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ASE Summer Schools in Bath
June 7 - July 13, 2025
Limited places are available on each course to preserve the small, interactive class experience, and places will be allocated to suitably qualified applicants on a first-come-first-served basis.
The deadline for initial applications is February 15, 2025.
Victorian Modernism and the History of Sexuality
Fin de siècle anxieties surrounding sexuality are the focus of this literature-based course in which British novels are presented as culturally engaged responses to social, political, and economic tensions.
Bath, Britain and the Black Atlantic
This course examines the history of British involvement in the trade of enslaved Africans and the writing of some of the people most profoundly touched by that trade.
Jane Austen in Bath
Austen reputedly fainted on hearing that her family would move to Bath in 1801. Scholars have argued about her reaction: was it joy or horror?
Shakespeare, Magic and the Supernatural
Shakespeare’s plays are positively filled with supernatural happenings and otherworldly beings: faeries, ghosts, sorcerers, and witches; mythological deities; efficacious curses; enchanted handkerchiefs; uncanny oracles; living statues; even resurrected mummies. How should we understand the kinds of magical power represented in these plays?
Writing Creative Nonfiction: Shaping Experience and the British Essay
Virginia Woolf describes the essay as a transformative literary form: ‘you can say in this shape,’ Woolf writes, ‘what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other.’ In this course, students will explore and amplify their own transformative personal experiences of living and studying abroad by an in-depth reading of British essayists, and through practical experimentation with the various forms these writers used.
Gods, Heroes, and Monsters in Western Mythologies
Mythology, with its various interactions among gods, mortals, and monsters, often expresses a culture’s most fundamental beliefs about the world and what it means to be human. This course examines several different mythological systems and asks how the cultures that developed these systems constructed the world, particularly as they wrestled with man’s place in it, resting as it does, uncomfortably, somewhere between the realms of the immortal and the bestial or monstrous. Students will undertake close readings (in English) and participate in discussions of extensive selections from the following epics:
Gilgamesh (Mesopotamian), the Iliad and Odyssey (Greek), the Táin (Irish), Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon), and the Poetic Edda (Norse).
The Importance of Reading Oscar
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.
London Calling: Transnational Narratives of Migration and Belonging
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.
Legends of the Round Table
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.
Queer Victorians
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.
Ecstatic Ekphrastics: Poems Alongside Visual Art
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!
Something Completely Different: UK Film & TV Comedy
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.
Trans-Atlantic Nature: Literature and the Environment in England and the United States
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’.
Writing the Weird
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.