NCSU at OXFORD UNIVERSITY
SUMMER Study Abroad PROGRAM
JUNE 27-JULY 24, 2010 (tentative)
Estimated Cost: $4000-$5000 range + airfare
Hello, potential Oxford travelers!
I (Wilton Barnhardt, Academic Director) have put this site together to answer some questions about the best program Study Abroad has going: the month in Oxford University, where you are taught by Oxford dons, live like Oxford students in one of Oxford's colleges, and check off a few GERs while you're at it. The smartest thing to do is to ask anyone who’s gone. They’re going to tell you it’s one of the most fun and rewarding programs around--it is, after all, the longest-running overseas program at NC State, going on 34 years. You’ll learn a lot from the Oxford dons who will teach you, you will become a true part of British life, you’ll enjoy the splendors of an English summer (when there is one, ask the survivors of the Rainfest of 2007), and know all about tea time, croquet, Marmite, Branston Pickle and brown sauce, Stilton cheese, BBC Radio One, English football (soccer), bitters and stouts, and--in order to survive--which way to look when you cross the street…
Oxford University is, well, a lot like NC State, believe it or not. You apply to a college to get in. The university provides exams, but it’s the famous medieval colleges, 30-some depending on how you count (i.e., Christ Church, St. John’s, Magdalen, Balliol, Trinity, etc.) who house and feed and tutor you, if you’re an incoming British student. We will be staying at Somerville College, the first woman’s college at Oxford, now co-ed. For those with the always-confusing map of Oxford before them, it’s at the north end of St. Giles (a massive street) and up the Woodstock Road. St. Giles is one of the widest thoroughfares in England and saw a lot of action during the centuries of religious infighting; the Martyr’s Memorial marks the spot where Queen Mary burned a few Protestant bishops at the stake and the plaza used to be the limits of the city gates, where Protestants, in turn, put Catholic martyrs’ heads on stakes for all to see. The religious disputation continued through the ages (John Wesley preached Methodism in Oxford, for example) and there was always some fuss about Tractarians, Dissenters, Cardinal Newman… The street is quiet now though it has several good pubs, including the overtouristed Eagle & Child, where C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien discussed religion too in their regular get-together, while working on their famous epic fantasies.
Somerville College (above) is designed like all the Oxford colleges—it has a Lodge (a fortified gate to keep the riffraff out—or in the middle ages, invading armies and rioting townspeople) which is maintained by porters. Inside the college are quads where professors and students live (yes, the profs often have rooms in the college next to their students). There is a Hall, a Library, a Chapel, classrooms, and several gardens. We will be in one of two residence areas, but both buildings are beautiful and newish by Oxford standards (Victorian-era). Everyone will have his own room, and you may be able to catch wifi internet access if you bring your laptop, though there's no guarantee with all the stone. There will be a designated computer room for us which will have printing facilities and the ability to get on the internet. (I encourage going "internet cold turkey"--there's too much to do to waste your time playing games or keeping up with the fascinations of Raleigh.) There are showers and bathtubs at end of the hall and kitchenettes with stove, refrigerator, tea- and coffee-making facilities, which will help cut down on your food costs some. Towels and linen, periodically laundered, will be provided. There are washers and dryers in a central building and fee cards you can purchase at the Lodge.
Aren’t the English, you ask, supposed to be among the world’s worst cooks? That stereotype is outdated, but I did.live four years in Oxford (I earned what is called an M.Phil., some-thing between a masters and a doctorate), and I recall that the food was... yes, notoriously bad. Students like myself ate whatever slop was dished out from the trough, while the dons sat on a raised platform and ate like kings, thanks to a separate chef and the best wine cellars in all of England. Somerville’s food is certainly as good if not consistently better than NC State dorm cafeterias. There’s the occasional English oddity (toad-in-the-hole or spotted dick, anyone?), but for the most part it’s hearty traditional and vegetarian fare. Perhaps eating in the grand dining hall will make it taste better. Breakfast and lunch is included; you can fend for yourself for dinner, and there will be no meals at all on Saturdays and Sundays (get out there and mingle, see something, explore!). On our final Friday night we will have a farewell banquet, and Somerville will no doubt bring up a bottle or two from the cellar. Just for toasting purposes, you understand.
