One of two Merton chairs, the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature oversees literature of what is known as the long nineteenth century—the Victorian and late Romantic periods. Professor Small’s job will be to build graduate studies in the field, support her colleagues in their work, and continue to write and speak about the Humanities more broadly.
“It is a great honour,” says Professor Small. “I am acutely aware that I am not the first New Zealander to occupy an Oxford English Literature chair, or be right at the heart of Oxford English, broadly defined to include the Oxford English Dictionary. Norman Davis, Dan Davin, Douglas Gray, Don McKenzie have all gone before me,” she says.
Professor Small remembers her time at Victoria University with great fondness. “It was a terrific English department, in part for reasons that might not seem a recipe for institutional happiness. I studied at Victoria in the late 1980s, a time of intense disagreement about what kind of philosophical mooring the study of language and literature should have,” she says.
“The lecturers and tutors were all charismatic and hard-working and cared about the quality of students’ writing. Lectures were enlightening and enormous fun. The fact that people disagreed—and didn’t hide their disagreements—on whether students should be exposed to structuralism, post-structuralism, New Historicism and a variety of feminisms, was intriguing, and gave you a sense that something potentially important was at issue.”
The completion of her BA (Hons) at Victoria University saw Professor Small head to Cambridge for her PhD on a Commonwealth Trust Prince of Wales Scholarship, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship, a stint teaching at Bristol University and then finally to Pembroke College, Oxford, where she has remained since 1996, apart from a period in New York.
In terms of her research interests, Professor Small’s most recent book The Value of the Humanities has been widely influential in the United Kingdom, Europe, and America. “I took up the subject because I was unpersuaded by much of the public advocacy offered for the Humanities, but found it hard to articulate my own position satisfactorily in conversation—so it seemed to me that I should clarify my own thinking in a book.”
Professor Small finds enormous value in the study of Humanities to society, democracy, identity, happiness and the economy. She argues that the most important thing the Humanities do is also the most basic and underplayed in accounts of their worth. They do “a distinctive kind of work”, preserving and extending understanding of the meaning-making and creative processes of the culture.
That work is directly useful to society, assisting cultural understanding, and training people in the skills required to reinterpret the culture in ways that meet the changing needs and interests of the present, she says. She also argues that the Humanities contribute to human happiness, enriching the capacity of those who study them to take pleasure in cultural achievements. “Though they cannot reliably make any given individual happier, they deepen understanding of what happiness consists in and how best to put ourselves in the way of it,” she says.
Humanities also make a vital contribution to democracy, says Professor Small. “Humanities departments are centres for the higher study and practice of skills of critical reasoning, debate, and evaluation of ideas that are core requirements for a healthy democracy.” Their special role here looms larger, she argues, whenever other departments of the university are tempted to neglect the attention to language and argument that is the Humanities’ special domain.
“I am also interested in the literature and philosophy of ageing, from antiquity to the present”, she says—“most recently I’ve been thinking about how far self-identity does or doesn’t persist into old age”.
Professor Small takes up the post in October 2018.