Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops
Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops
Intellectual Generosity. Creative Collaboration. Inspiring Future Generations.
- The Laura Marcus Fund: Help Secure the Future of the Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops
- Introduction
- About the Workshops
- About Professor Laura Marcus
- Previous and Upcoming Workshops
As part of The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’s fifteenth anniversary fundraising campaign, we are seeking to establish The Laura Marcus Fund to secure the future of the Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops.
By donating to the Laura Marcus Fund, you will help ensure that Laura's vision of scholarship—rigorous, generous, imaginative, and collaborative—continues to inspire future generations.
The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops were established in 2022 by OCLW’s Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Professor Elleke Boehmer, and Dr Kate Kennedy in collaboration with the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. The workshops celebrate the life and intellectual legacy of Professor Laura Marcus (1954–2021): one of the most influential literary scholars of her generation and a much-loved colleague, teacher, and friend.
Held twice each term, the workshops provide a rare and valuable space for sustained intellectual exchange between students, academics, and writers. They foster conversations around creative practice and academic research, bringing together established and emerging voices. Their purpose is not simply to present completed research, but to create a collaborative intellectual space in which ideas can be developed, tested, challenged, and refined.
In an academic environment where opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange are increasingly rare, the workshops preserve a space for conversation, experimentation, and collective thinking. They provide a forum in which creative imagination, historical research, literary scholarship, and life experience can come together to generate new ways of understanding both the past and the present.
Donate to the Laura Marcus Fund
Professor Laura Marcus held the prestigious Goldsmiths' Chair in English Literature at New College and in Oxford’s English Faculty from 2010 until her untimely death in 2021. A pioneering scholar whose work transformed the study of autobiography, biography, modernism, film, psychoanalysis, and narrative, Laura helped establish life-writing as one of the most vibrant and intellectually exciting fields in the humanities.
Among her many influential publications are Auto/biographical Discourses (1994), a foundational text in life-writing studies, and Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2018). Her scholarship fundamentally changed how we understand questions of selfhood, memory, narrative, and representation, and continues to shape research and teaching around the world.
Yet those who knew Laura remember not only her extraordinary intellectual achievements, but also her remarkable generosity. She encouraged younger scholars, fostered cross-disciplinary collaboration, and created intellectual communities wherever she worked. She possessed a rare gift for bringing people together through conversation.
The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops were conceived as a living expression of the values Laura embodied throughout her career: intellectual curiosity, scholarly generosity, interdisciplinarity, and a profound commitment to collaborative thinking.
Help Secure Laura Marcus' Legacy
The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops have welcomed distinguished scholars and writers from Oxford and beyond. Recent workshops have included:
- Georgina Ferry, Lives Under the Microscope: Scientific Obituaries Dissected
- Professor Elleke Boehmer and Dr Katherine Collins, Life-Writing and the Far South: Rhythm, Disruption, and Sensory Extremes
- Professor Josephine McDonagh (Chicago), The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Child Migrants
- Professor Laurie Maguire, Judith Shakespeare: Her Story
- Professor Nicole King, A Harlem Library Life: The Beginning of the Story
- Professor Santanu Das, E.M. Forster and Mohammed El Adl: Leads, Clues and Muddles
- Professor Simon Horobin, Writing the Oxford Lives of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
The workshops exemplify the intellectually adventurous and interdisciplinary conversation that Laura Marcus championed throughout her career. The workshops are coordinated by Professor Dame Hermione Lee in collaboration with Dr Eleri Anona Watson and Dr Julia Dallaway.
Details of forthcoming workshops can be found here.
Five years after Laura Marcus's passing, many of us still feel her influence every day: in our scholarship, teaching, and in our efforts to support the communities she built.
The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops have become one of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing's most important activities. They embody Laura's belief that scholarship should be intellectually ambitious, collaborative, generous, and open to the world.
It costs approximately £12,000 each year to deliver six workshops.
Our aim is to establish a fund to secure the workshops in perpetuity. The Laura Marcus Fund will ensure that future generations continue to benefit from the rigorous, imaginative, and collaborative intellectual exchange that Laura valued so deeply.
By contributing to the Fund, you will:
- Preserve a unique forum for interdisciplinary intellectual exchange;
- Support scholars and writers at every stage of their careers;
- Foster new research, creative practice, and scholarly collaboration;
- Ensure that Laura Marcus's extraordinary legacy continues to shape future generations of life-writers and scholars.
All supporters will become part of the continuing story of the workshops. Donors will be acknowledged through a permanent artwork created for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing by acclaimed artist and writer Dr Charlie Lee-Potter, Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, commemorating both Laura's legacy and the community of supporters whose generosity has secured the future of the series.
Supporters will also be invited to attend Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops, and major donors will be invited to participate in special events, such as lunches and small-group conversations with workshop speakers and OCLW members.
We welcome gifts of every size. Some supporters may wish to make a one-off contribution; others may prefer to pledge support over several years. We would also be delighted to discuss larger gifts and opportunities for philanthropic partnership and sponsorship.
The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops are more than a memorial: they are a living continuation of Laura's vision of scholarship: rigorous, generous, imaginative, and open to the world. Please join us in securing their future.
Donate:
Online: Click here to make a donation to OCLW’s Laura Marcus Fund
This link will open in a new tab—please edit the amount and select recurring or one-off donation.
To ensure that you receive donor benefits, after donating, please send an email containing your name and preferred email address to admin.oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Contact Us:
We warmly invite you to contact our director, Dr Kate Kennedy (oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk), to discuss sponsorship and any other ideas for supporting the Fund.
