Going back to one's academic alma mater

I have been highly interested to read over the last two or three days the account by Brian Cowan on Facebook of his reactions to his return to Yale as a Research Fellow for a month over twenty years after he was a postgraduate there. He is now an Associate Professor in History at McGill University in Canada. His old college - Berkeley - and the Beinecke and Sterling Libraries were still there much as he remembered them but there had been changes amongst the bookshops and restaurants in the area surrounding the campus.  Naturally, he was and is looking forward to meeting old friends and to pursuing his research.

I had a similar experience when I was able to spend six weeks in Oxford in 2016 where I had been an undergraduate and postgraduate historian. I thought that I knew the place and, in part, I did. All the colleges I had once known so well were still there but none of my contemporaries or friends remained. Some of the facilities I had once used had moved: the History Faculty Library was no longer in Merton Street but much of its contents were in the basement of the Radcliffe Camera. The History Faculty itself had moved into the former Oxford Boys' High School building in George Street. The university had spread out with many new departments and offices spread out much further up the Banbury and Woodstock, Cowley,  Iffley and Headington Roads. And there was no longer the opportunity to examine sixteenth and seventeenth-century documents in Duke Humfrey. That had to be done in the splendid Weston Library which is as good and modern a repository as any in the United Kingdom. I did bump into Blair Worden in the entrance to the new Bodleian and saw Sir Keith Thomas in  the distance in one of the lanes leading up to the High Street. Best of all, I was able to walk in the Parks and Christ Church meadow a few times. It was a good and enjoyable few weeks in my old university.

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