Main Summer School

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.

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?

This course explores the life cycle of democratic systems through case studies of the two countries, examining in depth the birth and growth of democracy in each in order to understand contemporary political trends. From this foundation, we will look closely at debates about the state of democracy around the world, and consider current arguments about global democratic resilience and decline. Our aim will be to reach a better understanding of the term ‘democracy’, of democratic systems and the institutions - legislative, judicial, executive, and electoral - that make them up. Throughout, students will hone their analytical and communication skills through a mix of classroom discussion, varied reading tasks, experiential learning and written assignments.

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. 

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: