Welcome from the co-directors
Dear Colleague,
NEH Institute Co-Directors Christian Lehmann and Nirshan Perera
We are both high school teachers with doctoral degrees who are longtime members of the community of Dickens scholars and enthusiasts who come together each summer in beautiful Santa Cruz, California. The University of California campus, nestled in a redwood forest above the Pacific Ocean, is the home of the Dickens Project–a global network that connects folks in academia with teachers and students and bookworms who have an appreciation for the work of Charles Dickens and nineteenth-century novels.
Our 2025 NEH Summer Institute will be the fourteenth hosted by UCSC and sponsored by the Dickens Project: As in previous years, we’ll be drawing on all the resources and faculty of the Dickens Project to create an exciting 3-week seminar that will be a catalyst for you to re-energize your classroom teaching with the latest approaches in academia.
We want to emphasize that you do not have to have a background in Dickens to apply for this institute: All you need is a strong interest and willingness to think through rich and challenging issues in connecting literature across time and place–and we know this is a key learning outcome in every high school English class. We are hoping to bring together a diverse group of high school teacher colleagues whose classroom work will benefit from and contribute to an exciting vein of humanistic thought that is rethinking assumptions about how “classic” literature can be taught.
Across the course of the three-week Summer Institute, we will be close reading Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations–the most frequently taught of his works at the high school level. Our focus, however, will be equally on its legacy across a variety of media forms: the many reworkings it has inspired in fiction, film, drama, dance, and portraiture up to our contemporary moment. Great Expectations in the Global Imaginary will use Dickens and his great novel as a case study for how classical source material is translated and re-tuned across time, transcending national borders and genre boundaries; and we will explore how relevant this is to conversations on diversity and social justice issues. Our goal is for the seminar to be inspiring and productive for all participants: You may end up creating lessons plans and units on Dickens or other nineteenth-century texts or authors; you may also be inspired to use the ideas and pedagogical strategies you will learn to re-engage with the content that most interests you and your students.
We hope the applicants to the institute will come from a range of backgrounds, teaching a range of English courses and grade levels–all you need is a sincere interest in the broader topic and an eagerness to engage in critical thinking and collaborative work with like-minded colleagues in a beautiful locale this summer. Though we will keep you busy with workshops and discussions and lectures most mornings and afternoons, there will be plenty of time for recreation and sight-seeing, taking advantage of everything Santa Cruz and Northern California has to offer.
Located on more than fourteen hundred acres of redwood forest and majestic meadows eighty miles south of San Francisco, the University of California at Santa Cruz is one of the top twenty AAU-member research universities in the United States. Participants will have access to the Dickens Project’s world-class Dickens and nineteenth-century studies library and to the expertise of its affiliated faculty, based both at UCSC and across the US. In addition, institute participants will be welcome to extend their work for one extra week by attending the annual Dickens Universe, a public scholarly conference that takes place at UCSC the week after the institute ends. With proximity to Napa, San Francisco, and Big Sur, the area teems with cultural and recreational opportunities, including Santa Cruz’s annual summer Shakespeare festival.
Dickens Universe faculty members from across the world, and all academic and public-facing programming during the week of the Dickens Universe will be available resources for institute participants, if they choose to stay for the extra week.
Participants will also have full access to the resources of UCSC’s McHenry Library. McHenry Library houses more than a million volumes. Its collections in nineteenth-century British literature, criticism, and history are strong, as are its holdings in twentieth and twenty-first-century Black literature, culture, and political movements. Its special collections department houses rich archives of first editions, documentary materials, and various ephemera in both of these areas–it even hosts the official archive for the Grateful Dead. All seminar members will have borrowing privileges at the library and full access to its digital databases and resources.
Residential accommodations will be provided on campus, with participants housed in single bedrooms within multi-room apartments. We will assist those who desire more privacy, family accommodation, or closer proximity to the town in their search for appropriate off-campus lodgings.
As Co-Directors of Summer Symposium, we are especially excited to work with fellow high school teachers who are eager to collaborate on new approaches to canonical books they teach.
Nirshan has taught at Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz for the past 12 years. He teaches AP Literature to seniors and also 9th and, most recently, 8th-grade English. He just finished teaching Great Expectations to his high school seniors, as he does most years, and is excited to share his newest experiences and strategies for connecting Dickens with 21st-century issues of class and identity. His doctoral work focused on Dickens, he has taught Dickens (and other nineteenth-century authors) regularly at the high school level, and has published on how his high school teaching intersects with new approaches in Victorian Studies. He has worked on high school teacher outreach for the Dickens Project, consulting on and participating in the Dickens Day of Writing event for high students, and he has peer reviewed high-school-level lesson plans for the Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom project.
Christian has taught at Bard High School-Early College since 2018. For the past three years he has taught an in-depth Dickens Seminar that coincides with the Dickens novel of the year. Simultaneously, he runs a YouTube series offering close readings of the novels. One of his passions is for finding ways to get students to engage in Dickens from a variety of perspectives: personal, critical, and creative. For the past two years he has also participated in The Dickens Day of Writing, where he and his students join other budding Dickensians to write and publish an essay or creative work inspired by a piece of Dickens’s Journalism. He serves on the Teaching Faculty of the Dickens Project and has published on Dickens’s running headers, on the representation of race in the illustrations of his novels, as well as reviewing monographs for The Dickensian and Dickens Quarterly.
Both of us would be happy to answer emails and chat via Zoom if you are thinking of applying and have any questions at all! We are looking forward to hearing from you.
Warmly,
Christian Lehmann and Nirshan Perera