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Professor Anne Hudson’s legacy to fund graduate scholarship at St Hugh’s College

St Hugh’s is honoured to be one of two Oxford colleges hosting scholarships supported by an extremely generous legacy left to the English Faculty, St Hugh’s and Lady Margaret Hall by our late Honorary Fellow, Professor Anne Hudson. Prof. Hudson studied English at St Hugh’s, matriculating in 1957. She bequeathed £2.6 million for endowing scholarships for graduate students working on medieval English. St Hugh’s will hold the Pamela Gradon scholarship, named after one of the college’s most distinguished English scholars, who was also Professor Hudson’s tutor, colleague, friend and close collaborator on the enormous Wycliffite Sermons project. The Anne Hudson scholarship is to be held at Lady Margaret Hall. We look forward to welcoming our first Pamela Gradon scholar in the autumn.

Anne Hudson was an undergraduate at St Hugh’s College, and later a University Lecturer in the English Faculty and Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. She then became Professor of Medieval English at the English Faculty from 1989 to 2003 with a Professorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. She was an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s College. In 1976, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and she became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988. For several years she was Director of the Early English Text Society. Professor Hudson was also Co-Investigator on the ‘Towards a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible’ research project which ran from 2016-2018. She was particularly well-known for her work on Wycliffe and Wycliffite writing, with many field-changing publications in that area, including The Premature Reformation, Doctors in English: A Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries, and Lollards and Their Books.

Professor Marion Turner, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Faculty Board, said, ‘This is a transformational legacy, that will help us to support some of the best graduate students working on later medieval literature. Many of us remember Anne Hudson as a crucial presence in our faculty for many decades; her generous gift helps to assure the future of the field to which she committed her life and work.’

Anne wrote about her experiences as a student at St Hugh’s and her subsequent career which can be viewed by clicking here.