This course will explore the history of British art's engagement with the Islamic world bordering the Mediterranean, in particular the territories under Ottoman rule, providing a comprehensive investigation of different genres of art, such as landscape, domestic scenes, portraits and history painting, how these genres adapted as artists began to travel in greater numbers from the 1830s, and how the images they created formed part of a larger history of Western imaginative, political, and colonial involvement with the region. Themes covered include travel and the associated adoption of Oriental costume by British visitors, the influence of the traditions of Islamic art, British artists’ recreations of the harem, the visual power of both myths of the Orient and the experienced reality, and the lure of Palestine, the “Holy Land”. Featuring British artists from the late eighteenth century to the end of World War I, including William Holman Hunt, Richard Dadd, John Frederick Lewis, David Roberts, Frederick Leighton and Stanley Spencer, this course will immerse the students in the role of the visual arts in the complex history and shared legacy of Britain and the Middle East.
 

This course offers a survey of Scottish literature over the last two centuries and lays a particular emphasis on the ways in which Scottish writers have contributed both positively and negatively to contemporary ideas of Scottish national identity. The course begins with a study of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, two of the world's most popular and influential writers in the nineteenth-century, and examines in particular the way their work contributes to a Romantic idea of Scotland as a country of sublime natural beauty and a wise, rooted rural folk. We then examine the way such ideas are developed, and sometimes questioned, in the work of late nineteenth-century writers, among them Robert Louis Stevenson and J.M. Barrie, before moving to mid-twentieth-century writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Muriel Spark who uproot many of the assumptions of a sentimentalized Romantic Scotland. The course finishes by looking at recent Scottish writing which, as instanced in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, frequently portrays a complex modern nation troubled by its divisions between city and countryside and its uneasy relationship with the British state. The emphasis is on the study of literary representations of Scotland but the course also considers the way Scotland has been represented in film (Braveheart, Brave, Trainspotting), in cultural criticism and theory, and in popular cultural forms such as those associated with tourism. The course will be of interest to all those who want to learn more about the literature of one of the United Kingdom's constituent countries but also to students keen to explore the ways in which literature informs and questions the processes of nation-building and identity-formation in the colonial and postcolonial eras.

Shortly after Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, the theatrical world of London was revolutionized. The Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 smashed the duopoly power of the patent theatres Covent Garden and Drury Lane and the Victorian era thus saw a remarkable explosion in theatrical entertainments. Over what remained of the nineteenth century, the London stages saw a colourful and vibrant theatrical culture reflect the hopes, aspirations, and fears of a global empire. On this course we will look at a variety of dramatic pieces that are representative of Victorian mores. We will consider the rise of melodrama, mid-Victorian comedy, imperial drama, the Victorian “blockbuster”, and the elegant social comedy of the close of the century, masterfully epitomized by Oxford graduate Oscar Wilde.

Charles Dickens was perhaps the defining writer of the nineteenth century, but “Mr Popular Sentiment,” as he was parodied by Trollope, was also a dazzlingly original novelist. This course will look at three of the greatest novels, drawn from across his career, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. As well as looking closely at the novels themselves, the course will discuss Dickens’s critical reputation and also examine TV and cinema adaptations with a particular eye to the idea that his imagination was formed by the burgeoning popular culture of the nineteenth-century metropolis of London.

From the smart thoroughfares of the early nineteenth-century to the decadent and demonic city of the fin de siècle, this course examines the changing social, topographical, political and cultural shape of London throughout the Victorian era. The topics covered include: crime and punishment, theatre and music hall, the metropolis vs. the provinces, planning and the public realm, and civic identity. The class will visit various significant sites in London including: the British Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens, and, time permitting, a Victorian Music Hall.

British rule spread ideas of freedom and justice around the world. Dominated people took up these ideas in struggles for their own freedom. In this class, we will explore together the extent to which British ideas were reshaped by leaders in North America, Ireland, India, and Southern Africa. Particular attention will be paid to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, as well as the impact of the world wars on the trend toward decolonization.

An examination of Britain’s involvement in the First World War (1914-1918). This course will explore the reasons why Britain went to war, military strategy, the effects of the war on the home front, Britain’s role in the peace negotiations, as well as other topics. Attention will also be given to war literature and remembrance of the conflict.

Historian Niall Ferguson writes that "Once there was an Empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world's population, covered about the same proportion of the earth's land surface and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British Empire was the biggest Empire ever, bar none." The growth and development of this empire took place at the same time that liberal political ideas were taking hold in Britain itself: ideals of political equality, the right to vote, personal autonomy. How, then, did the Empire-builders understand their project? What were their motivations? And why, you may ask, should we care? The British Empire "fell" some fifty years ago. Yet it remains an important model of global governance from which we can learn much about our contemporary, globalized world, with both its benefits (increased wealth and integration, for example) and its costs (global inequality). This course begins by asking the question, What is imperialism? We will focus our survey of the British Empire on the following episodes: The growth of British involvement in India following their loss of the American colonies; the large migration of Britons abroad; the "scramble for Africa"; the rise in anti-imperial sentiment following the Boer War; and decolonization. Themes such as British identity, popular culture, gender roles, and post-colonial criticism will shape our study of the British Empire through primary sources, historical surveys, fiction, and film.

