Worcester College, Oxford in the context of Sir Thomas Cookes, 2nd Baronet

The position of Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology (designated the Professor of Comparative Philology 1868–82 and 1925–2003, and known as the Corpus Christi Professor of Comparative Philology 1882–1925) is a professorship in comparative philology at the University of Oxford. The professor's duties are "to lecture and give instruction in Indo-European and the history and comparative philology of the Indo-European languages."

The professorship was created for the German academic Max Müller in 1868. It was called the "Corpus Christi" Professorship because a commission in 1877, led by Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of Selborne, recommended that the richest colleges should help the university by providing funds for chairs. Corpus Christi College was reluctant – partly because of the cost involved at a time when the college's income was affected by an agricultural recession, but also because the fellows of the college feared that they would be outvoted by professors. Although the chair was renamed as the Corpus Christi professorship in 1882 on the basis that provision had been made to endow the chair out of the college's revenues, the college never provided sufficient funds to establish a full endowment for the chair, and its obligation to do so (to the college's relief) was removed in 1925. The chair was renamed in 2003 after Professor A. Richard Diebold Jr., to mark his donation to the university to support the chair. It is now associated with a fellowship of Worcester College, although Anna Morpurgo Davies (appointed in 1971) was a fellow of Somerville College instead because at that time Worcester did not have women fellows.

Jericho is a historic suburb of the English city of Oxford. It consists of the streets bounded by the Oxford Canal, Worcester College, Walton Street and Walton Well Road. Located outside the old city wall, it was originally a place for travellers to rest if they had reached the city after the gates had closed. The name Jericho may have been adopted to signify this 'remote place' outside the wall. As of February 2021, the population of the Jericho and Osney wards was 6,995.

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate (born 26 June 1958) is a British academic, biographer, literary critic, broadcaster, and scholar, known for his work on Shakespeare, Romanticism, and ecocriticism. He is currently Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities and Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, where he served as Provost from 2011 to 2019.

From 2017 to 2019 he was also Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. Bate was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He has authored major biographies of the poets John Clare, Ted Hughes, and William Wordsworth, as well as influential works on Shakespeare. He has written and presented extensively for BBC radio, and wrote the one-man play Being Shakespeare for actor Simon Callow.

Sir John Arthur Ransome Marriott (17 August 1859 – 6 June 1945) was a British educationist, historian, and Conservative member of parliament (MP).

Marriott taught modern history at the University of Oxford from 1884 to 1920. He was an Honorary fellow, formerly fellow, lecturer and tutor in modern History, of Worcester College, Oxford. He was the Conservative MP for Oxford from 1917 to 1922, and for York from 1923 to 1929. After defeat in 1929, he retired from active politics.