Embracing Change: 100 Days with the EJCP
My project’s name is Oxford Dawn. I will introduce the history of the project as a way of explaining what it is. The name is a tribute to my grandparents, whose last name was Dawn. It is also a play on the old honorific of “don” for Oxford faculty. My grandparents loved the city of Oxford, and my grandmother inadvertently inspired me to apply to study at the university.
I founded Oxford Dawn in 2020 to chronicle student life at Oxford University. As an institution, Oxford is frequently misunderstood and misportrayed, so I wanted to focus on the lives and experiences of ordinary students. I had a grand mission of demystifying the university with the aim of making it accessible socially and culturally. I intended to demystify things like formal dinners, pet-an-alpaca day, or the college system. Yet, over the course of the pandemic — a time when normal student life was suspended — and my own studies, the purpose and content of Oxford Dawn evolved, incorporating elements of my own research, hobbies, and interests.
Unsurprisingly for someone whose MA is in History and Literature, I love reading, and at a certain point during the evolution of Oxford Dawn, I turned toward pieces in which I unpacked the meaning behind dated allusions or assumed knowledge in works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For example, here is a passage from Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1860s serial novel Wives and Daughters, in which she used a colloquial vocabulary regarding Oxford (and Cambridge) which was specific to her time period:
Roger Hamley, who at present lived and reigned at Hamley, had not received so good an education as he ought to have done. His father, Squire Stephen, had been plucked at Oxford, and, with stubborn pride, he had refused to go up again.
A “plucked” person in nineteenth century Oxford-Cambridge parlance was someone who had failed his examinations, a serious matter but one which provided fodder for satire in 1836. “To go up again” meant returning to Oxford to retake the exams. “Up,” incidentally, was not a term indicating one headed north; rather, it was an idiomatic use where one went “up” to London, Oxford, or Cambridge, regardless of the direction one travelled.
The newsletter’s content sits at the intersection of commentary, history, and entertainment. Hence, I call it “comment-ainment,” a portmanteau of “commentary” and “entertainment.” Oxford Dawn’s essays are themed on reviewing books, providing historical context, or addressing historical or social inaccuracies in film and television. We solve a friction point for a certain type of creative who needs specific information for work but doesn’t have it. Ideally, we also make informational reading fun to do.
Over the past one hundred days, the instructors and mentors of the EJCP have guided me to embracing the evolution of my project. Although there are important stories to be told about Oxford and its people, comment-ainment reflects my true passion and has found an audience.
I invite you to explore comment-ainment: www.oxforddawn.com.
If you would like to learn more about me, please visit my website www.maryluciadarst.com.
