The Courses

Today, the bustling and charming streets of London and Paris seem forever removed from their terrible history when Hitler ruled almost all of Europe. Your time in this class will bring the terrors of that time back to life. Each day will show new ways of seeing the still-living brutality of the Blitzkrieg that overran France in 6 weeks and threatened to do the same to the United Kingdom. You’ll walk in the indelible shadows of history and memory with us as we explore the origins of the war and then trace its terrifying course.

The Blitz: When it Rained Bombs in London

You’ll be astonished to learn the scope of the Nazi air attack on London and how it nearly brought about the surrender of the UK. You’ll also learn what the leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill meant to his fellow countrymen and the fortunes of Hitler’s plans to subjugate the British. Your Blitz walk with us will culminate at the Imperial War Museum where the plight of London in 1940 and 1941 can feel so real to some that there’s an emergency evacuation door inside the museum’s “Blitz Experience.”

The Holocaust in France: The Vel d’Hiv Roundups of Jews in 1942

When you’ve begun our week of learning in Paris, you’ll walk the quiet streets where the Jewish ghetto thrived for centuries. As you’ll have your feet on the cobblestones of what has occupied France from June 1940 until August 1944. What was occupation like? How did the Holocaust happen to French Jews? What did the French do to resist the Nazi occupation? Who were the heroes and who were the martyrs? Each day you’ll use your notebook and smartphone to engage with the treachery, villainy, and murder that came to be matters of life and death in the time of blitzkrieg and occupation.

Omaha Beach: The Blood-Sand of Liberation

There’s no feeling as a learner to match what it is to stand above Omaha Beach in the American military cemetery as you walk with us where the brave soldiers of D-Day fought and fell to launch the liberation of the European continent. In this course, you’ll have that experience as we connect the UK and France finally to our own soldiers and the valiant fight that was Operation Overlord and the liberation of France.

To paraphrase many a historian prior to lecture: “Today’s class will turn in both brutal and beautiful directions.” Your class with us features two intensive weeks of this adage in high resolution. As you focus on the stories of blood spilled in war, the sacrifices made to gods long forgotten, and the treasured monuments erected to memorialize the heroic dead, you’ll make London and Paris your living classrooms. Each day, you’ll get up-close-and-personal with the artifacts and creations and their poetic and brutal efforts to offer homage to eternity left behind.

Walking the Boundaries of the Ancient World

While traversing the busy metropolitan streets of what were once only colonies of an ancient empire, we will meditate on what urban life was like 2,000 years ago. Not only will we read about gladiators and the politics of Roman games, but we will also do so in the ruins of an arena, the very place where gladiators fought and died. We will retread the steps of the followers of the mysterious god Mithras as we walk through his temple, brought to life by the latest technology. We will read the work of Julius Caesar on his war with the ancestors of the French, while gathered in the famous cafés of Paris. Standing before the tomb of Napoleon, we will discover how his conquest of Egypt in the 18th century lit the spark of Europe’s obsession with “exotic” ancient Egypt.

Hieroglyphic 101: The Rosetta Stone

As we walk through the celebrated halls of the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London, we will reconstruct the histories of the ancient past through its remains. Our course would not be complete without experiencing the physical dominance of Hammurabi’s Code, one of the oldest law codes in the world, or gazing upon the imposing, colossal statues of Akhenaten, Egypt’s heretical king. Using the most famous royal decree from antiquity, the Rosetta Stone, we will learn to read some basic Egyptian hieroglyphs. From there, we turn our attention to the controversial Elgin Marbles, taken from the Athenian Parthenon, a symbol to one of the world’s first democracies.

Come uncover the ancient past and experience for yourself the world of the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. The sacred and the profane will both be in your view, and so will the brutal and the eternally beautiful.

William Shakespeare has been rightly called the greatest writer in the English language. What’s less know about is the sweep his works have enjoyed for centuries beyond the English speaking world or the merry olde England where he was the ultimate “player.” In our class, you’ll read his plays and sonnets and attend productions of his works, as you seek each day to understand who Shakespeare was and why his genius has spoken so powerfully for centuries to both the powerful and the oppressed.

The Seamy London of Shakespeare’s Age

Part of searching for Shakespeare will mean walking along the once-seamy South Bank of the Thames in London, wherein the “Bard’s” era bawdy theatre, fire eating, and bear baiting were popular amusements to enjoy before going to The Globe for a performance of Hamlet. We’ll tour the incredible Globe ourselves and then queue up for a live play, as we stand like the “groundlings” did to take in the lyrical genius of an iconic play.

Shakespeare’s Birth Place and Home: Stratford

Your course will take a day to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born and died. What can we learn about the writer from his own will and testament? How can we understand his genius more intimately by seeing where he lived and wrote? Part of our search will also feature the green spaces of London and what it feels like to sit in them and passionately unpack some of the most lyrical and hilarious lines ever written in our native tongue.

