A Historical Adventure at the University of Oxford

Fortnight in Oxford 

May 31 – June 13, 2026

Our traditional two-week program in Oxford allows you to experience the University at the end of Trinity Term. Applicants can select from two seminars:

History/Politics Seminar: 

Roman Britain: History and Archaeology, Dr. Steve Kershaw

The influence of the ancient Romans on modern British society is enormous and unique. This course will explore the fascinating events and the extraordinary cultural and artistic achievements of the Romans in Britain, and the Britons under Roman control via a range of topics pertinent to history, archaeology, and material culture.

The fascinating events and the extraordinary cultural and artistic achievements under scrutiny will include: the nature of our archaeological evidence; Roman knowledge of Britain; Julius Caesar’s expeditions; the ‘between the wars’ period; the Claudian invasion; Boudicca’s revolt; Vvillas; slaves; issues of identity and ethnicity; Tacitus’ Agricola; Hadrian’s Wall; and the end of Roman involvement in Britannia. Numerous intriguing human issues will be confronted as we follow the process of the creation of a Roman province, explore the challenges faced by both the Romans and the natives, examine the physical and mental environment in which they spent their lives, assess their triumphs and mistakes, and evaluate the solutions they attempted.

Students will be invited to analyze and reflect on the controversies and dilemmas posed by the written and material evidence: who were these people? Why (or) did they succeed? And why (or) did they fail?

Literature/Culture Seminar: 

The Political Shakespeare, Dr. Angus McFadzean

Shakespeare wasn’t just an entertainer, writing romantic comedies and epic tragedies. His plays reflect the turbulent changes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, both of which he was close to and knew through nobles and patrons. The 1570s and 80s saw the development of the new genre of ‘history play’, patriotic theatre that propagandized for the Elizabethan state. Shakespeare took this genre and developed it into a major artistic achievement: his line of history plays from Richard II to Henry VI, covering the War of the Roses and other key moments in English history. At the same time, educated courtiers in the Elizabethan court looked back to the stories of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire to understand England’s prominence in the world. In response, Shakespeare developed his own line of Roman stories: from his poem The Rape of Lucrece about the founding of the Republic, to his late theatrical masterpiece Coriolanus about a Rome in turmoil from the mob. 

The first week will focus on Elizabeth’s court. The 1590s and 1600s, the time of Shakespeare’s greatest prominence, were challenging for the monarchy. The second week will focus on James’s court. With his ascent to the throne in 1603, the question of succession was settled and James proved to be a good king. However, his court was quite different to Elizabeth’s and Shakespeare adapted his drama to please a monarch with different tastes. Through texts by Shakespeare, we will develop a rounded sense of Shakespeare’s political plays and assess how they reflect contemporary politics today.

---

Sennight in Oxford

June 14-20, 2026

Our one-week program in Oxford offers you a concentrated experience in Oxford that features all the highlights. One seminar will be offered:

Murder Most British: Crime and Detection in Victorian Fiction, Dr. Emma Plaskitt

Though the mention of Victorian detective fiction instantly brings to mind an image of Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker clad detective, in fact, Sherlock Holmes followed in the investigative footsteps of many earlier sleuths, both male and female, serious and humorous, amateur and professional. Between 1800 and 1900, roughly 6,000 pieces of crime fiction were published in English and were devoured by an enthralled audience of what Thomas de Quincey satirically called “Murder-Fanciers”.

Today, crime and detective fiction remains a popular staple in literature, film, and television. In this course we trace the development of the genre to discover why it was and remains so fascinating, especially when connected with that most heinous of crimes —murder. We will look at its connection to the most infamous crimes of the nineteenth century, including the1860 Constance Kent case, and the 1888 Jack the Ripper killings that caused panic and terror in London’s Whitechapel district and beyond.

As part of our investigation, we will study the origins of crime and detective literature and its relation to other transgressive subgenres of fiction: the penny dreadful, the gothic novel, and the novel of sensation.  How did the Victorian middle classes view the police and what was their response to crime and criminality? Above all, why were they so fascinated by crime and detective fiction, particularly those stories dealing with murder, and why do we continue to be so?  

