toni Morrison course 2026

Toni Morrison Course 2026

Live online course 2026.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is one of the most celebrated authors in the world and an essential voice in modern American literature. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and was described by the Nobel Committee as someone ‘who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality’.

Morrison’s rich narratives have redefined American literature and offer powerful visions of African American history and culture. Her novels are often ambitious in scope and engage in questions of history, narrative, race, and gender through poetic and inventive storytelling. Key to Morrison’s style is a sustained focus on beauty, violence, and struggle in relation to Black identity and community as well as the continuing legacies of slavery and its fraught aftermath. To read Morrison is to be introduced to her distinctive and masterful storytelling and to be challenged by an insistent and expansive questioning of social, historical, and ethical concerns and our understanding of the world.

In this course, we will study four of Toni Morrison’s most compelling novels. Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye (1970) is the story of a young African American girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio after the Great Depression, who prays for blue eyes and their allure of whiteness. Song of Solomon (1977) solidified Morrison’s reputation through its lyrical story of Milkman Dead, a Midwestern man swept into the ambiguities of his family origins while navigating the historical shifts of the mid twentieth century. The classic Beloved (1987) is a haunting narrative of slavery and infanticide set after the civil war which is dedicated to the ‘Sixty Million and more’ of the transatlantic slave trade and is richly imagined from the historical case of Margaret Garner. Finally, Jazz (1992) explores love, obsession, and violence in Black urban life in Harlem in the 1920s.

Reading List

The Bluest Eye (1970)
Song of Solomon (1977)
Beloved (1987)
Jazz (1992)

Four sessions, weekly, 21 May to 11 June 2026 with Alex Calder, University of Cambridge.

Link

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Speech (written text and recording)

Course fees

£210 full price
£190 CAMcard holders
£190 students
Prices include VAT at 20%

Recordings

This is a 4-week course, with a live online lecture and seminar each week. The lectures are recorded so that participants can listen again during the course, and for 2 weeks afterwards, if they wish. The seminars are not recorded.

Zoom link for the course

We will send you a Zoom link at least 24 hours before the course begins. Please let us know in good time if the link does not arrive, so that we can re-send.

If you cannot attend a course you have booked

Please note that, because places are limited, we cannot usually give refunds if you cannot attend a course. But if you contact us in advance, we might be able to transfer your booking to a different course.

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