A Victorian Study-Abroad Course for Undergraduates

Abstract

Study-abroad opportunities are an important part of the undergradu ate experience at my university. Mor than half of our students take advan tage of one or more study-abroad programs before graduation. Almost all report that these experiences are among the most formative of their undergraduate years. In summer 2007, the English department launched a London program for English majors, and I was asked to take the first group. As I was conceiving the course I would teach, I knew I wanted to expose our majors to as many of London's Victorian resources as possible. My course plan called for each student to choose a particular decade in the nineteenth century, from which she must narrow down her research interests to a specific year and ultimately a specific literary text. (I ended up calling the course Literary London in the Long Nineteenth Century since I had eleven students enrolled and needed an extra decade!) I asked students to browse through two or three runs of periodicals for their chosen year and to follow up on their interests with other more traditional research sources. My goal was to instill a sense of?and hopefully a taste for? independent research by giving students the freedom to browse around, follow their instincts, and develop a project out of their own interests. Before the class began, I arranged for student access to the University of London's Senate House Library?chiefly for its open stacks ofVictorian periodi cals. The Senate House Library allows visitors to purchase short-term member ships at a reasonable price and was quite willing to negotiate an individual rate that allowed students reference access for the entire seven weeks of the course.