ARRIVING: You will arrange your own flight. From long experience, it seems you can do better booking on the internet than Study Abroad could hope to. Whether you get in at Heathrow or Gatwick, there are buses that go directly to Oxford; go to an information desk and asked to be pointed toward them, ifyou don't find the many helpful signs. This takes about two hours, but the countryside is lovely (if it’s not raining buckets). When the final list of Oxford students is finalized, 1) we will pass out shuttle bus info and directions on how to walk to Somerville College from the bus station (another reason to pack light, or at least get your luggage on wheels). Just two turns and not quite half a mile —it couldn’t be simpler. And 2) we can eventually, by emails, see who is on what flight and coordinate who flies with whom, who sits near whom, who can search for the bus stop together... In 34 years of doing this NO ONE has gotten seriously lost or not found our home-away-from-home in Oxford. You will be provided with my British cellphone number, if you get totally messed up, and I can guide you in to face the derision and mockery of the others...
COURSES. Unlike virtually ever other American university’s Oxford programs, our instructors are actual Fellows and Dons at Oxford colleges. To take British history or Shakespeare with a charismatic British professor is hard to beat. These courses usually count as GER credits or electives (some disciplines have odd exceptions here and there); if you already have these GER credits, then sometimes (if you’re a major in the subjects taught) the course can be reckoned as an independent study. You should take two of the three courses; one of these may be taken pass-fail. All three instructors will be done teaching by lunchtime and your afternoon and evenings are usually clear to do with as you will.
There’s Dr. Martin Holmes’ British History since 1930 (HI 395). If you ask anyone who’s been to the program: Dr. Holmes’ ability to educate and entertain is legendary. Even people who shy away from fine art will like Dr. Linda Whiteley’s Art Treasures of Oxford (HA 395), which includes a stroll through the famous Ashmolean Museum and a field trip to one of the world’s great museums, the British National Gallery. Dr. Victoria Moul, noted Elizabethan scholar, will teach our Shakespeare on Stage course (ENG 309, which may still be listed in TRACS as ENG 209), which will be tied into our trip to Stratford-upon-Avon or London (they are renovating the main stage in Stratford, it depends) to see a Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of a play you will be studying. This might not be the best intro course if you’re in the sciences and have never ever taken any literature course… but if you’re really into it, I’ll sign you up for it.
EXCURSIONS. There will be two bus excursions. Most years we go to Canterbury (ancient seat of British Christianity, where Henry II's knights slew Thomas a Becket, and home of the most beautiful 12th Century stained glass you're ever going to lay eyes on) and nearby Dover Castle (the English castle to end all castles, perched up on the famous White Cliffs). sometimes, we slip in an extra jaunt to the Salisbury Plain. WARNING: Our itineraries are subject to massive improvisation, given the whims of weather, roadworks, opening hours, etc. Stonehenge (2400 BC or thereabouts) is probably not the thrill you think it is—it’s fenced off and you stare at it from walkways with as many as ten thousand summer visitors a day. We sometimes go there but if you want to get more personal with the ancient standing stones, there’s Avebury, center of what must have been a great Paleolithic civilization. The area is lousy with dolmens, burrens, tumuli, and stone circles (circa 2600 BC) which surround the town. Some years we head to the Westcountry to see one of the great medieval cathedrals (and my personal favorite) in England, in the heart of cider country, Wells. It is an amazingly quaint town, too. Nearby is Glastonbury which, when it’s not hosting the English equivalent of Woodstock each summer, is a town with a gorgeous ruined abbey (trashed by Henry VIII) and the grave site of King Arthur. Yeah, I don’t buy that either, but much of the Arthur lore revolves around Glastonbury. Then a return through the famous Cotswolds, the rolling hills and quaint stone villages west of Oxford. Stay tuned...
Our second excursion is a half-day adventure to Stratford-upon-Avon where we will stand at the grave of William Shakespeare—but, as I said, we have to see what the 2008 theater construction schedule will be. We may instead make our way to the rollicking, fabulous Globe Theater in London and get our Shakespeare fix there.
