Current Programme
2025 Programme: Schedule
5-13 July 2025
The full programme for the 2025 Summer School will be available soon. An outline of the daily schedule appears on this page; you can meet our current speakers here and read about the seminars below.
The programme features plenary lectures, small-group seminars, readings by eminent writers, and special outings to theatres, libraries, and literary landmarks, including day trips to Burnt Norton and Little Gidding.
All lectures and special events are plenary. Each student chooses one seminar to attend for the week; seminars meet each afternoon for 1.5 hours, Monday to Friday.
Saturday
5.30pm – Arrival and registration at Merton College, Oxford
6.00pm – Welcome remarks
6.30pm – Inaugural Event: A Discussion with Mark Ford
7.45pm – Drinks reception
Sunday
9am – Depart for Little Gidding, meeting point in High Street, just in front of Queen’s College
11:30am – The Annual T. S. Eliot Festival at Little Gidding
Full programme to be announced
2.30pm – The Annual Little Gidding Lecture, delivered by Sarah Kennedy
5:30pm – Depart for the journey back to Oxford
Monday
9:15 – Introduction and Welcome, Rebecca Stewart, Merton Events
9.30am – lecture
10.30am – Break
11am – lecture
12.15pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Seminars
3pm – Daily wrap up
Tuesday
9.30am – lecture
10.30am – Break
11am – lecture
12.15pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Seminars
3pm – Daily wrap up
Wednesday
9.30am – Lecture
10.30am – Break
11am – Lecture
12.15pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Seminars
3pm – Daily wrap up
Thursday
9.30am – lecture
10.30am – Break
11am – lecture
12.15pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Seminars
3pm – Daily wrap up
Friday
10am – Depart for Burnt Norton
12pm – Picnic
12.30pm – Walking the grounds and dry pools of Burnt Norton
2pm – Welcome and address
2.30pm – The Annual Burnt Norton lecture, featuring Vincent Sherry
4pm – Depart for the ride back to Oxford
Saturday
9.30am -lecture
10.30am – Break
11am – lecture
12.15pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Seminars
3pm – Daily wrap up
7:00pm – Gala Dinner at High Table
Sunday
11am – Walking tour of Eliot’s Oxford, led by Carey Adina Karmel and Mark Storey
Farewells at the pub and throughout the day
2025 Seminars
Small-group seminars are at the heart of the Summer School programme, allowing students to interact one-on-one with leading scholars in the field and to engage in closely focused discussions of Eliot’s work. Each student will choose one seminar to attend for the entire week; seminars will meet each afternoon, Monday through Friday, after the morning’s lectures have finished.
Early Work: Poetry and Criticism, David Chinitz
Later Work: Poetry and Criticism, Patrick Query
In this seminar we will look at Eliot’s work in the 1930s and `40s. In this period, Eliot both reached what many consider the pinnacle of his poetic career in Four Quartets and forsook non-dramatic poetry in favor of a career writing for the stage. This amazing transition took place within a vortex of political radicalization across Europe, as communism and fascism threatened to squeeze out more familiar possibilities. We will read Four Quartets as well as the two plays he wrote around the same time, Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, as Eliot’s creative responses to the intensifying demand for political commitment and speech. What kind of answers are these works to political questions that, like those of our own day, often seemed to swallow up most of life?
Eliot & Woolf, Ria Banerjee
TBA, Sarah Kennedy
The Waste Land, Anthony Cuda
The most important poem of the twentieth century just celebrated its 100th anniversary, and an array of new materials has emerged to help us regard with new eyes its strangeness, difficulty, and beauty. This seminar will introduce students to the poem’s themes and structures, to some accepted ways of understanding its methods and avant-garde techniques, and to more recent insights into its dazzling and disturbing imaginative leaps. We’ll consult drafts and discarded fragments; read essays and letters that illuminate Eliot’s state of mind at the time of its composition; and immerse ourselves in source materials from the visual arts, opera, the Russian Ballet, classical myth, and anthropology.