Now He Belongs to the Ages: The Global Shakespeare

Finally, our course will take a global view on the majestic legacy of the international settings and controversial play stagings that have been the history of many of Shakespeare’s works. We’ll explore how his history plays, in particular, were performed all along the western front in France during World War One. You’ll also learn about the life that his works enjoyed in France under the Nazi occupation, as covert performances became resolute reminders that eventually liberation from and victory over Hitler would come. We’ll also take a look at how he imagined a great city like Paris–where we’re quite sure he never visited other than in texts and images–with sufficient clarity and conviction to write it as he needed it to be written for his plays to be effective.

So do come with us and get your hands dirty as we muck around the dig sites of the old Rose and Curtain theaters. While we also clean our hearts of some of the clutter and confusion that we all carry with us in life. From London to Stratford to Paris, we’ll search for clarity and the eternal in our quest to know the sources and the scope of William Shakespeare’s stunning genius and literary reach.

Vast bodies of research have shown that the negative stories we tell ourselves are contrary to our own wellness. Similarly, it’s well documented that higher expressions of personal and collective wellness can correlate with the mindful practice of everyday life. This course explores how positive psychology is understood and developed in the UK and France by various governmental and institutional entities today.

Is there a more head-spinning way to experience the scope of art in society than by chasing beauty for half a month throughout London and Paris’ streets and museums? When you’ve cut back and forth all over these great cities with us, you’ll sure to agree that no learning has ever been more eye-popping than this.

Museums as Classrooms

Lovers of art will tell anyone to get a new bucket list if their life plans don’t include serious learning in the museums we use for our class: The British Museum, The Tate Britain, The National Gallery, The Tate Modern, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Louvre, and the Picasso Museum. You’ll feel the same after you’ve mastered the museums of our cities and the historic architecture that dots your way through London and Paris each day. Like art lovers across the ages, you’ll duck into your favorite pub or cafe after a busy day of seeing incredible beauty and proclaim to your new friends: “I was there in the mix! We had class right there!” 

Street Art

If you love to learn about art and the creative process as you stand face-to-face with masterpieces from the past, you’ll relish searching all over London’s Shoreditch neighborhood for the latest work by Banksy. You’ll follow the famous Parisian taggers who argue with obvious power that their outsider art is more important today than anything featured in posh galleries. Stake out the banks of the Thames in the evening when the young graffiti artists head to the South Bank Skate Bark to lay their spray paint claims to greatness.

War Memorials: The D-Day Beaches

Finally, you’ll experience how we teach art and its creative processes as a dynamic and gut-punching energy that has always stood at the heart of what civilizations depend on for social identity. We use architectural monuments and public art all over London and Paris to tease out this argument. Then you’ll take a look at the role art has always played in making physical and creative statements that have reached for the embrace of eternity. You’ll feel this eternal touch inside of and around Notre Dame Cathedral. And you’ll experience it when we have our field exercise on the sands of Omaha Beach and the Normandy battle sites from World War II. This is where we explore how gravestones, sculpture, and other elements of public art have been used to give a call of remembrance to the hell on earth that was our world when fascism and Nazism were stopped by young soldiers who died in the millions.

The Requirement: From Art Theory to Art Practice

Welcoming art majors and non-majors alike, our class will expose you to new ways of seeing as you also explore how so many generations before you have defined and fulfilled the expanding scope of art. Get ready to explore your own artistic scope as you work individually and with your fellow students on what our course calls “The Requirement.” This unique element of our class will be done mostly on our day crossing the English Channel from Portsmouth, England to Normandy, France–and then in conjunction with our experience together on the D Day beaches. You’ll use photography, pen and ink, watercolor, charcoal grave rubbings from the American Battlefield Cemetery or beach sand and debris from Omaha Beach to make “The Requirement” a piece of personal artistic response to what many students call the most moving learning day of their lives.

Madness has been conceptualized in many ways over the centuries. From the iconic statues of “Raving and Melancholy Madness” that stood outside of Bedlam in the 17th century to the fits and poses of the “hysterics” in Charcot’s La Salpetriere. Then on to the mute soldiers of the Great War suffering from “shell shock” to modern day notions of “mental illness.” This class travels to these historic institutions and takes a close-up look at the connections between trauma and the development of human problems over the centuries. The course also explores what social psychology teaches us regarding the development of historic political movements like the French Revolution? This course will use social psychological concepts to analyze these movements, the coming to power of individuals like Napoleon, and Robespierre and the various methods and workings of propaganda during the eras of the two world wars. An analysis that informs not only the past, but current political movements and world leaders as well, Hysteria–as we explore trauma, propaganda, and leadership, will definitely not be your typical psychology class. But then, London and Paris are far indeed from you normal classrooms, and neither are the D-Day landing beaches, where we’ll study first-hand the battlefield context for what would be called “battle fatigue” in the era of World War Two.

