Carolyn Weber

Oxford is the setting and half the argument of Surprised by Oxford, Carolyn Weber's memoir of arriving there from Canada in the early 1990s as a graduate student hostile to religion and leaving with a Christian faith. Weber holds an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in Romantic literature from Oxford, where she studied as a Commonwealth Scholar after a first degree from Huron College at Western University, and she became the first woman to serve as dean of St Peter's College. She has taught at Seattle University, the University of San Francisco, Westmont College and, more recently, New College Franklin in Tennessee. The memoir appeared in 2011 from Thomas Nelson, then an independent Christian publisher and bought by HarperCollins the year after, and is written straightforwardly as a conversion narrative; its title echoes C. S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy. It took the Grace Irwin Award, the largest prize for Christian writing in Canada, and was filmed at Oxford in 2021 and reached cinemas in 2023, from a screenplay Ryan Whitaker wrote with Weber.