September Seminar in the Humanities

In cooperation with Hertford College, Worcester College will offer its eighth September Seminar in the Humanities in 2022. This intensive, month-long seminar is open to any student studying at Worcester during the Michaelmas term, and allows those students to extend their stay in Oxford so that the fall term's work is comparable in substance and duration to a full semester. Students enrolled for the full year are also welcome to join.

See below for detailed information.

Academic Experience 

The seminar will be of interest to intellectually adventurous, highly motivated students who wish to consider why and how we study the humanities. The seminar takes as its organising theme  'other minds,' and considers the ways texts from various periods and cultures grapple with problem of imagining the consciousness and experience of others—all while critically examining the practices that humanistic disciplines use to approach this problem.

Students are taught the general expectations for the Oxford tutorial essay, and they write two essays related to the material on the syllabus.
Teaching will be provided by faculty from the departments of Classics, English Language and Literature, and Medieval and Modern Languages. Different tutors will teach each week of the seminar, providing over the course of the month a chronological sequence that moves from the idea of the barbarian in ancient texts to the problem of representing consciousness in the modernist novel.
The seminar will include a trip to Shakespeare's Globe in London to see one of the plays studied in the Seminar.

September Seminar students often travel over the weekends, but they should know that attendance at all classes (apart from excused medical absences) is mandatory.

The faculty involved in teaching the seminar in September 2021 included the following:

Residential Life

The seminar includes visiting students from both Hertford College and Worcester College. Students live in the colleges in which they are enrolled.

At Worcester, enrolled students live together on the college campus. A Junior Dean, one of several graduate students serving on the college's Student Welfare Team, will also reside on the premises with the group of students and make sure they are comfortable as they settle into Worcester, Oxford, and the UK. In addition to the Junior Dean, the Programme Director is also available to students should they require assistance or simply want to chat. Catering services are available in a limited capacity during September. All dormitories have kitchens, and (like matriculated Oxford students) the visiting students do a good deal of cooking for themselves. 
The month includes a formal welcome dinner at Worcester, and we hold a traditional tea party at Hertford in Michaelmas term.