Dr Hannah Roux

Background

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Calleva Research Centre at Magdalen College, working on the project ‘C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Scholarly Reappraisal,’ led by Professor Simon Horobin (Magdalen College) and Professor Giuseppe Pezzini (Corpus Christi College). The project aims to reassess the immediate impact and later significance of the scholarship of one of Magdalen’s foremost fellows, C.S. Lewis, by situating his scholarly works within their historical, theoretical, and intellectual contexts, including especially his exchanges with J.R.R. Tolkien.
My background is in the tension between the high and middlebrow in the literary history of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their circles. I completed my PhD in English at the University of Sydney in 2024, and my academic monograph based on this research, C.S. Lewis on T.S. Eliot: A Critical Reception (1933-1954), is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in late 2027. I am interested in the way writers of the early to mid-twentieth century – especially Lewis and Tolkien – negotiated questions of literary value in tumultuous times, and in the implications of their work in contemporary literary and popular culture.