Location and Facilities

University of California, Santa Cruz

Located on more than fourteen hundred acres of redwood forest and majestic meadows eighty miles south of San Francisco, the University of California, Santa Cruz is one of the top twenty AAU-member research universities in the United States in terms of doctorates granted and externally funded research. It is one of the very few R1 institutions in the country designated as both a Hispanic-Serving Institution and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. 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 and UCSC’s annual summer Dickens Universe.

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is a delightful beach town with a mild summer climate. The UCSC campus offers a beautiful—and unique—setting for our seminar. Participants can expect to wake up to cool mornings that give way to sunny and occasionally quite warm (70-85+°F) afternoons. Evening temperatures can get quite chilly, so be sure to bring at least a light jacket. Strategic layering is the key to comfort in Santa Cruz, so include pants and sweatshirts along with your shorts and comfortable shoes for navigating the campus terrain.

The Dickens Project

Our institute will benefit particularly from its association with the Dickens Project, a University of California Multicampus Research Unit. The Dickens Project staff includes a full-time administrator, student assistants, and two faculty co-directors, and its affiliates include university faculty members from across the world, high school teachers from across the country, and community members from all walks of life, particularly concentrated in California and the Bay Area. The Dickens Project will serve as the administrative hub for the institute, managing the institute’s financial matters, organizing housing, meals, classroom space, and accessibility accommodations on campus, and serving as a central point of communication and assistance for participants before and during the institute.

The Project maintains an up-to-date library focused on Dickens and nineteenth-century Anglophone literature and culture that will be fully available to institute participants. In addition, the faculty co-directors of the Dickens Project and its affiliated faculty, teachers, and community members can serve as resources for institute participants in search of additional mentorship in scholarship, pedagogy, or modes of community engagement. The Dickens Universe summer conference, in 2025 focused on The Old Curiosity Shop, begins the day after the institute ends, and all institute participants will be welcome to register for the Universe and extend their work by one week. Any teachers who choose this option will benefit from an extra week of access to the institute co-leaders, lectures and seminars by top scholars in nineteenth-century studies, conversations with the hundreds of faculty, graduate students, and members of the general public who gather in Santa Cruz for the Universe, and a high school teacher pedagogy seminar that will meet each day during the Universe. The Dickens Project and UCSC will provide any participants interested in receiving continuing education credits for the institute with a letter (upon completion of the institute) allowing them to do so. For those participants who want to extend their work to include the Dickens Universe, continuing education for that week will be available through the UCSC Continuing Education division.

McHenry Library

During the institute, participants will also have full access to the resources of UCSC’s McHenry Library, including its digital scholarship commons and digital scholarship librarians. McHenry Library houses more than a million volumes. Its strong collections in nineteenth-century British literature, criticism, and history complement the Dickens Project Library holdings, and it also has special strengths in its Grateful Dead archive and its holdings in twentieth and twenty-first-century Black literature, culture, and political movements. The library’s Special Collections department houses rich archives of first editions, documentary materials, and various ephemera in all of these areas. All institute members will have borrowing privileges at the library and full access to its digital databases and resources.

Bibliographies of supplemental materials will be provided to aid participants’ use of library resources as they work on their institute projects. A library tour and orientation will take place in the first week; digital scholarship librarians will introduce participants to the tools and resources available in these areas and special collections librarians will be available to help participants navigate the archival materials participants may want to explore. Though participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops, computers will be available for their use in the library.

Other Facilities

All institute meetings will take place in UCSC seminar-style classrooms and film screenings will take place in the UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall. For those who cannot attend evening screenings, the films will be made available on the U-Stream platform, accessible with an institute-specific password that will be provided to all participants.