Talk: Equal Citizenship of the Mind with Joanna Miller

Equal Citizenship of the Mind with Joanna Miller

7pm-8pm, Thursday 4th September 2025

This talk explores women’s fight for equality at Oxford, from the establishment of the first colleges in the 1880s, to 1920 when women were finally accepted as fully fledged members of the university.

In writing her novel, The Eights, writer and poet Joanna Miller gained some fascinating insights into the lives of the first women at Oxford, and the role that suffrage and World War One played in changing male attitudes.

From overbearing chaperones, to climbing in windows and finding loopholes to beat the men at rowing, the lives of the first women at Oxford were certainly never dull!

Joanna Miller is a writer from Hertfordshire whose debut novel The Eights will be published by Fig Tree Penguin (UK) and Putnam Books (US) in March 2025. The novel tells the story of four women from different backgrounds who are amongst the first to matriculate at Oxford University in the shadow of the First World War. 

Joanna’s work explores themes around female friendship, feminism and suffrage and is inspired by museums and local history. Joanna works part-time as a bookseller and has just completed an Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford. She is also graduate of Faber Academy and Escalator, the National Centre for Writing’s talent development scheme.

Prior to that, Joanna established an award-winning poetry gift business and worked as an English teacher and literacy adviser. Her rhyming verse has been filmed twice by the BBC, and in 2015 she won The Poetry Prize, run by Bloomsbury Publishing and The National Literacy Trust.

Picture by Lucy Noble Photography.