Our world today is swollen with images on every platform imaginable. Yet most of these photographs lack any value as art. And most don’t even expand the social media reach they’re meant to achieve. Why? Because they fail one or all of the basic tests of composition, dynamism, technical integrity, or artistic vision. In our class, you’ll use the amazingly vibrant cities of Berlin and Prague as a cultural context for what you’ll learn each day about the art of taking evocative and powerful travel photographs. With the skills you’ll acquire in our class, your own work as an artist, blogger, media influencer, or brand driver will be markedly enhanced.

Image Capture: The Street is your Studio

After technical work each day, you’ll start your apprenticeship to photographic art in the streets of Berlin and Prague. No cities in Europe have seen more change in their tortured histories than these. And because the streets, buildings, and monuments reverberate with this hard history, so will the images you capture and produce. Whether your shooting list on any given day is about transportation, food, shopping, historical monuments, sports or nightlife, the street will be your studio. While some of your fellow students will have 35m cameras and maybe even multiple lenses, others will be using just their Smartphone in conjunction with editing software. Our mantra will be simple: it is vision and technique and not the equipment that will get your images hung on walls.

Image Production: Your Smartphone and a Good Cafe

If hyper compelling photos are sometimes just snapped, more often the photos we truly appreciate are carefully produced using editing software. In our course, you’ll download powerful editing apps to your Smartphone and/or tablet. With these tools, we’ll work with you to identify, frame, and manipulate your raw images to become powerful photographs you’ll highlight in the professional portfolio our course will have you create. The very best of these art photographs will then be further culled and produced to become story-telling elements in the travel photography blogs you’ll produce for key assignments in our class.

Art Photography and You: This Class and your Career

While many of our students will be art majors, you may not be. That’s perfect. Our course believes that the clear-headed vision needed to capture and craft art and travel photographs is related to the same skill set that helps a person write plainly and with potency. It’s also in the wheelhouse of anybody who wants a career that touches even the edges of marketing, brand development or media.

Survival and the Modern Mood

Literary modernism has so often been taken to be an English or expatriate form of 20th century writing that authors from central Europe or “empire” can seem like curiosities alongside the cabinet of Hemingway, Joyce and others. In its turn to Camus, Hesse, Mann and Kafka, this course explores Modernism as a search for the poetics and politics of the 20th century’s quest to understand how humanity was meant to survive the human being.

Existentialism and Literature

If the French pioneered the mass production of existentialist writing, they never hid from the fact that the underpinning of this philosophical expression were central European. Even Camus–the Algerian–was forever in the debt of the Germans in particular whose writings he’d read as a young man. Our course explores the roots and shoots of existentialism in Camus and Hesse, as we explore how the places these authors visited and matured in were part and parcel to the way they came to experience the world and write about it.

The Banal and the Horrible

Our course also explores the imagery of central European Modernism as an expression of the tortured history of empire, nationalism and fascism that was the context within which its writers lived and worked. Who was Thomas Mann and what word did he come from? How was it that he and his cohort of genius writers felt as though they were living witness to the terrible death of humanity? And who was Franz Kafka and where did his fantastic fiction come from? As we search for clues to why they wrote how they wrote, our course will walk the urban paths that were home to these writers, from their coffee shops to their book stores.

Phantasmagoria, Suffocation in Society and Mass Death

As our class converts public parks and mind-bending museums into our classrooms, we will grapple together with what our writers felt in the midst of a society that was theirs to be born into and die because of. Along the way, we will pour over the beauty of the literary art they created even as they watched their world light the match of the Great War’s Western Front and turn on the ovens of the genocide of the Jews. What, our artists ask in so many ways that remain insightful today, can be the role of the writer as witness and survivor?

Few classrooms can compare to Berlin and Prague when it comes to studying Nazism and the Holocaust. Berlin was the epicenter of the New Order that Hitler built, and the vestiges of the 1933-1945 era remain very present here.  From the museum that stands today where Gestapo Headquarters were in the Nazi era to the roll-call field at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, our class will walk the terrible trail that was the path of the Nazis and their war against the Jews and others whom the regime deemed “undesirable.” From Berlin, we will go as the Nazis did and follow their swath of occupation and murder East to the jewel of former Czechoslovakia: Prague. It is the city where Hitler and Himmler installed their most trusted and brutal soldier, General Reinhard Heydrich, to govern the conquered city and the “protectorate” of which it was the centerpiece. Prague is also where the covert mission “Anthropoid” crystallized in 1942 with the assassination of Heydrich. We will study how the Nazi occupation worked as we also explore how resistance movements grew up in Prague and elsewhere. We’ll take as our classroom such hallowed places as the village of Lidice, the Cathedral of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, and Prague Castle itself. Click here to review the 2017 syllabus for Nazism and the Holocaust Syllabus (1) (1)

The pink triangle was born in Nazi Germany as a means of identifying gay people to discriminate against, round up, and eventually murder in the 1940s. Yet as this class will show, the sometimes brutal cultural and the medical and state politics of sexual orientation and gender identities were not born with Hitler. Before and after the Nazis, sex and gender roles have been hotly contested aspects of social life in Europe and beyond, and remain so to this day.