literature Courses 2024–2025
Literature courses 2024
We offer a range of live online courses which run weekly or fortnightly. Each course focuses on a particular writer or theme. Each session lasts for two hours, with an hour-long lecture by a leading scholar, followed by a moderated seminar.
• London in Literature I course (1778-1948), six fortnightly sessions, 18 Sept. to 27 Nov. 2024. SOLD OUT.
• The Contemporary Novel course, six fortnightly sessions, 5 Oct. to 14 Dec. 2024
• Close Reading William Wordsworth, two weekly sessions, 20 and 27 October 2024. SOLD OUT.
• Close Reading Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, two weekly sessions, 24 November and 1 December 2024. SOLD OUT.
• Lecture for Peace: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own: After the First World War, 27 December 2024.
Lectures for peace
Approximately once a year we hold a lecture to raise money for refugee charities. Since 2020, we have donated to Freedom from Torture, Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and others. In June 2024, we are extending our support to Oxfam Gaza, Standing Together (Palestinian and Jewish peace movement) as well as Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. All proceedings from these lectures are shared equally between the named charities. The next Lecture for Peace will be on 27 December 2024.
Literature courses 2025
• Close Reading Irish Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, 5 and 12 January 2025.
• Passion and Violence in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy, January-February 2025.
• Close Reading Anne Sexton, January 2025.
• Close Reading Sylvia Plath, February 2025.
• Bloomsbury: Art and Politics, February-March 2025.
• Iris Murdoch and Art course, March-May 2025.
• Oscar Wilde course, March-May 2025.
• Close Reading Coleridge, April 2025.
• Comedy and Irony in the Young Jane Austen course, May 2025
• Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death, May-June 2025.
• Close Reading Tennyson, June 2025.
• Close Reading Mary Oliver, June 2025.
• Close Reading Shelley, September 2025.
• Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny course, September-October 2025.
• London in Literature I, September-October 2025.
• Women and Power in 20thC Fiction: 1950s-1980, September-November 2025.
• Close Reading Keats, November 2025.
• George Orwell: Power, Freedom, Decency, November-December 2025.
• Elizabeth von Arnim: Women, Men and Dogs course, October-December 2025.
Live online lectures and seminars via zoom.
For our live online literature Seasons, see this page.
More courses for 2025-26 will be added in the coming months
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A list of past online lectures and seasons since May 2020 can be found here.
From a participant:
Gaura Narayan of New York writes:
Dear Trudi,
I want to thank you and your team at Literature Cambridge for hosting these online sessions during the pandemic. The first one I attended was on George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as Female Bildungsroman with Clare Walker Gore in October 2020. Thereafter, I attended several other sessions including memorable ones on Siegfried Sassoon with Alison Hennegan and India in Mrs Dalloway and Refugee Tales with you. I have thoroughly enjoyed every single session that I have attended.I hope you will continue to host these even after the pandemic is a thing of the past as they have been enriching and they have put me in touch with people I would never have encountered without these, such as Shaista Tayabali, whose poetry collection Something Beautiful Travels Far I bought and read after sharing a Zoom room with her during your Refugee Tales session.