All Women's / Gender Studies

This tutorial explores the representation and condition of women in literary and historical sources, beginning with the idea of 'woman' inherited from classical and Judeo-Christian thinking, and progressing to representations of women in western Europe between 500 and 1500. Students will have the opportunity to explore in detail the roles played by religion, learning and artistic production in the lives of women, and will be given scope to write on any aspect of women's achievements as artists, thinkers, and writers in the Middle Ages. For general information on ASE's Oxford-style tutorials, please visit The Tutorial Programme.

Subject areas: Medieval Studies, History, English and Women's Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Women, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century England [Autumn]
May also meet requirements for Women's Studies and History.

In recent years, television and film adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen and her contemporaries have crossed our screens. They have fed a popular and academic fascination with eighteenth-century women's history. This course, aimed at both specialists and newcomers alike, looks beyond heaving bosoms and tinkling teacups to the realities of eighteenth-century women's lives, their contributions to culture and their place in society. By examining women's participation in both public and private spheres - through topics such as education, marriage and family life; work, poverty, criminality and philanthropy; politics and religion; and consumerism, art and culture - the course seeks to integrate women into eighteenth-century history. We will listen to the voices of ordinary and exceptional women, to draw out a picture of a vibrant and dynamic society in which they were constrained by literary prescription, custom and law, and yet sought out new avenues for involvement and, by the end of the century, feminist advance. The study trip focuses on Chatsworth, the Derbyshire home of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Subject areas: History and Women's Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Women In Twentieth-Century Britain [Spring]

This course looks at one of the most momentous changes to take place in modern British society - the social, political and economic advancement of women. As well as celebrating the progress made and the battles won, however, it also examines the failures and the reverses, questioning why, for example, ‘equal pay’ remains an aspiration and not an achievement. Besides the prominent individuals - such as the Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, and Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher - we also deal with the history of women en masse: in war and peace, education and employment, at home and at work. Alongside political struggle, we assay a rich vein of British culture in the twentieth century, taking in pioneer aviators and champion golfers, painters and novelists, and the remarkable sisters who outshone their brothers. The course weighs the overall impact of the emancipation of women, while underlining their indispensability to the ideal of democratic secular society.

Subject areas: History.
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Jane Austen [Autumn & Spring]

From Clueless and Bridget Jones to Becoming Jane, Jane Austen continues to exert a powerful influence on popular culture. This course will explore how Austen's acute social observations of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries live on into the twenty-first. It is structured as a chronological survey of all six major novels, from the youthful optimism of Northanger Abbey, through to the cool irony and narrative games of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, and the experimental style of Persuasion. Seminars will combine close reading - analysis of Austen's narrative technique, her use of parody, irony, and free indirect discourse, for instance - with thorough historical and literary contextualisation. We'll also discuss re-interpretations of Austen, using a wide range of texts and films, both academic and popular - from postcolonial readings of Mansfield Park to The Jane Austen Guide to Dating and Bollywood.

Walks around the streets of Bath featured in the novels allow a unique insight into Austen's social dynamics. This is complemented by our visits to her home at Chawton in Hampshire, and to the Chawton Library research centre, newly established to promote women's writing of the eighteenth century.

Subject areas: English and Women's Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists: the Gothic and the Realistic [Spring]

The nineteenth century was the great age of novel writing in English, and some of the best novelists of the period were women. This course begins by examining how women writers made use of the supernatural, the fantastic, and other aspects of the Gothic novel to address the nature of human identities and relationships. It then explores a selection of realistic works reflecting the domestic and social contexts of women’s lives. Texts to be studied may include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Library Window’; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; and George Eliot, Middlemarch.

The two-day study trip in Yorkshire includes extended walks on the moors and a visit to Haworth Parsonage, the home of the Brontë family.

Subject areas: English and Women's Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

The Writings of Virginia Woolf [Autumn & Spring]

This course follows the chronological pattern of Woolf's development as a novelist, exploring the ways in which her writing offers innovative designs with the narrative form and its contribution to the English novel. We will consider the importance of gender on Woolf's writing and the ways in which her work asks us to think about what it meant and means to be a woman and a writer, as well as examine the different issues which are raised in looking at Woolf's legacy to feminism. The emphasis of this course is textual, although significant events in Woolf's life, the social and literary contexts of her work, and how she has been read and critically received during the century will also be considered. The course will take a study trip which includes visits to Monk's House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Sussex home, and Charleston Farmhouse, the nearby home of Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister) which provide valuable insights into their life-styles and preoccupations.

Subject areas: English and Women's Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Writing and the Body [Autumn]

What can we make of the differences in the ways men and women depict the body? Why is fear such a bodily experience in Gothic literature? Why is the body and fashionable dress so minutely described in realist and naturalistic fiction?

This course addresses recent developments in the study of the body and seeks to link them to the ways the body is represented in literature and on screen, from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will look at the role that the human body, and all that is associated with it, plays in narrative and poetic practice. Using the theories and ideas of Foucault and Judith Butler, we will examine texts by Horace Walpole, WM Thackeray, EM Forster, Jeanette Winterson, Chuck Palahniuk, and Brett Easton Ellis; and the movies Fight Club and The Pillow Book. There will also be opportunities to consider the representation of the body in medical writing, in horror films, in television series (including Sex and the City) and in erotic writing.

Subject areas: English, Women’s and Gender Studies.
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.

Patterns of Power: Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality in Contemporary Society [Autumn & Spring]

Every theory which attempts to explain relations between people and institutions in contemporary society rests on a notion of power. But power is a much misunderstood concept, variously invoked as constructive, liberating, coercive and conspiratorial. It is used to represent everything from economics and the law to the influence of cultural norms and language – so how can we best understand it?

This course draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary sources, from the theories of Marx and Weber to Foucault, Bourdieu and contemporary scholars tackling the dominant issues of the early twenty-first century. It incorporates the major political and economic models of power, as well as recent theories explaining sociological trends such as the rise of individualism, risk culture, hypermediation, the therapeutic state and the possibilities and implications of new technologies. The course seeks to connect theoretical analysis to the full range of issues arising in today’s political, cultural and media contexts, and students are encouraged to critically examine examples from literary, political and popular culture.

Subject areas: Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Women's/Gender Studies and African-American Studies
Check with your home institution for specific information on fulfilment of major/course requirements.