Location and Facilities

Archived content. The NEH Summer Seminar “Why Literature Matters”
occurred from June 24-July 21, 2018.

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz is located on two thousand acres of redwood forest and majestic meadows overlooking the scenic Monterey Bay, seventy miles south of San Francisco. Organized on the collegiate model of Oxford and Cambridge, its ten colleges, sixty-five undergraduate majors, and forty-one graduate programs currently serve over eighteen thousand students. 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. In 2017, UC Santa Cruz was rated 3rd in the world for research influence by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, tied with Stanford University.

The campus is is built on a hilly terrain. Classrooms and meeting spaces are all accessible via ramps or elevators, and there are stairs and ramps to navigate between buildings. Apartments may not have elevators. Assistance will be available for those needing assistance with luggage.

 

Santa Cruz, California

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 (70-80+°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

The seminar will benefit from its association with the Dickens Project, a Multicampus Research Unit of the University of California. Headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, the Dickens Project is internationally recognized as the premier center for Dickens studies in North America and one of the world’s leading sites for research on Victorian culture. A consortium of faculty and graduate students from seven University of California campuses, as well as from forty-one other universities across the US and overseas, the Project sponsors a wide range of Dickens-related programs and activities, including the annual “Dickens Universe” conference at UC Santa Cruz. The text for 2018 is Little Dorrit. In addition to the excellent web-based materials it has produced, the Project houses an extensive reference library of works by and about Dickens that will be available to NEH Summer Scholars.

 

McHenry Library

The UC Santa Cruz McHenry Library houses more than a million volumes. Its collections in nineteenth-century British literature, criticism, and history are strong. In addition, the Ada B. Nisbet Archive, with its fine collection of first editions and other materials on Dickens and Victorian culture, is located in Special Collections. All seminar members will have borrowing privileges while at UCSC, and bibliographies of supplemental materials will be provided to aid their work on their seminar projects. A library tour and orientation will take place during the first week, and participants will have access to the institution’s rare Dickens books and original serial parts. Summer Scholars will be able to interact with rare Dickens texts and discover open-access online resources that they can use to connect their students with Dickensian texts and images, including the original serial parts of Dickens’s novels, illustrated texts, and Dickens’s journalism. We will talk about how they can most effectively make use of these materials in their classrooms.

 

Computing

Though NEH Summer Scholars are strongly encouraged to bring their own laptops, computers will be available for their use.