Sceptr’d Isle: England 1550 – 1650

---

Tutor: Dr Alan Crosby

Dr Alan Crosby is one of Britain’s best-known local and regional historians. He has taught highly-successful courses for the Oxford University Summer School for Adults (OUSSA) in most years since 2000, and for 25 years has been the editor of The Local Historian, the national journal devoted to the subject. Since the early 1990s Alan has led many historical study tours in Britain and Ireland and also to France, Italy, Hungary and Poland. He has published over 40 books and numerous papers, has a doctorate from the University of Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

---

Course Outline

Week 1: The English nation 1550-1650

• Queens, kings and dynasties: royal government and its problems
• The voice of the people? Parliament and its growing power
• The Church of England, its constitutional place and its growing divisions
• The old faith: Catholicism, the fight to survive and the Armada crisis
• The build-up to civil war and the course of the war itself
• Foreshadowing the empire: overseas trade and colonisation
• Generating wealth: the English economy and its expansion
• The Old Poor Law: helping the underclass and stabilising society
• Shrinking the world: travelling in Tudor and Stuart England
• Mapping the nation and discovering their world

Week 2: The people and their achievement 1550-1650

• Counting heads: the people of England 1550-1650
• Health and well-being: plague, epidemic and famine
• Town and country 1550-1650
• The London phenomenon: a world city in the making
• Architecture and style under Queen Elizabeth I and King James I
• Domesticity and lifestyles: houses and their contents
• Food, drink, and cooking
• The flowering of English music
• Art and design in Tudor and Stuart England
• Shakespeare’s world: summing up and overview

During the program, we expect to visit Stratford-upon-Avon and to take a field to trip to explore examples of Elizabethan/Jacobean houses.

---

Background Reading

• Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Daily Life in Stuart England (Greenwood, 2007)
• Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (Penguin, 2021)
• Roy Strong, The Elizabethan Image An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558-1603 (Yale UP, 2019)
• Derek Wilson, Elizabethan Society: High and Low Life, 1558-1603 (Robinson, 2014)
• Blair Worden, Stuart England (Phaidon, 1986)
• Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2010)

---

Shakespeare in Love: Discovering the Romantic Bard

Everyone thinks they know Shakespeare, the most famous writer in the world. But who was he really? What energised him? What was he passionate about? This course promises to reveal a new side to the famous poet by looking at his work through the theme of love.

In the first week, we will address the theme of comic love. We will trace the historical origins of love and how it became a dominant theme in Shakespeare’s time. Following the style of Plautus and Terence, Shakespeare’s ‘romantic comedies’ delight in depicting lovers in curious entanglements. As You Like It follows Rosalind and Orlando’s struggles to woo each other while she is disguised as a boy Ganymede. Meanwhile in Twelfth Night, Viola woos the Duke in the guise of a pageboy, while her twin brother Sebastian is wooed by Olivia. For comic Shakespeare, love is mercurial and metamorphic and absurdly complex. Jealous rivals, parental obstacles, changed identities, overhearing scenes, and deceptive letters, all lead to a happy ending in marriage (sort of).

In the second week, we will address tragic passion. Love moves people to violence and dying for love is often offered as the most complete expression of love. The sonnets offer a tragic love triangle of hopeless despair that reveals Shakespeare at his most raw and vulnerable. Romeo and Juliet offer the quintessential story of doomed youthful love, against the background of feuding families and social conflict. Othello meanwhile reveals male fears of cuckoldry, the consequences of jealousy and humiliation, and the assumed right of bloody revenge.

We may not know much about Shakespeare the man, but by following his passions through the plays, we can obtain a clearer vision of what moved and obsessed Shakespeare the writer. 

---

Tutor: Dr Angus McFadzean

---

Course Outline

• Monday – Shakespeare and Love: An Introduction
• Tuesday – As You Like It
• Wednesday – As You Like It
• Thursday – Twelfth Night
• Friday – Twelfth Night

• Monday – The Sonnets
• Tuesday – Romeo and Juliet
• Wednesday – Romeo and Juliet
• Thursday – Othello
• Friday – Othello

---

Set Texts

Reading widely in Shakespeare is encouraged and we may touch on other plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that End’s Well, and others.

