C.S. Lewis became chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge in 1954.
The appointment marked Lewis’s move from Oxford to Cambridge University. He became the first holder of the newly established chair, formally titled the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. He was also elected a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he continued teaching and writing until his death.
Lewis had spent nearly three decades at Oxford, becoming a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College in 1925. Although he was already a major literary scholar and widely known Christian writer, he had not received an Oxford chair. Cambridge offered him a professorship focused on the medieval and Renaissance periods that had long been central to his scholarship.
The Cambridge appointment did not end Lewis’s public writing. In his later years he continued producing literary criticism, theological works, and fiction, including Till We Have Faces. The Oxford-to-Cambridge transition is sometimes overlooked because both universities are associated with him, but 1954 clearly separates the two phases of his academic career.