Oberlin-in-London Program
Fall 2026 London Program
Curriculum
The 2026 London program will be focused on the arts in Britain, particularly music and literature. The program will be led by Charles McGuire (Musicology) and Jennifer Bryan (English); students will take either Professor Bryan's Shakespeare course or Professor McGuire's British Music course. In addition, all students will take a required, team-taught course on the medieval or "gothic" revivals of the nineteenth century, which happened across the arts and transformed the British sense of identity. What do these movements tell us about the creative uses of the past? About artistic innovation and re-invention? The course will be taught largely on-site at various locations in and around London, and will explore a broad range of visual art, architecture, literature, music, and popular culture.
Faculty
Jennifer Bryan, English
London is one of my favorite places. Professor McGuire and I taught the London Program together back in 2011, and I can't wait to do it again. I love just being in the city—the huge parks, the river walks, the endlessly different neighborhoods, the food, the energy, all the strange and wonderful things you find everywhere, just poking around—but of course I'm particularly excited about the fantastic resources it offers for experiencing and studying the arts. While I am centered in literature and Professor McGuire is centered in music, we are both broadly interested in culture and history, and in all the ways that people create meaning and pleasure in the world around them. One of the things I like about our "Gothic revivals" course is that we do art, architecture, and even interior design in addition to music and literature—a whole cross-section of nineteenth-century artistic production, seen in relation to the social and political concerns of the times (and they were very interesting times). I also like the way that this interdisciplinary approach gets us out into the city, where we are always discovering things we didn't plan for. And a Shakespeare course in London? That's just an English-major/theater-lover's dream come true. London theater is such a special experience, and the London area offers endless resources to enrich our study of the plays.
Charles McGuire, Musicology
Like Professor Bryan, I consider London one of my favorite places. After being bedazzled on a trip to the UK when I was a student at Oberlin, I picked my graduate research topic partly in order to spend as much time as possible in London! Over the years, I have gotten to know London and the surrounding area intimately through walks in the city and the near countryside, hearing concerts and seeing theatre (sometimes in very surprising spaces), and keeping my eyes open for the vestiges of the past and the hope for the future that is crammed into nearly every corner of this great city. What I love about the courses we will teach is how much of London – and how much of British culture – they cover. We will not sit still in “Gothic Revivals”: we will wander through parts of the city, known and less known, seeing how its very fabric used the Gothic as a way to project power and venerability in a time of great societal change and upheaval. In “Crossroads,” we will see some of the best music London has to offer, from many genres, in some of the most beautiful concert halls and churches in the world – thus showing how the city has always been an international hub for what is traditional, and what is fashionable, and how music and the arts have been used to create and question ideas of British identity.