Gabriel Rolfe, Magdalene

Biographical Information

I am a Vice-Chancellor's and Magdalene College Scholar with a broad research interest in English poetry, its history, theory, and practice. I have supervised undergraduate work for the English Tripos Part IA, 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice', and Part II, 'History & Theory of Literary Criticism'. As a poet, I recently received the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Prize. 

My doctoral research broadly concerns the relationship between late modernist poetics and the academic vocation in post-War Britain. In this context, my thesis offers a close comparative study of the work of Geoffrey Hill and J.H. Prynne, drawing upon an extensive archival record of both poets' academic employment. I argue that close attention to the university, as an idea and as a material setting for much of Hill and Prynne's writing, reveals a nexus of institutional commitments – to scholarship, teaching, even administration – in which their poetic practice is deeply implicated.

Previously I studied English as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, and as a postgraduate at University College London, where I was awarded the John Oliver Hobbes Memorial Scholarship in Modern English Literature.