This 3-week Institute will explore how the 1861 novel, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, has been adapted across time and geography by filmmakers, novelists, and artists from around the world. The institute will borrow from critical race studies, postcolonial theory, adaptation studies, and, undisciplined, literary/media studies to engage high school teachers in current academic conversation about decolonizing the classroom, even, and especially, when canonical British novels are at the center of their curriculum. The institute will re-situate the Victorian literary canon within and against nineteenth-century imperial networks, contemporary racial and social politics, and global systems of knowledge. We focalize this work through Great Expectations because it is one of the most taught (and assessed) novels in the US high school classroom.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey (1997)

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (2000)

Great Expectations adapted by Tanika Gupta (2010)