J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor at Oxford.
Tolkien had a long academic career at the University of Oxford, where he taught English language and literature. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945, then became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.
Oxford was more than Tolkien’s workplace. He lived and wrote in the city for many years, and its libraries, medieval scholarship, and literary communities supported his creative and academic interests. His Oxford colleagues included C.S. Lewis, with whom he discussed literature, mythology, religion, and drafts of his writing.
A common confusion is to identify Cambridge as Tolkien’s university because Cambridge is also a major center of English-language scholarship. Tolkien did not hold his principal professorship there. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and later taught at both Leeds and Oxford, but Oxford is the university most closely associated with his mature career.