Giles, Oxford, where exactly

[beccaelizabeth]

"I was twenty-one, studying history at Oxford. And, of course, the occult by night. I hated it. The tedious grind of study, the overwhelming pressure of my destiny. I dropped out, I went to London."

Is precisely the whole of what we know about Giles' university education.

But Oxford is made up of many many places, so I was wondering about which in particular Giles could have studied at.


http://www.ox.ac.uk/aboutoxford/

Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world and lays claim to nine centuries of continuous existence.

Oxford is a collegiate university, with 39 self-governing colleges related to the University in a type of federal system. There are also seven Permanent Private Halls, founded by different Christian denominations. Thirty colleges and all halls admit students for both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Seven other colleges are for graduates only; one has Fellows only, and one specializes in part-time and continuing education.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/colleges/
lists all those colleges

Answers.com has a page on them too.

St Hilda's is still a women's college, so he didn't go there. Others changed to being co-ed in 1974 so there were probably more still women only when he was studying.
St Anne's College was women only until 1979 according to Answers.com
At one time so were Somerville College, St. Hugh's, and Lady Margaret Hall.

We can be fairly sure Giles wasn't there part time, so not Kellogg College (besides which, that only existed under that name since 1994). All Souls has fellows only so not there neither.

All the information I found about History degrees is about studying starting now, but the undergraduate degrees are three year courses. So at 21 he could have been finishing as an undergraduate or he could have just started on his graduate degree. So that doesn't narrow it down any more.

Also, while Green College, Linacre, Nuffield, St Antony's, St Cross, Templeton and Wolfson admit only graduate students, all the others admit both, and I couldn't see on skimming any reason a student wouldn't just stay at the same College to keep studying at a different level. So it might be more likely that he didn't study in one of those places, even if he was a graduate student by then. Also it looks like a lot of them didn't exist in the early 70s.

I don't get the feeling that Watchers, or Giles in particular, are particularly Christian so I don't think he would go to one of the particularly Christian Halls.

Since there are enough Watchers to fill their own school it occured to me that there might be like a Watcher college, but if that were the case then he wouldn't have to split his studies and only do the occult stuff at night. (And it is still slightly odd that he had to study both. Why do Watchers study mundane History?)

Apparently there are enough fictional colleges to get their own page on answers.com, though a lot of them are from the same books. So if we make up a Watcher college we'll at least have a lot of company.



http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/index.htm
Modern History homepage

Today the University is one of the world's most encompassing centres for the study of history. The faculty has about a hundred permanent teaching staff, nearly twelve hundred undergraduates, and almost five hundred graduate students attracted from many countries. Historians also abound in other departments. At their service is the Bodleian library and its ancillaries, which count among the greatest of research collections.

They work and live in forty-five college communities, in buildings ranging from honey-coloured medieval quads, to the most controversial of post-modernist architecture, all set within the lively, thriving, and beautiful city of Oxford.

The bit on 'How do I choose a college' has a lot of helpful comments that seem to boil down to 'it doesn't matter because you'll probably get reshuffled anyway'. Which isn't actually helpful to the matter at hand. As far as I can skim from the site, choice of subject doesn't dictate choice of college.

This page is a list of subject areas that can be studied on a postgraduate degree.
Medieval Britain, Europe and Byzantium
Early modern British history
Early modern European history
Modern British and Irish history
Modern European history
History of the United States of America
Commonwealth/Imperial and African history
Latin American history
Economic and Social History
History of Science, Medicine and Technology
History of Art

Which is an interesting list to try and fit Giles into. I don't really see him studying anything from where it starts saying 'modern' on down, which makes me rethink if I'm looking in the right department.


ANYways, the list of places I haven't found a specific reason for him not to be at is:


All Souls College
Balliol College
Brasenose College
Christ Church
Corpus Christi College
Exeter College
Hertford College
Jesus College
Keble College
Lincoln College
Magdalen College
Mansfield College
Merton College
New College
Oriel College
Pembroke College
Queen's College, The
St Catherine's College
St Edmund Hall
St John's College
St Peter's College
Trinity College
University College
Wadham College
Worcester College



St Catherine's College was apparently set up to give access to poorer students. From the outset, St. Catherine's has been characterised by innovation and a progressive outlook. Which doesn't sound to me like the kind of stuffy Watcher place that would drive Giles away. Also the Answers.com site says 1963, so it would have been shiny new.


