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Nicholas Smart is the Astor Junior Research Fellow in English. He completed his undergraduate studies at °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ between 2016 and 2019. After a year at Oriel for his MSt, he returned to °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ to undertake doctoral research in 2020 under a joint scholarship from All Souls College, Oxford, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Clarendon Fund, completed in the Spring of 2024. He received a University Gibbs Prize for his undergraduate degree and the Marilyn Butler Prize for his MSt research. He has also received the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize for research into the criticism of Matthew Arnold and Zadie Smith, and has been highly commended on two occasions for both the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize and the Martin Starkie Poetry Prize.

Teaching

At °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ, Nick has contributed to the teaching of Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (1830 – 1910), and Paper 4 (1910 – Present). He has also supervised FHS Dissertations and Visiting Students on various topics from 1830 to the Present.

Research Interests

Nick's DPhil thesis, Preserving Old Possum: T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation, explored Eliot’s approach to – and anxieties about – matters of self-fashioning. It used the wealth of new material made available by recent editions of his work to argue that Eliot was not only an expert cultural marketer, but that he also used his poems to criticise the very strategies that were used to promote them.

Nick's current project moves forward in time, to the second half of the twentieth century. He is interested in the path now frequently tread by eminent poets who become teachers of creative writing in university faculties.

Selected Publications

'T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive’, ELH 90.3 (2023), 851-81

‘Arnoldian Contempt: Matthew Arnold and Zadie Smith’, Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize, Oxford University Gazette (2022).