UT English - Off-Campus

... at Oxford

The U.T. Department of English has sponsored a summer program in Oxford since 1984 for students to enjoy life and literature at the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Program director Elizabeth Cullingford explains the importance of programs like this one for students: “It opens minds, touches hearts, and encourages cultural and intellectual comparisons. We want students to love travel, not tourism, because travel shatters insularity. And reading great books in the context of the places they were written, set, or produced is a thrill like no other.”

This year’s Oxford Shakespeare course was taught by the original founder of the program, Alan Friedman. Students saw Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace) and three other plays (Hamlet, As You Like It, Othello) staged at the reconstruction of the Globe Theater in London. The summer featured its first course on author Zadie Smith, including tours of places in Smith’s texts and discussions of race, gender, and class in Britain. Additionally, Professor Minou Arjomand taught a course on War and Literature that included Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh, among others. Students visited Lawrence’s birthplace, Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, and London’s Tate Gallery for an exhibition of art in the aftermath of WWI.

... at Winedale

Shakespeare at Winedale is a program dedicated to exploring Shakespeare’s living art: rich and complex texts activated by play. Established in 1970, the group has grown into a year-round program reaching students from a diverse array of backgrounds. At the end of April, under program director James Loehlin, the spring class staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of a course on “Metatheatrical Shakespeare.” Students in the summer program dedicate two months to the bard, studying and performing three plays in a 19th-century barn-turned-theatre in the Texas countryside. This year’s summer season included four plays performed by students: Love’s Labour’s Lost, a delightful early comedy; Julius Caesar, a political tragedy; and All’s Well That Ends Well, a sophisticated romantic problem play. Students also performed, for the first time, Arden of Faversham. This darkly funny crime drama has been included in the New Oxford

Shakespeare as an early work written with an unknown collaborator. Performances ran July 19-August 12 at the Winedale Historical Complex near Round Top, TX.