13 Mar 08

Professor Lee regularly contributes to cultural programmes in the media

Professor Lee is a distinguished expert on women writers, American literature, life-writing, and modern fiction. Her many books include a major biography of Virginia Woolf (1996), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize and was named as one of the New York Times Book Review’s best books of 1997, and a biography of Edith Wharton, published to considerable acclaim in 2007.

She is also well known for her reviewing and her work in the media. From 1982 to 1986 she presented Channel Four’s first books programme, ‘Book Four’, and she contributes regularly to ‘Front Row’ and other radio arts programmes. She was Chair of the Judges for the ManBooker Prize for Fiction in 2006. Her honours and awards include a CBE for services to literature.

Founded in 1965, Wolfson College is the largest graduate college in Oxford. The college’s diverse student body has a wide spread of disciplines and nationalities.

Professor Lee said: ‘I am delighted and honoured to have been elected to the Presidency of Wolfson College, an institution which since its foundation by Sir Isaiah Berlin in the 1960s has represented some of the best and most forward-looking aspects of Oxford education. It is a non-hierarchical, friendly, international and lively graduate college, a striking modern building in a beautiful riverside setting. Though I shall be sad to stand down from the Goldsmiths’ Chair, a post in which I have had ten rewarding and fruitful years, and though I hope to maintain my links with the Oxford English Faculty and to keep up my activities as a writer and critic, I look forward to taking on the new challenge of leading, representing, and working for the College.’

Professor Lee will take up office on 1 October 2008.