Taking London’s metropolis as both setting and object, this program combines urban and environmental studies, theater, literature, and field experience to give students tools to knit together for themselves a first-hand perspective on one of the world’s most vibrant multicultural cities. From its history as Roman outpost and hub of the U.K.’s vast empire to its evolving post-colonial present in the Anthropocene, London offers the student traveler an incomparable text of human striving, meaning-making, and change.
The program will include:
- Seeing 2-3 theater performances each week;
- Exploring the city as a multilayered history and cultural geography and as a stage of human interaction;
- Cultivating first-hand knowledge of a particular street or neighborhood with its businesses, human constituents, and 24-hr. life cycle.
The seminar is open to students of any major or intellectual leaning. Students must have sophomore, junior, or senior-year status.
ENGL 281/381: London as City: Londinium to the Anthropocene (6 credits, with 300-level option for English majors)
Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises exploring cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?
Instructor: Peter Balaam
ENGL 282: London Theater (6 Credits)
This course offers a deep dive into the breadth and variety of productions that make London world-renowned for theater. We will see two to three productions per week, from classic to comic to avant-garde, across a wide array of venues, styles, and periods in London and in Stratford on an overnight excursion for the season’s Royal Shakespeare Company productions. Expert local instruction, light contextual readings, guest visits from actors and directors, in-class discussion, and debate will help students hone their skills for enjoying and interpreting this ancient and living art. Students keep a theater journal and write reviews of several plays.
Instructor: Jane Edwardes, former theater editor for the weekly magazine Time Out London
ENGL 279: Urban Field Studies
(6 credits, Arts Practice distro, S/CR/NC only)
Weekly excursions led by local faculty and an observational-drawing instructor will lead students to sites of urban interest across greater London. Light background and contextual readings, guided site-visits, introductory drawing instruction, group, and individual exploration make this something of a lab course, a practicum with the goal of training students in the necessary tools for registering the complex cultural narratives that have shaped and been shaped by this particular global metropolis.
Instructors: Dana Ross & Local Faculty
A scholar of 19th-century Anglo-American literature and culture, Peter Balaam has research interests in Romanticism, religion, the environmental humanities, visual art, and the Anthropocene. He teaches at Carleton in English and American Studies, including courses on Transcendentalism, the American novel, literary theory, female poets from Dickinson to Bishop, the Bible as Literature, Children’s Literature, and Walt Whitman’s New York City. This is his second London Program.
Students will stay in fully-equipped apartments in South Kensington and in small hotels and hostels while on overnight excursions.
Weekly group meetings throughout London and its environs, this program offers group excursions to Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and several days in Paris. An extended midterm break and unprogrammed weekends will allow additional time for individual travel.
Program dates roughly correspond to the Carleton academic term. Specific dates will be communicated to program participants.
All Carleton-sponsored 10-week off-campus study programs charge the Carleton comprehensive fee, which includes instruction, room and board, group excursions, public transportation, medical and evacuation insurance, travel assistance, and most cultural events.
Students are responsible for books and supplies, passports and visas (when required), transportation to and from the program sites, and personal expenses and travel during the seminar. Students will receive a program-specific Additional Cost Estimate at the time of acceptance.
Student financial aid is applicable as on campus. See the Off-Campus Studies website for further information on billing, financial aid, and scholarships.