http://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/universe.html
I just came back from the week-long Dickens Universe proj
ect at the University of Santa Cruz where I co-taught a graduate workshop with Elsie Michie from Rice University. The Universe is an annual event, supported by an academic consortium, of which TAU is a member. Each year a Dickens novel is chosen and a slew of lectures, talks, workshops and events is organized around it. This year the novel was "Great Expectations" and the details of the program can be found at the link attached.
My general impression is that the Universe is trying too hard to be all things to all people. The audience is very mixed: academic, semi-academic (high school teachers and students), and non-academic (Dickens lovers, mostly retirees). It is inevitable that some events, such as the daily Victorian tea and the Grand Ball, cater to the non-academics who pay the bills. In fact, this makes for a fun atmosphere. But the plenary lectures suffer from trying to be both accessible and scholarly and sometimes being neither.
This said, the workshop I taught was very exciting. The graduate students, from several universities in the US, were good (almost as good as our own!). And I also participated in a professional workshop on Victorian science, which was renamed an "intellectual spa" in the spirit of the Universe.
Santa Cruz itself is caught in a time warp, with a bunch of superannuated hippies preaching universal love and smoking organic pot. But the coffee-shops are good and the boutiques even better.
The novel for next year is "Bleak House", my favorite. So I suppose I could put up with more Victorian teas.
