Support Progress
Innovation, Inclusivity, and the Arts
Shaping the Future of Learning
At Jesus we are creating a smarter and stronger future for our community every day by fulfilling the promise of our enterprising students, fostering scholarship, and advancing research. What does it mean to be a 16th century Oxford college in the Digital Age? It means being receptive to progress, agile in our thinking, and making the most of opportunities that will help equip us with the most state-of-the-art learning practices available.
Progress for Jesus College also means making it more accessible for its current and future members. A formalised commitment to becoming more open and inclusive began in 2016 with the creation of an Access and Outreach team led by a dedicated College Access Fellow. Digital access and outreach is a key part of the future of the University’s public engagement, and we are particularly well placed with our Digital Hub, and our growing online access presence, to be influential leaders in this space.
Thanks to philanthropist Dr Henry Cheng Kar Shun, we created the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub to offer a dedicated space in College for interactive events, workshops and performances that demonstrate how advances in digital technologies are transforming our understanding of the world around us.
Support Progress
We continue to push these boundaries to create new opportunities at Jesus for the furthering of Digital Age learning and research. With our College led by a Computer Scientist as our 31st Principal, and the subsequent introduction of Computer Science as a subject of study at Jesus in 2015, we are now at the cutting-edge of this rapidly expanding academic discipline. Since then, we have graduated cohorts of students in areas such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, and our research practices and College teaching have evolved in tandem to employ computational methods and data analytics.
College’s brand new Digital Hub is a purpose-built educational facility designed for sharing interdisciplinary digital research, knowledge exchange, and teaching. The Hub’s digital streaming technology enables students to have an exceptional learning experience, and supports academics to engage with colleagues, researchers and institutions around the world. Support for Digital Hub symposia means supporting world-leading research in critical areas such as Climate Change, Global Healthcare, and Artificial Intelligence and Ethics.
College Priority: Digital Hub Flagship Programme
The Digital Hub Flagship Programme explores how technological advancements enable us to rediscover the past in news ways, empower us to question the present, and allow us to define the future together. We run over 50 events per year that range from skills-based Digital Bootcamps to interactive public events, academic conferences, tech expos, hackathons, and digital art exhibitions. We are a dedicated space for sharing cutting-edge progress and debating insights into critically important areas to develop a brighter future collaboratively (e.g. AI for Good).
Recent events include the student-led Oxford Synthetic Media Forum, which was Oxford’s first conference on generative AI and the synthetic future, and ‘Archives of the Future’, which explored the challenges and benefits of curating digital archival materials.
We attract thousands of in-person attendees to the Hub every year and have a digital reach of around 100,000 people. We make digital tools and technological knowledge accessible, both through levelling the playing field and enabling new insights and connections especially across (1) conventional academic silos, between (2) academia and industry, and (3) research and the public.
“Supporting the Digital Hub Flagship programme helps us to continue to deliver a curated events programme of innovative and interactive activities to the College community and wider public.”
– Dr Janina Schupp
SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow for the Digital Hub
Our Progress: Digital Manuscripts Project
Since its foundation, Jesus College has gathered a remarkable collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts, building an internationally significant resource for researchers, students, and the wider public. The collection offers a unique view into the intellectual and cultural life of medieval and early modern Britain as well as an understanding of College’s place contextually in this period.
Our archives suggest the ancient collection began with a bequest of 47 manuscript books ‘of Divinitie in wrytten hand’ by Gregory Prise in 1600. A renowned scholar, Prise must have inspired later book bequests to be left to College as over the 17th and 18th centuries Jesus benefitted significantly in this respect. The collection boasts significant Welsh manuscripts (literature and histories of the Principality) and many befitting a college founded during the reign of Elizabeth I, with a number of important works of the Reformation. The complete collection is hugely varied and it is our aspiration to shine new light on relatively unseen texts, their writers, and the craft of the bookbinders through an extensive and ambitious digitisation project.
The riches of our collection are of global significance and this project will open up access to current students in Oxford and to researchers from around the world, in addition to interested members of the public. We currently receive around 100 viewing requests per year and the opportunity to fully digitise the collection will advance scholarship in palaeography, codicology and broader historical study, and also deepens our understanding of our own College’s heritage.
