Arts and Events

The college has a long history of hosting interdisciplinary talks and lectures across the arts, religion and culture – with the chapel playing a central role.

Recent highlights have included Principal Jane Shaw’s revival of the Upton Lecture series to mark the centenary of the first Upton Lecture, given by Evelyn Underhill, who was the first woman at Oxford University to lecture on Theology. To inaugurate the revival, Jeanette Winterson spoke on the same subject that Underhill lectured on 100 years ago: The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today.

More recently, Professor Susan James spoke on Fake News: Learning from Spinoza, and the College’s current artist-in-residence Edmund de Waal gave a talk entitled You Take an Object from Your Pocket: Stories, Families and Objects in Exile.

In 2024 the Principal, Jane Shaw, also inaugurated The Manchester Lectures, a series of talks that she has called part of our ‘thinking together’ about the college’s surprising, and sometimes radical, history. The topic for the first year was William and Elizabeth Gaskell: The Unitarian Making of a Novelist, with the inaugural lecture in the series given by Professor Dinah Birch.

The chapel is also an extraordinary space for art – as well as its permanent arts and crafts windows and painted organ pipes, it hosts events by a network of resident and visiting artists and writer Fellows, including Edmund de Waal, Michael Symmons Roberts, Mary Jean Chan and Fiona Sampson, as well as musicians, singers and composers.