Catherine Redford (Career Development and Outreach Fellow)

Catherine is the Access and Outreach Fellow at Hertford, and is a specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English literature. She spends half her time on academic research and the other half working with potential applicants.

I came to Oxford as an undergraduate in 2003, having benefitted greatly from the University’s outreach work. The previous year, while taking my A-levels at my local sixth-form college, I had spent a week in Oxford on the University’s access summer school programme – an early precursor of the current UNIQ scheme. Despite my worries about fitting in (I was a rather nervous little Goth at the time!), I was able to see that there were people from my social background at Oxford and that this is a great place to study whoever you are. Neither of my parents had been to university, and we certainly didn’t know anyone who’d been to Oxford, but I soon felt at home and could imagine myself as a student here.

After taking my BA in English literature at Oxford, I went to Bristol for my MA and PhD before returning to Oxford as a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian literature. While the black hair and facial piercings are now in my distant past (although I’m still quite partial to The Cure), I retain a strong interest in access work and in 2015 was appointed as Hertford’s second Access and Outreach Fellow. I see my Access and Outreach work as a way of ‘paying it forward’ – helping out the next generation of potential Oxford applicants from less-privileged backgrounds, just as fourteen years ago people gave up their time to help me. My research, which is on early nineteenth-century apocalyptic literature, feeds into my outreach work, and I enjoy offering academic taster sessions on Mary Shelley and Lord Byron to the school groups that visit us.

I’m proud to work at Hertford. We don’t just pay lip service to access work – we’re really committed to taking the best and brightest students, whatever their background. It’s always great to be able to tell potential applicants about our generous bursary scheme, which makes a real difference for students from lower-income backgrounds. I particularly enjoy hosting school visits into Hertford; such visits allow school students to forget about the myths and stereotypes and to see what it’s really like to study here. I remember being completely taken aback by how much amazing stuff was going on in Oxford on my first visit here: all the lectures, plays, concerts, societies. It seemed like another world. It makes me happy when I see the participants on our Taster Days and Summer School reacting in the same way; it’s that moment when it all clicks and they think ‘Oxford’s for people like me, and it’s the place I want to be’.