Of Victorian Interest

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Of Victorian Interest

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Seminar: NEH Summer Seminar on Dickens (3/1/2016; 7/3-29/2016)

Dickens Day

Applications are now being accepted for “Charles Dickens: Hard Time and A Tale of Two Cities,” a four-week Summer Seminar supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Directed by Prof. Marty Gould, the seminar will be held at UC Santa Cruz, home of the Dickens project. The seminar begins Sunday, 3 July 2016 and ends Friday, 29 July 2016.

The application deadline is 1 March 2016. Don’t miss this opportunity to spend a month in on the beautiful California coast discussing Dickens with colleagues from across the country! If you know K-12 teachers with an interest in Dickens, please forward this announcement to them.

Designed for middle and high school teachers, the “Charles Dickens: Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities” seminar critically explores two of the most frequently taught of Dickens’s novels. Both of these texts are deeply engaged with political and social issues that are as relevant today as they were for Dickens and his contemporaries: education, labor reform, law, social revolution, and terrorism. Via a range of disciplinary fields and methods, the seminar considers how Dickens—and literature more generally—can promote historically inflected cultural literacy while developing the ethical and political perspectives our students need in order to fully engage with contemporary social issues.

Though built around Dickens, the seminar’s critical methods are more broadly applicable, making the seminar useful for teaching literary texts in a wide range of humanities courses, including history, theatre, and civics. In their final projects, participants will develop and share specific strategies for translating the seminar material into real-world classroom activities that prompt students to consider why Victorian literature remains relevant to contemporary culture and how humanistic fields of inquiry are necessary to understanding and responding to today’s most pressing social, political, and ethical challenges.

Hosted by the Dickens Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the four-week seminar will be led by Marty Gould, Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida. Guest speakers will include professors Kate Flint (of the University of Southern California) and Sharon Weltman (of Louisiana State University). With daily meetings and special sessions on pedagogical development, the seminar will offer participants a challenging--but intellectually rich--experience.

The 16 seminar participants will each receive a stipend of $3300 to help offset the costs of travel and lodging. After the conclusion of the seminar, participants will be invited to remain in Santa Cruz for the week-long Dickens Universe conference, which will focus on Dombey and Son.

Applications are due 1 March 2016. To learn more about the seminar and to find out how to apply, visit the website: http://www.DickensNEH2016.com. Or email the director at mgould@usf.edu.

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