Contact: Bruce Conley, Associate Director of College Relations
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June 23, 2005

Augustana Professor Named Visiting Fellow at Oxford

SIOUX FALLS – Dr. Patrick Hicks, assistant professor of English, is privileged to represent Augustana and fellow faculty as a Visiting Fellow to historic Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world.

Dr. Hicks was selected to attend the Summer Research Institute at Oxford’s Harris Manchester College July 4-11.

The Summer Research Institute provides an opportunity for academics to pursue their research interests in the academic environment of Harris Manchester College. Membership is open to selected academic institutions which nominate one person each year for three years to attend the Summer Research Institute. Dr. Bruce Ammann, professor of music, represented Augustana in 2004.

“This is a real honor,” says Dr. Hicks. “Only fifty institutions around the world have been selected to participate. I think it’s important for our students to know this opportunity exists for the faculty of Augustana.”

Dr. Hicks will be researching the major and minor poets of the Great War who attended Oxford before they deployed for military service in France. His subjects are Edmund Blunden (1896-1974), Robert Graves (1895-1985), C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), and Arthur Graeme West (1891-1917).

“There is something enchanting about Oxford, and I’m excited that I will be in the place where these young men studied before going off to war,” says Dr. Hicks. “I couldn’t do this kind of research anywhere but Oxford.”

The primary objective of Dr. Hicks’ project is to discover the social and educational sentiments which existed in Oxford from 1914-1918.

Harris Manchester, founded in 1786, is Oxford’s newest college. The College recruits mature students and is the foremost higher education establishment in the United Kingdom for the education of older students.

Dr. Hicks, who grew up in Stillwater, Minn., earned his master’s degree in English at Queens University in Belfast, and his Ph.D. at the University of Sussex. He has some ties to Oxford having done research there for his doctoral degree.