Program Academics

Faculty: Dr. Bridgham and Dr. Stretter

“My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become a Londoner.”

— Ben Aaronovitch, Moon over Soho

We invite students in DWC 202: Global London to become Londoners by developing a deep and broad understanding of the city in relationship to the rest of the world. By using the city itself as its “primary text,” this course will examine London as a place of many contradictions: the Roman imperial outpost that later became the imperial superpower on which the sun never set; the site of superior technological and financial innovation that houses and conceals a substantial underclass;  the indomitable and resilient wartime homefront that banded together as one to oppose and withstand the attacks of fascism from without and within; and the culturally diverse and vibrant – though potentially fragmented – microcosm of its nation that exists today. Each of these topics will form a unit of our course, which will approach London from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, politics, literature, drama in performance, cultural geography, the fine arts, diaspora studies, and more.

The colloquium regularly takes students out into the city, with visits to such places as:

• The British Museum
• The Tower of London and Tower Bridge
• The Docklands and Canary Wharf
• The London Museum (newly reopened after a £450 million renovation)
• Windrush Square and the Black Cultural Archives, Brixton
• The Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum (Greenwich)
• Brick Lane (East London, heart of the south Asian immigrant community)
• Whitechapel (made infamous by Jack the Ripper)
• The Imperial War Museum

Students will also travel beyond London:

• day trips to the English town of Bath,the site of popular spas dating back to Roman times, and to the renowned university town of Oxford
• a Spring Break trip to Rome, Italy. The Roman Empire literally laid the foundation for the city of London, and like the London we know today, Rome was – or imagined itself to be – a cosmopolitan city where cultures met and shared ideas. In preparation for “Rome Week,” we will visit the ruins of the Roman amphitheater in London’s Guildhall and the ruins of the Roman city wall, as well as tour exhibits on Roman London at the newly re-opened London Museum.
• a weekend trip to Dublin, Ireland, where we will explore the complicated history of England and Ireland before and during the British Empire, and since the foundation of the Republic of Ireland in 1949.

Classes do not meet on Fridays, encouraging students to explore London and its surroundings further on their own. Students also can use the long weekends for a quick trip to continental Europe. Cities such as Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Barcelona are all within easy reach.

Faculty: Dr. Bridgham

This course:

• fulfills the Oral Proficiency core requirement
• is designed for students from any major
• counts as a literature elective for English majors/minors or a free elective for anyone

What does it mean to be English? How is Englishness different from Britishness? Answers to these questions are slippery at best, shifting over time, conceived differently depending on who is responding, skewed by contiguous concepts such as patriotism, tradition, race and ethnicity, religion, etc.  Such different versions of a nation can lead to a crisis of national identity – a need to evaluate and forever re-evaluate the nation’s place in the world, and the individual’s place in the nation.  One point of consistency, though, is that much of our understanding of a nation comes from its cultural representations of itself – that is, through its fictional versions of reality.

This course will examine England through its self-representation in novels and movies from the 19^th through 21^st centuries.  While relevant historical events will be a crucial part of our study, the progression of the course will not be strictly chronological.  Rather, the course will be organized around a variety of perspectives on the nation which include England’s relationship to its own history, to political and military crises, and to the changing global environment.  Along the way, we’ll take a virtual tour of the UK, studying the different regions, cultures (and subcultures) that comprise the nation.