The digitising and cataloguing of the Jesus collection will require £260,000 to complete, with the cost of completing one manuscript costing £1,600 (plus gift aid). From our eclectic collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts we have circa 130 manuscripts left to digitise and we hope that with the help of alumni and friends we will be able to achieve the important milestone in material accessibility.
We look forward to sharing more on this exciting and historically important project in the upcoming months. To see the treasures already visible on the Digital Bodleian website, click here.
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“Jesus College was an early adopter in utilising digitising techniques to share its magnificent manuscript collection with a wide audience. In 1996 the college agreed to its Celtic manuscripts being used as the pilot collection for the Early Manuscripts at Oxford University Project. In the years since, and thanks to the generosity of alumni and supporters to College, we have been able to fund ad-hoc digitisation of 18 manuscripts. We now have the opportunity through this project to set a new benchmark in accessibility through digitising the entire collection, making these manuscripts readily available to anyone worldwide.”
Andrew Dunning
Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College -
“This is a rare opportunity to digitise a complete collection of medieval manuscripts from one institution. Individually, every manuscript is a unique artefact; collectively, they speak to each other and to the intellectual curiosity of the medieval world.”
Owen Massey
Jesus College Librarian
Support Access
Thanks to Dr Matthew Williams, we now have one of the strongest access records in Oxford, with proven results in our target areas in London and across Wales. Through the success of our Access and Outreach programme, we have seen where our efforts are most needed. We already offer and support an extensive range of school visits, outreach programmes and activities for prospective students from non-selective state schools and under-represented groups. Over time, we have extended our range to inviting school children as young as Year 5 to experience College’s openness firsthand.
We now seek to expand our successful access offering to include in-reach programmes to support students throughout their time at College, ensuring that the access journey does not end when a student has been accepted, but continues at every stage of their studies at Oxford.
College priority: Digital Access Officer
With millions of content views and downloads to date, the Jesus College access team has the most public facing and influential social media presence of any Oxbridge college. The Digital Access Officer post was created in 2024 to enhance the team’s online presence and reach.
The aim of this post is to increase digital modes of access and outreach via the College access and outreach social media channels, developing fresh and informative web content, and other communications that support prospective Oxford students.
College’s ambition is to make this a permanent part of the Access and Outreach team. It is currently funded by a generous spend-down donation by the Richey Family Foundation but will require additional support to ensure its longevity.
Our Progress: In-Reach Programmes and MOOCs
In-reach programmes are designed to offer opportunities and support for current Jesus students. This can come in the form of supporting internships and training for students who help with student recruitment and College Open Days. These programmes not only support students by helping them build skills and confidence, but also add value to the Access and Outreach programme by creating a mentored team of student ambassadors.
We also have ambitious plans to develop Jesus Access MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and to create a digital facsimile of College that could be explored on any device from anywhere in the world.
With this metaverse College, we could run hybrid events with people in our actual Digital Hub experiencing the same public lectures and outreach talks as those on the other side of the globe in a virtual Hub. This is an avenue that other Oxford and Cambridge colleges have not exploited, giving us an edge. We are currently seeking support to develop this programme.
Support Arts
In 2023, a College Arts Committee of current students and Fellows was formalised to represent the interests of music, drama, and the visual arts at Jesus. Support for College arts helps us to celebrate the artistic talents of our community and to create more opportunities for these practices to flourish.
The arts play an invaluable part in College life, and our popular student clubs such as the Music Society and non-auditioning Chapel Choir make it an inclusive and supportive environment in which to participate.
It is thanks to the generous support of alumni and friends that we have been able to help fund Chapel Choir tours abroad, host College Visiting Fellows in Art, and stage the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. Our aim is to bring the arts closer to the heart of College, both for the enrichment of our community and wider Oxford.
The Rosaline Wong Gallery
Thanks to the new Rosaline Wong Gallery at Jesus, there is now an unprecedented opportunity for College to forge new creative partnerships and artistic collaborations. Progress also means creating new opportunities for our students to showcase their talents, follow their passions, and provide meaningful support for their creative exploration.
