Linacre College, Oxford has announced a DPhil thesis by one of its students. The title is “Evelyn Waugh: Travel Writing and Politics” and its author is Roger Irwin, a postgraduate student. The college is a postwar foundation, and its students are all postgraduates working on advanced degrees. It is not clear from the announcement whether the thesis is at the beginning or end of its gestation, but it is probably the latter. Roger Irwin previously described his research in a 2016 posting on the Linacre College website in which the earlier stages of the project are described:
Linacre student, Roger Irwin, has just returned from a Leeds Hoban Huntington Exchange Fellowship. Researching Evelyn Waugh’s letters, journals and manuscripts held at the Huntington Library, California, Roger accessed many primary resources for his DPhil thesis on the politics of Waugh’s writing and, in particular, on his war novels and travel writing. […] Roger recommends the exchange: “As well housing great literary collections, the Huntington is an excellent place to think and work. I loved its gardens, museums and galleries and it has a lively intellectual community where I enjoyed chatting to fellow researchers at lunch every day. I was also fortunate enough to spare some time at the end of my stay to read the autograph manuscript of Decline and Fall (1928), which is Waugh’s first (and funniest) novel.”
