literature Courses 2026
Lectures for peace
Since 2020, we have been offering special lectures to raise money for refugee charities. We have donated to Freedom from Torture, Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and others. Since June 2024, we now offer Lectures for Peace, raising money for Oxfam Gaza, Standing Together (Palestinian and Jewish peace movement) and refugee charity Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. All proceedings from these lectures are shared equally between the named charities. Details here.
Literature courses 2026
We offer a range of live online courses which run weekly or fortnightly. Each course focuses on a particular writer or theme. Each session lasts for two hours, with an hour-long lecture by a leading scholar, followed by a moderated seminar.
2026
• Shakespeare and Euripides: Romance Plays, Jan–Feb 2026
• Women Writers Season: Zora Neale Hurston, 17 January 2026
• Close Reading Emily Dickinson, January 2026. SOLD OUT.
• Literary Gardens Course I, Jan–March 2026
• Katherine Mansfield Course: Stories of Love. March-April 2026
• Close Reading Walt Whitman, February 2026
• Lecture for Peace: Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet?, 7 March 2026
• Iris Murdoch and the Natural World Course, March–May 2026
• Close Reading Terrance Hayes, April 2026
• Jane Austen’s Families Course, April-May 2026
• Odysseus the Storyteller: Trials and Return with Jan Parker, May 2026
• Iris Murdoch: Poems from an Attic lecture with Miles Leeson, 31 May 2026
• Toni Morrison Course, May-June 2026
• Close Reading Seamus Heaney, June 2026
• Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny Course, September-October 2026
• Close Reading Shelley Course 2, September 2026
• Literary Gardens Course 2, 27 September-6 December 2026
• Visions of Venice Course, September-November 2026
• Introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost with Fred Parker, 10 and 17 October 2026
• Lecture for Peace: Poetry of the Irish Peace Process with Mariah Whelan, 11 October 2026
• Anton Chekhov Course: Stories and Plays, 5-26 November 2026
• Close Reading Emily Dickinson Course 2, 8 and 15 November 2026
• Four Queens of Detective Fiction course, October-December 2026
• Close Reading Poems about Birds, 29 November and 6 December 2026
• Brontes Course (to be confirmed)
Live online lectures and seminars via zoom.
For our live online Virginia Woolf Season, see this page. The current Woolf Season runs until June 2026. Then a new Season will start in September 2026.
More courses for 2026-27 will be added in the coming months
From a participant:
Gaura Narayan of New York writes:
Dear Trudi,
I want to thank you and your team at Literature Cambridge for hosting these online sessions during the pandemic. The first one I attended was on George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as Female Bildungsroman with Clare Walker Gore in October 2020. Thereafter, I attended several other sessions including memorable ones on Siegfried Sassoon with Alison Hennegan and India in Mrs Dalloway and Refugee Tales with you. I have thoroughly enjoyed every single session that I have attended.I hope you will continue to host these even after the pandemic is a thing of the past as they have been enriching and they have put me in touch with people I would never have encountered without these, such as Shaista Tayabali, whose poetry collection Something Beautiful Travels Far I bought and read after sharing a Zoom room with her during your Refugee Tales session.