Christ Church College Oxford
Christ Church College Oxford

Christ Church Oxford is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. The college is associated with Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, which serves as the college chapel and whose dean is ex officio the college head.

Like its sister college, Trinity College, Cambridge, it was traditionally considered the most aristocratic college of its university. It is the second wealthiest Oxford college by financial endowment (after St John’s) with an endowment of £436m as of 2015.

Christ Church has produced thirteen British prime ministers, more than any other Oxbridge college.

The college was the setting for parts of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, as well as a small part of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. More recently it has been used in the filming of the movies of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and also the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights (the film bearing the title of the American edition of the book, The Golden Compass). Distinctive features of the college’s architecture have been used as models by a number of other academic institutions, including the National University of Ireland, Galway, which reproduces Tom Quad. The University of Chicago and Cornell University both have reproductions of Christ Church’s dining hall (in the forms of Hutchinson Hall and the dining hall of Risley Residential College, respectively). ChristChurch Cathedral in New Zealand, after which the City of Christchurch is named, is itself named after Christ Church, Oxford. Stained glass windows in the cathedral and other buildings are by the Pre-Raphaelite William Morris group with designs by Edward Burne-Jones.

Christ Church is also partly responsible for the creation of University College Reading, which later gained its own Royal Charter and became the University of Reading.

The first female undergraduates matriculated at Christ Church in 1980.