My Oxford Term

High table dinner at Magdalen

My time in Oxford has come to an end and I head back to Chicago this week. I was a visiting Fellow at Magdalen (pronounced "maudlin") College for the Hilary Term.

There's a six week break between the eight-week Hilary and Trinity terms. They work the fellows hard during the terms with teaching, tutoring, admissions, hiring and various other administrative functions. All the events, seminars, workshops, high-table dinners are scheduled during the term. Pretty much nothing between terms, and many domestic students are forced out of their housing, and many of the fellows/professors leave town as well. An interesting strategy when us Americans get just a week for spring break. 

I came here for research, working mostly with my former PhD student Rahul Santhanam, a tutorial fellow at Magdalen, and his students. More on the research in a future post.

I took full advantage of the Magdalen college life, working in the senior common room, having lunch in the winter common room, evensong in the chapel with an outstanding choir and organ, and high table dinner in the hall. I had the same experiences as Magdalen fellows have for centuries including CS Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Erwin Schrödinger. There's also a summer common room with a secret door to the old library, and by old it predates most American universities. Magdalen looks like such a traditional old college that some recent Oxford-set shows, including My Oxford Year and Young Sherlock, had extensive filming there. 

As I mentioned earlier, community focuses on the college not on the departments. I had an office in the CS building but didn't spend that much time there. Every day at Magdalen particularly at lunch and dinner, I had great conversations with lawyers, biologists, historians, archivists, literature, music historians, stained-glass restorers and the numismatist who manages the 300,000 coin collection of the Oxford Ashmolean museum.

One dinner I sat next to the COO of the new Ellison Institute of Technology, a ten billion dollar venture in Oxford but independent of the university, funded by the Oracle CEO. She talked considerably about the famous pub, the Eagle and the Child. The pub, nicknamed the Bird and the Baby, was famous as the meeting place of the Inklings, a group of writers including Lewis and Tolkien. It never reopened after Covid and was purchased by Ellison and currently being renovated. 

Another visiting fellow, Elaine Treharne, was giving a talk on Medieval poetry the same week I talked about complexity and machine learning. We went to each other's talk. Hers in the brand new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, the same Schwarzman from MIT's College of Computing and mine in a CS building that's a mish mash of other buildings. She outdrew me two to one.