in the other direction, NYU's faculty seems to be on the rise (or so they say). they've increased their faculty significantly over the past few years, poaching Peter Nicholls (from Sussex), Lisa Gitelman (from Harvard), Thomas Augst (from University of Minnesota) among a few others.
oh then by all means, play on! i was trying to give you a heads-up. another friend of mine went to ox and loved their approach, i just made an inference from some of your other applications that seemed to be more theory-heavy schools (hopkins, brown, nyu).
did you apply straight to the phd at ox, or mlitt->phd? i might be able to offer some advice having just come out of that system, should you need any.
grimwig, i'm not sure what your research interests are, but if you're literary-theoretically-inclined at all i'd caution you to stay away from ox. a member of my cohort at cambridge that had done his ugrad at ox had a hard time getting up to speed because many ox professors still considers authorial intention to be a key element of literary study, whereas it has been all but discarded at a lot of other schools.
edit - columbia and brown also have european campuses (columbia's campus in paris is supposed to be spectacular)
a lot of this right now. started off with an acceptance building me up, followed by five very unexpected rejections, now thinking of maybe just sticking to business management consulting.