Which university employed J.R.R. Tolkien before he returned to Oxford?

The University of Leeds employed J.R.R. Tolkien before he returned to Oxford.

Tolkien became a professor of English language at Leeds in 1920. He worked there with fellow scholar E.V. Gordon, and together they produced a major edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published in 1925. His Leeds period helped establish his reputation as a medieval-language scholar.

In 1925, Tolkien left Leeds to become Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He later held the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature at Oxford. These academic posts were important to his study of languages and medieval texts, interests that also informed the structure and vocabulary of his fiction.

The question can be confused with Tolkien’s student years at Oxford or with his later Oxford appointments. Leeds was the university where he held his first full professorship, while Oxford was the institution to which he returned and where he spent most of his later career.