardens on a cold January day, dragging two suitcases containing enough clothing for my five-month stay as an academic visitor at Oxford University. The Victorian Gothic house was forbidding and strange – with closed doors between all the rooms. It had sat…

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On a bitterly cold day in mid-January, Mat Davies led our group of Oxford Next Horizons scholars to the exterior of Rhodes House where a stone carver was etching the words of a  “sleeping” African language known as ǀxam into the building’s lower parapet. As the Rhodes Trust’s Director of Estate, Mat had been closely…

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It was sweltering in Paris over the weekend of Polar X, an inaugural workshop and symposium at the Université Paris Cité which brought together scholars, artists, and writers from around the world to examine a new framework for thinking about polar narratives in the Arctic and Antarctic. On the first day, June 13th, Paris hit…

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Was it the scent of wood smoke drifting through the ground floor of the castle from the open fireplace in the massive country kitchen? Or the vases of olive branches and wildflowers we picked from the surrounding hills. Or perhaps the workshops held in a grand library, all of us seated around a long wooden…

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Claire Parker has faced some tough challenges in her life. At 28, she lost a leg to cancer. At 55, she ended a long marriage. But on this spring morning in mid-April, the retired British oncologist removes her artificial leg, kneels on a yoga mat, and uses her arms to swing her body off the…

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Dr. Nilo Merino Recalde, a young researcher studying birdsong at the University of Oxford, walks through a wintry landscape leading into Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire, a woodland habitat for birds, foxes, badgers, and insects. This 1,000-acre woodlands, which date back to the last ice age, are one of the most studied wild places on the…

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Workmen were pulling up the tattered red carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly Wednesday rehearsal. After casting around that afternoon for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College,…

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On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…

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Neil Wigfield stands in front of a mostly bare flower bed on a bitterly cold afternoon in February without a hat or gloves. Though the temperature hovers around freezing that day in Oxford, he’s wearing a single fleece top on to keep him warm. But, as he explains the succession of spring blooms that will…

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One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years…

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