Actually I have a vague feeling that if it started anytime after about 1600 it wouldn't be a Watcher kind of place.

Scarf colors on answers.com, so now I'm trying to remember if Giles ever wears a scarf, and if so what color it was. I get the feeling he did, probably in season 1 or 2 when he was all with the layers and tweedy. But I lack specific recollection.

My notes say in the episode 'Angel'
also as well as all the clothes from all day he has a little red and blue scarf. Paisley? Something complicated patterny. is a funny looking thing to wear. Is so much brighter than all the rest he has on.

Paisley doesn't sound like a school scarf.
And yes, I make notes on all his clothes and ties and such, for just such an occasion as this research. Not for many episodes yet, but when I go into note taking mode I get really obsessive particular.

My notes for 'Never Kill a Boy on the First Date' mention a scarf, but don't say what color. Near the start.

Likewise 'The Pack'. Near the end.

NKaBotFD scarf is dark. Could be dark blue, could be the lighting. 'The Pack', scarf is wierd orange and squares of maybe green.
Three different patterns then, and unlikely to be significant. No help there.


I just speng more than an hour looking stuff up like all that, and I'm not much closer to an answer. Also, all I was actually wondering is what kind of place Giles would live in when he studied there, and how to fit Ethan into it, which I can handwave to no particular detriment to the story.
I just get these curiosities is all. *shrugs*

But I'll ask the audience (*waves*): where do y'all think Giles studied?

Comments

[wisdomeagle]

WOW.

where do y'all think Giles studied?

No idea.

But WOW. *bows before your superior geekishness*

[beccaelizabeth]

:)

*does the royal wave*
you may rise...


:)

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

My feeling is that he's at one of the very old Colleges: University, Balliol, or Merton are the oldest, but I think Balliol may be right out as too obvious (although its my personal favorite because Lord Peter Mimsey went there). University has a mythical foundation by Alfred the Great, which looks like typical COW public relations, and Merton was founded for secular education of the religious, which also is ambiguous enough to sound like the Watchers.

Julia, probably unhelpful, as usual

[penwiper26.livejournal.com]

I put him in Magdalen, but mostly because it was the college with which I was most familiar. My connotations for Magdalen are history (the subject), an urbane sense of religion, brisk (in)efficiency, and a shabby-academic air that not all the colleges have. That seemed sufficient, and what I looked up later didn't contradict my idea, so I stuck by my whim. *shrug* But there are plenty of other viable options.

[janedavitt.livejournal.com]

Fascinating question and you've really given it a lot of thought ::admires:;.

I don't know... but all old and venerable, definitely.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*

[jedi-penguin.livejournal.com]

He wore a scarf in both "Nightmares" and the Frankenstein-type episode (I'm blanking on the name). I never thought to look for a significant pattern in it.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I've put Giles at New College in a fic (well, in the backstory to a fic), mostly because I'm unreasonably amused by the old joke about how New College was new in the fourteenth century. Later I learned that New College is the college of choice for boys who went to Winchester, which, coincidentally, I also had Giles attending. *is pleased by the serendipity*

I don't think Giles would likely have been a postgraduate student at 21. Isn't 19 the normal age to start university? So he'd more likely have been in his final year as an undergraduate. (In said backstory, my Giles takes his Ph.D. in history (specifically, the history of late antiquity and the early middle ages) at the Warburg Institute, which is affiliated with the University of London.

It's possible I've been thinking too much about this, yes.

[beccaelizabeth]

18 turning 19 that year is the usual age to start uni unless you take a year out, which seems unlikely for high pressure academic focus. So degree when ages 18, 19 and 20, turning 21 somewhere in the last academic year unless his birthday is in the school holidays like mine is. Still 21 when next degree starts.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I am a wealth of trivia on Oxford due to the novel, and the fanfic story it grew out of. I also have lots of Oford contacts (including a beta who was there in the 70's -- St Anne's which is of more use to me than to you).

I had Giles at Keble and Ethan at St John's in '1984 Plus Four' but that was in part because I was playing on the St John's vs Keble thing, and also because I wanted the third of the trio at Balliol and therefore within staggering distance of both.

Feel free to fire questions at me.

Gina