literature Courses 2025–2026

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 2025 and 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.

2025

• Passion and Violence in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy, January-March 2025. SOLD OUT.
• Close Reading Anne Sexton, January 2025.
• Close Reading Sylvia Plath, February 2025. SOLD OUT.
• Bloomsbury: Art and Politics, February-March 2025.
• Iris Murdoch and Art course, March-May 2025. SOLD OUT.
• Oscar Wilde course, March-May 2025. Bookings now closed.
• Lecture for Peace: Lewis Carroll, the Wonderland books, 23 March 2025
• Close Reading Coleridge, April 2025.
• Comedy and Irony in the Young Jane Austen course, May 2025. SOLD OUT
• Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death, May-June 2025. SOLD OUT.
• Close Reading Tennyson, June 2025.
• Close Reading Mary Oliver, June 2025.
• Close Reading Shelley, September 2025.
• Lecture for Peace: Woolf, Between the Acts, 6 September 2025.
• London in Literature I, September-October 2025.
• Women and Power in 20thC Fiction: 1950s-1980, September-November 2025.
• Close Reading Keats, November 2025.
• George Orwell: Power, Freedom, Decency, November-December 2025.
• Elizabeth von Arnim: Women, Men and Dogs course, October-December 2025.
• Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Lecture, 7 December 2025.
• Lecture for Peace: Trojan Women, 14 December 2025.
• Close Reading Poems about Winter, 14 and 21 December 2025.

2026

• Shakespeare and Euripides: Romance Plays, Jan–Feb 2026
• Close Reading Emily Dickinson, January 2026
• Literary Gardens Course I, Jan–March 2026
• Katherine Mansfield Course: Stories of Love. March-April 2026
• Close Reading Walt Whitman, February 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
• Toni Morrison Course, May-June 2026
• Literary Gardens Course 2, Sept-Nov 2026
• London in Literature Course 2, Sept-Nov 2026
• Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny course, September-October 2026.
• Brontes Course (to be confirmed)

Live online lectures and seminars via zoom.

For our live online literature Seasons, see this page.

More courses for 2026-27 will be added in the coming months

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A list of past online lectures and seasons since May 2020 can be found here.

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.