Oscar Wilde was the most (in)famous writer of the first half of the 1890s until, at the pinnacle of his success, he was convicted of and imprisoned for “gross indecency.” He died in exile only a few years after his release from prison.

From a multigenerational novel in verse to a queer national romcom, dive into this exploration of British identities through a genre-bending study of some of the most exciting immigrant/ BIPOC/queer British novelists, filmmakers and poets writing today: Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, Kamila Shamsie, Bernadine Evaristo, Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar, and Monica Ali.

Ready for a quest? In this course, we will study the stories of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table, from their mediaeval origins to contemporary satires and critiques.

Starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s early masterpiece The 39 Steps (1935), this course will follow the UK’s transformation from a confident imperial superpower in the 1930s to the globalised, post-Brexit present and analyse how film and TV have represented the dramatic political, social, and personal changes that came with it.

Education Summer School Students will have a daily placement at a local primary school, allowing the simultaneous development of education theory and practice.

From Dame Maggie Smith to Naomie Harris, from Sir Ian McKellen to Idris Elba and Andrew Scott, British actors are world-renowned for their versatility and skill. But what does it mean to learn to act, British style?

What kinds of stories are etched into the physical spaces that surround us? How do the plaques, murals and monuments in our communities shape what can be learned, understood, and remembered? Can we view these places as readable and writable, and ourselves as literate agents responsible for helping to craft the stories of home.

Though largely unrecognised as such at the time, the Victorian period was full of writers addressing what we now consider themes of ‘queer’ sexuality and gender. Literature by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde emphasize kinship, desire, matrimony, and domesticity, acting as a rich resource for analyses of same-sex desire, gendered and sexual subjectivities, and closeting and homophobia.

We will explore the power, allure, contradiction, and mystery of this ancient approach to writing poetry. We will read everything from classics of ekphrasis by John Keats and WH Auden to recent work by contemporary poets like Sarah Howe and Diane Seuss. We will take inspiration from these writers to create our own ekphrastic poems in response to the beautiful works of art—real and imagined—that we will explore together in Bath and beyond!

The course will involve readings and regular viewings of a rich range of UK comedy, fostering debate on what cultural, historical, and social factors have contributed to the UK comedic sensibility and tracing how UK comedy exploded across the globe. We will ask what makes people laugh, and probe the nature of humour itself: the role it plays in society, media, and government; and what makes it so essential to the human experience.

In this course, we will first consider how numerous influential British authors turned to nature to express their thoughts on religion, imagination, and social order. We will then cross the Atlantic to see how nature writing was cultivated in the ‘New World’, analysing how race and gender inform our perceptions of nature, before returning to England to explore the impact of climate change and the burgeoning sub-genre of ‘cli-fi’.

We will write weird stories: transgressive stories that defy genre convention; stories that navigate the slipstream between horror, fantasy, science fiction and ‘literature’; stories that might contain monsters or ghosts, or at the very least threaten our sense of what is real.

Realism, Naturalism, Romanticism, Total Theatre, Socialist and Feminist Drama: there have been numerous developments in British Theatre since William Shakespeare and the Renaissance.