In 1800 the Act of Union was successfully put through the Irish and British parliaments. Ireland came under the direct control of Westminster, initiating another major phase in the centuries-old struggle for Irish independence. From the agitation of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stuart Parnell to the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence (1919-21), and the Irish Civil War (1922-23), Ireland was a bloody and fractured nation. Even the eventual emergence of the Republic of Ireland in 1949 did not salve colonial wounds, with the terrible conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s showing that troubles – or “The Troubles” – continue into the present. This course will examine how Irish writers (both from the Protestant and Catholic traditions) reflected the tensions and distresses of the British occupation. How were the core issues of religion, land, and rights/duties treated in the novels and short stories of the period? We will look at a variety of writers over the course and pay attention to the various literary modes deployed by writers such as the Gothic, the “Big House” novel, and modernism. Writers studied will include major figures such as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett but the course will also aim to introduce somewhat less well-known figures to participants.
 

The First World War was one of the first wars to be fought in the era of mass literacy but among the last to be fought before the advent of the broadcast media. This gave literature and the written word a particular power: servicemen and civilians looked to fiction and poetry in order to make sense of the unprecedented experiences of modern mechanized warfare. This course will explore the work of several of the great soldier poets, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon and prose recollections of the war like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, and will deal with popular poetry as well as literary verse. Seminars will engage in close reading of these works but will also consider contextual questions about the importance of literature in wartime: its relationship to national literary traditions, its status as political propaganda, and its significance in the rituals of mourning and memorialization.

Thomas Shippey has called Tolkien “the author of the [twentieth] century” – why? What makes his fantasy so original and rich? Pursuing this question, we examine the major fantasy writings of Tolkien by interweaving three strands of inquiry: Tolkien’s own theory of fantasy as expressed in “On Fairy-Stories”; the relation between this theory and Tolkien’s own background as an Anglo-Saxonist and philologist; and the use and significance of language – as style creates reality in fantasy. Important in all these processes are, of course, the literary backgrounds and sources of the fantasy and Tolkien’s own moral sensibility and his times.

1851-1951 was a century of exhibitions and world fairs, when Great Britain showcased its imperial triumphs and industrial achievements. Starting with Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 we will examine the different variations of ‘exhibition culture’ and its development over the century. Looking at regional displays, such as the Art-Treasures Exhibition in Manchester (1857) and the influence of New World Fairs, such as that of Chicago in 1933, we will conclude with the Festival of Britain, devised as a ‘tonic for the nation’ and held in London in 1951. We will analyse what exhibitions were intended to achieve, why they proved so successful, how they were represented, and the ways in which they were experienced. The module will draw heavily on contemporary accounts by those who planned these exhibitions, the journalists who reported them, and the visitors who experienced them. Many of the artefacts that were displayed can still be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, while the South Bank Centre and Crystal Palace Park provide evidence of exhibition architecture. We will have an excursion to London to see these sites.

In this course, we will examine together the material aspects of British imperialism. Class members will discuss the extent to which the spread of British dominion in the nineteenth century may be linked to plantation agriculture, breechloading rifles, tropical medicine, and mine engineering, among other industrial and technological developments in such far-flung places as the West Indies, India, and Southern Africa. The class will debate the extent to which technology influences the course of history while exploring the collection of Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum. The class will end with a consideration of the ways in which technology and geography shaped the origins and outcomes of the First World War, the time when the British Empire reached greatest and most overstretched extent.

No previous 160 years in the history of the human race has seen faster or more profound change than the years after 1830. Much of this has derived from a growing understanding of how natural forces operate and how they can be applied to the circumstances of life. This course will look at the leading scientific discoveries of the age - in evolutionary biology, electricity, atomic energy, and cosmology. It was the application of scientific principles to practical problems that led to the great inventions of the modern world: railways, modern medicine, genetics, photography, and radio astronomy. Science and invention do not exist in a vacuum, however, and this course will also examine how these changes influenced society, politics, religious beliefs, and the ways in which people actually lived. No previous background in science is necessary for this course, and there will be no mathematics.

In 2012 the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, celebrated the 60th anniversary of her accession, having been crowned sitting on the Coronation Chair of Edward I, dating from 1296 but harking back to King Edward the Confessor, who reigned before the Norman Conquest of 1066. All very traditional. But also in 2012 she appeared to accompany James Bond in parachuting into the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. She then watched a ballet celebrating the provision of universal healthcare through the National Health Service, established by Act of Parliament in 1948. Britain’s constitution is notoriously uncodified, and its politics highly complex and responsive to dramatic change since the Second World War. This course introduces students to the structure of British government and the practice of British politics in the modern era. We examine both the role of formal institutions of the state (Parliament, the monarchy, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service) and the influence of political parties, social movements, and the media. Topics addressed are of both historical and contemporary interest, and include constitutional reform, political ideologies, devolution within the United Kingdom, the relation between Britain and Europe, security and civil rights, and the politics of immigration, race, and multiculturalism.

Engaging the provocative thesis of Callum G. Brown in The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisatioin, 1800-2000, this seminar will explore both the secularization of culture and the transformation of religion in Britain over the past two centuries. A particular focus will be the recent diversification of religious expression in contemporary Britain and the implications this has both for traditional forms of religiosity and for secularization theory.

A study of some of Shakespeare’s plays, integrating discussion of the texts, visits to performances in Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, or London (the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), and subsequent discussion of the relationship between text and performance. The plays to be studied will be announced when theater programs are confirmed. The additional fee for this course includes tuition, travel to, and tickets for the additional performances attended.