Members of the Epsom community are invited to attend a seminar with one of the world’s leading literary scholars, Jonathan Bate, next Thursday at 6.15pm.
Jonathan Bate holds the title, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University where he was the Provost of Worcester College from 2011 to 2019.
He has wide-ranging research interests in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Romanticism, biography and life-writing, ecocriticism, contemporary poetry, visual culture and theatre history. He has been awarded a CBE for his services to higher education and in 2015 he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.
He is widely applauded for the clarity of his prose which reaches an audience far beyond the confines of elite academia. He is a regular guest – and expert commentator – on BBC Radio Four.
He will be leading a talk for our A-level students on the poet John Keats (it was the bicentenary of Keats’s death this week and there have been multiple ceremonies to mark the event).
Students from the Bourne Education Trust and from leading Independent Schools will also be in attendance. Members of the Epsom community may attend if they wish. They will need to email Deputy Head Secretary by Wednesday 3 March and request to be added to the Teams call. There is a limit on numbers on a Microsoft Teams Call and we apologise in advance if not everyone who wishes to attend is able to do so.
To coincide with bicentenary of Keats’s death, Professor Bate has just published a new book Bright Star, Green Light: The beautiful works and damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott-Fitzgerald which explores the parallels of these two writers and explains the deep influence of Keats had on Fitzgerald. We also anticipate this will work be referenced during his talk.
