Dr Julyan Oldham

BA English Language and Literature (University of Oxford, 2017); MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Thought (University of Sussex, 2018); DPhil in English (University of Oxford, 2025)

I joined Christ Church as a Lecturer in October 2025.

At Christ Church, I teach the first-year English Prelims Papers 3 (Literature in English 1830-1910) and 4 (1910-Present). As well as working at Christ Church, I lead skills workshops at the English Faculty on topics including exam revision and extended essay writing. I supervise undergraduate dissertations on a range of topics, from pain in Edith Wharton's fiction to queer vampires in contemporary culture.

My research broadly examines how social expectations around intimacy and embodiment are intertwined with modern prose forms. Most of my work focusses on twentieth-century British literature.

I am currently finishing my first book, Fictions of Incompleteness: Virginity and the Early Twentieth-Century British Novel, which situates virginity as a major linguistic and thematic touchstone in modern British writing. This interdisciplinary project argues that virginity illuminates broader cultural preoccupations with ‘complete’ lives, narratives, and bodies, especially in the wake of sexology and the First World War. It presents new readings of a wide range of novels, from well-known works by Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence to lesser-known fiction by Aldous Huxley, Mary Butts, and others.

‘Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Creepy Doll: A Collection’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 13.3-4 (special double issue ‘Creepy Configurations’), forthcoming summer 2026

‘“Preserved Through Childbirth”: Reading Deep in Mrs Dalloway’s Virginity’, Journal of Modern Literature, 49.2, April 2026

‘Weighing Up Celibacy: The Fat Virgin of Molly Keane’s Devoted Ladies’, Humanities, 15 (special issue ‘Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing’), March 2026

‘Growing Absurd: Sexuality, Development, and Virgin Time in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage’, Studies in the Novel, 55.4 (special issue ‘Strange Temporalities’), December 2023