• Romeo and Juliet (Oxford World Classics)
• Othello (Oxford World Classics)
• As You Like It (Oxford World Classics)
• Twelfth Night (Oxford World Classics)
• The Sonnets (Oxford University Classics)

---

Teaching Methods

• Short lectures/Presentations
• Physical handouts
• Seminars/group discussions
• Video recordings
• Audio recordings

---

The Brontë Sisters: Lives, Literature, Legend

This course examines the short lives, acclaimed novels, and enduring legend of three Victorian sisters: Charlotte (1816–56), Emily (1818–48), and Anne Brontë (1820–49). Before we focus on Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1837), and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), participants will be introduced to the Victorian period with its notions of “separate spheres” for men and women and the “Angel in the House” ideal of femininity. In their re-invention of the Gothic romance, the Brontës produce pioneering, radical novels that challenged conventional ideas on gender and religion as well as featuring other Victorian female archetypes: the fallen woman, the governess, and the madwoman. We will examine the novels in detail, placing them in biographical and historical context, while assessing just what makes them so enduring. Is it down to the literary merit of the novels themselves? Or endless fascination with so-called Brontë myth, which begins with anonymous publication and is firmly established with the controversial biography of Charlotte written by friend and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell? Charlotte’s own attempts to safeguard and control the posthumous reputations of her sisters and a wealth of television and cinematic adaptations of the novels have only added to their mystique, while hundreds of admirers continuing to make pilgrimages to Haworth village and the Brontë parsonage to this day. What does our ongoing fascination with these sisters and their writing tell us about them, and about ourselves?

---

Tutor: Dr Emma Plaskitt

Emma Plaskitt is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on gender and reputation in fiction by eighteenth-century novelists Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney. Since 1994 she has taught English literature 1640–1901 for various Oxford colleges and OUDCE programmes MSSU, Berkeley, MSU, and Duke/UNC. She has worked for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where she was responsible for writing many articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers and is a Tutor and Lecturer in English Literature for Study Abroad Programme, SCIO in Oxford and for Stanford University in Oxford.  Dr Plaskitt taught the hugely successful Jane Austen seminar for the 2024 Sennight in Oxford.

---

Course Outline

Monday
Introduction to the Victorian Era and the social, economic, and political position of women to place the Brontës’ lives and writing in context. Discussion of their father Patrick and ne’er do well brother, Branwell, their at times tragic lives, and how their own experiences translate in their novels. Their determination to publish, doing so under androgynous pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell) to avoid prejudiced reviews. Critical response to the novels and their revolutionary nature. Examination of the Yorkshire landscape that was so pivotal in their creation of unforgettable plot, scenes, and characterisation.

Tuesday
Jane Eyre: its pioneering nature, unusual and original heroine, narrative innovation, and treatment of female archetypes; also, its problematic elements, including the autobiographical elements, treatment of race, and what has been termed an “excruciating” conclusion.

Wednesday
Jane Eyre: continued. Wuthering Heights: a novel that baffled and horrified Victorian readers and reviewers, while they noted its power and interest. Emily’s literary influences that lead to the creation of monster-hero Heathcliff. Its influence in shaping the hero-villain for decades to come.

Thursday
Wuthering Heights: continued.

Friday
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which shocked Victorian readers and reviewers as it featured a virtuous woman who nonetheless leaves her drunken husband and takes their son with her —what amounted to property theft in the period. Original, bold, and loaded with social commentary, it has been overshadowed by the famous novels of Anne’s sisters and even Charlotte attempted to apologise for its overly radical nature, calling it “a mistake”. We will analyse the novel to assess the validity of these claims. Conclusions and consideration of the so-called Brontë Myth as well as the enduring Brontë legend.

---

Half-day Field Trip

Destination
To place the novels in the context of gothic fiction, a visit to Strawberry Hill House and Garden: eighteenth-century gothic revival villa and home to the writer of the first gothic ‘romance’, Horace Walpole.

Excursion rating
Moderate: standing while viewing art in a stately home, walking through the galleries and rooms, going up stairs, etc.

---

Required Reading

Any edition is fine to use. These are easily available or free to read online. As this is a literature course, the below readings are required. It is preferred, but not essential, to bring books to class.

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

---

Recommended Film/Television Adaptions

(Not necessary but interesting to watch available/accessible. We will be watching relevant clips in class.)

• To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters (2016 BBC film starring Finn Atkins et. al.)
• Jane Eyre (2006 BBC series starring Ruth Wilson)
• Jane Eyre (2011 film starring Mia Wasikowska)
• Wuthering Heights (1939 film starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier)
• Wuthering Heights (1998 television series starring Robert Cavanah and Orla Brady
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996 TV Mini Series 1996 starring Tara Fitzgerald)

---

Teaching Methods

The teaching methods used during this course will include:

• Short lectures/Presentations
• Physical handouts
• Seminars/group discussions
• Video recordings
• Field Trip