Program Highlights
Program Dates
June 21 – July 25, 2025
Faculty Director
Dr. Graham Culbertson, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Dr. Culbertson has been exploring the connections between philosophy and pop culture since his dissertation on the connections between social progressivism, culture, and literature. He currently focuses his research and public humanities work at the expression of political philosophy in games and fantasy literature. He became particularly interested in explorations of British literary figures and political movements – from the medievalisms of J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris to radicalism in the English Revolution – through his current work on his academic podcast, Everyday Anarchism.
Program Highlights
Although the sun has set on the British empire, fantasy versions of Britain continue to dominate our imagination, with series such as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Discworld, and Harry Potter all selling more than 100 million books worldwide. This course will look at exemplars for each of these four series, studying them both as fantastical tales and as products of British history. We will pay particular attention to the way that imperial conflict, resistance, and revolution shaped these fantasy narratives during the late- and post-imperial periods of British history.
As a residential course spending three weeks in London and three weeks in Oxford, students will have the opportunity to visit many of the locations where these fantasy narratives were composed, including the famous pubs where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien shared their work with colleagues. We will also visit the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Oxford Bodleian library, and other cultural sites to learn about British history and Anglo-Saxon mythology and see how they influenced British fantasy.
London and Oxford in particular have also been used as filming locations, either as fictionalized versions of themselves or as stand-ins for fictional places (Oxford University standing in for Hogwarts, for example). Using Umberto Eco’s concept of “hyperreality” as a guide, we will encounter the “real” places that became the Shire and Ankh-Morpork, and compare them to their fictional counterparts. In course assignments, students will interrogate what is lost and what is gained when fictional places subsume real ones in the global imagination, and how the messy realities of empire and revolution become hyperreal stories of good vs. evil. This work on hyperreality will culminate in a visit to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London: The Making of Harry Potter, to see a real place that is based on the fictional Hogwarts that is based on the real Oxford.