We will go on several walking tours over the four weeks: to the Thames towpath, to Godstow Abbey and the holy well of St. ffrydeswyde, to the thatched village of Binsey (and its thatched 14th century pub) and the Trout Inn (where Elinor of Aquitaine, it is speculated, strangled the Fair Rosamond). One some nice afternoon, we will pile onto the city bus for Blenheim Palace, home of Winston Churchill, if you can call a place you could put three Biltmore Houses inside a “home,” and the nearby historical village of Woodstock, where Bloody Mary kept the future Queen Elizabeth I under house arrest. Another city bus ride another time can take us to Dorchester Abbey and back by way of Iffley, which has the most photogenic, medieval sculpture-covered Romanesque church in the Oxford area. All of this is walkable or in reach of city buses.
INDEPENDENT TRAVEL: In past years, with a bit of ambition, students have worked out daytrips (by bus and train) to the white cliffs known as the Seven Sisters in Sussex, to Bath (a Roman town that peaked in Jane Austen’s day), and all over the London region (Hampstead Palace, Windsor, Eton, Rochester, St. Alban’s… you name it). The second full weekend in Oxford is what we call the “Long Weekend,” in which we don’t hold Friday classes. This is your chance to go somewhere further afield, if you like. You don’t have to. There’s plenty to do locally and you wouldn’t be alone if you did stayed put. You could, for instance, channel Brideshead Revisited and work on your punting, and take a lavish picnic on the River Cherwell, or punt your way upriver to the taverns that are only accessed by the water. But if you are going somewhere (Amsterdam, for some reason, proved popular with the guys...), you MUST plan early! Either make reservations very soon after arriving in England or do it by internet from the U.S. I've seeb trips to Paris fall apart because there simply weren’t any unsold seats on the Eurostar trains to France through the Chunnel. So think and plan tactically. I will play travel agent as best as I can; also, if you tell me your interests, I can suggest locations to tour in the UK, having lived there five years. (Many students, of course, wait until the Oxford program is over, mail some of their belongings home, and go backpacking throughout Europe for the next few weeks until school starts up again.) Gangs of students went all over the UK on their long weekends last year: the Lake District, hiking in the national parks of Wales, going along the Roman Hadrian’s Wall (which kept the blue people out of England), and glorious Edinburgh, raucous Dublin, stroppy Manchester…
By Week Three, many of the students can write their own guidebook to London… Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, shopping on the trendy Kings Road, going to the postmodern Tate Gallery, Harrod’s, Bond Street, Soho (gayest place on earth these days), Covent Garden, clubbing on the South Bank. Yes, you could go instead on the London program, but with London an easy train ride (if you have a railpass), leaving once an hour OR a 1-2 hour bus ride away from Oxford (cheap with student discounts; the buses leaving every ten minutes in both directions until very late at night when they’re every twenty minutes), you can have the best of both worlds in Oxford. And Oxford’s university-town ease is safer than London’s teeming city, if security is a worry.
REMEMBER: This isn’t the third world. They have great national health care (forget the horror stories), and you are insured—it’s included in your fee. We, technically, speak their language. There will be no problem going to a doctor or even, if you need to, seeking counseling. And if you’re homesick or depressed or just hate it (and we’ve never had the last thing happen), you can always go home. At any time, you are less than 24 hours from being back in good ol’ N.C., if you absolutely had to leave. There is nothing to fear. Only great rewards and pleasures, only adventures and experiences that will be remembered an entire lifetime are ahead. Go ahead, ask anyone who’s been. We’ll announce an orientation, in fact, where we will invite previous participants and you can do just that. Henry James wrote of medieval, spectacular, boisterous Oxford that "it was simply the finest thing in England." He's still right. Plan to come with us! Deposits are due on FEBRUARY 5th.
Yours,
Wilton Barnhardt, M. Phil. (Class of 1987)
Brasenose College, Oxford University
Academic Director
2008 Oxford Summer Program
a.k.a. Director, MFA in Creative Writing
276 Tompkins Hall
wwbarnha@unity.ncsu.edu
* It is very hard to predict the cost. Last year the pound dipped to $1.36, and the year before that it was $2.05. The price, however, tends to hover around $4-5000. Contact Study Abroad to learn more about aid, fellowships, scholarships, sources of potential money or loans.