C.S. Lewis became a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925. He held the Oxford position for nearly three decades before moving to Cambridge.
Magdalen College was central to Lewis’s professional and social life. He taught English literature, wrote books, and formed friendships with other scholars. His Oxford circle included J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, and Lewis participated in literary discussion groups such as the Inklings.
Lewis’s academic work was not limited to Christian writing. He was a medieval and Renaissance literature scholar, and his major scholarly publications included The Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.
In 1954, Lewis became the first professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The similar names Magdalen and Magdalene can cause confusion: his Oxford college was Magdalen, while his Cambridge college was Magdalene.