June 2026 Modules

Aelfric of Eynsham was the most prolific writer in Old English. He left behind homilies, biblical and political commentary, letters, and other materials. This module will dig into his series of homilies titled Lives of Saints, homilies in Old English retelling the life and times of individual saints organized according to the church calendar.

Why are the works of J.R.R. Tolkien still so relevant to us in the 21st century? In this course, we will look at some of the central themes of his novels, including Family, Home, Good vs. Evil, and Loss, exploring how Tolkien is still speaking to us almost fifty years after his death.
There are no required texts for this course, however, you may find having a copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings very useful (any edition).

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: War and Home
	Discussion 1: Why is Tolkien still relevant?
Week 2	Lecture 2: Family, friendship, and fellowship
	Discussion 2: Hope and Heroes
Week 3	Lecture 3: Good and Evil
	Discussion 3: Fantasy: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation
Week 4	Lecture 4: Gender and Race
	Discussion 4: Nature and the Landscape

Unlock profound imagery and meaning in just a few words. This module explores the timeless art of haiku, blending theory with live practice. Each week, dive into the essence of the shortest form of poetry, from its core principles and spiritual roots with a special guest scholar, to its classic and modern masters. Then, immediately apply your insights in a collaborative workshop where your own haiku will come to life. Theory one day, transformation the next. Craft your visions, one word at a time.

Course Outline:

Week One
• Introduction to haiku
Week Two
• Cultural/Religious connections to Haiku with guest speaker Dr. Robert Steed
Week Three
• Haiku Classic masters: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Masaoka Shiki
Week Four
• Modern Haiku
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This two-module series introduces friends who are ready to try writing to some tools of the craft. Nearly a century ago, Dorothea Brande wrote Becoming a Writer — a guide to discovering writing that really hasn’t been outdone since! We use Brande’s guidance, journaling, writing experiments, and writing prompts to discover the individual student’s optimal writing conditions and strengths as well as to develop their repertoire of skills and techniques. The cohort will build trust in each other and the always-supportive Collaborative Feedback Method as they optionally share their pieces and read encouragingly for each other.

Module 2 Course Outline:

Week Five
• Story Development
Week Six
• Story 2
Week Seven
• Make it your own!
Week Eight
• Story 3
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This is the textual language of the early classical Chinese philosophical and literary tradition, bearing a relationship to modern forms of Chinese like that of classical Latin to a modern Romance language. Just as one does not need to know Italian to study Latin, no prior knowledge of modern forms of Chinese is needed to study the classical language. This language served as a kind of "lingua franca" throughout East Asia for much of history, much like the role Church Latin served in medieval Europe. In this module we will begin building the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary to eventually be able to engage with the texts associated with Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi. If a cohort forms, we can continue this study within a continuing sequence. We will focus exclusively on developing the ability to read it as a literary language.

Building upon our exploration of Garner's foundational fantasy The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, this follow-up course delves into its darker, more complex sequel, The Moon of Gomrath. Where our first course examined Garner's introduction to the magical world of Alderley Edge, this second instalment investigates his evolution as a writer through a narrative that Philip Pullman noted "presents a less conventional fantasy on every level." We'll analyse how Garner introduces the dichotomy between "High Magic" (controlled, patriarchal, rational) and "Old Magic" (wild, feminine, emotional), exploring how this tension manifests through Susan's profound connection to ancient Celtic forces and Colin's desperate attempts to save her. The course will particularly focus on Garner's emerging literary voice—more direct, stripped-down language and a less linear plot structure that would come to define his later work.

Our discussions will examine how The Moon of Gomrath subverts traditional fantasy conventions through its abrupt, ambiguous ending and its refusal to provide neat resolutions. We'll explore Garner's masterful evocation of "both the wonder and terror of the mythical forces that hide behind the mundane surface of the world," and how the book rewards readers on multiple levels—offering adventure for younger audiences while presenting complex philosophical themes for adults. The course will conclude by considering how this sequel, with its "deeply melancholic and powerful story," marked Garner's transition toward more challenging literary territory, establishing themes he would explore throughout his distinguished career. Join us as we continue our journey through Garner's mythic landscape, where ancient magic awakens in modern England with consequences both thrilling and profound.

Are you planning to travel to Japan and would like to communicate and get by? This crash course is designed for the traveler who wants to interact with the people who live there.

Learn to order with confidence at restaurants, buy at a konbini , and ask for directions. With guest speaker, Dr. Robert Steed, we will also also explore etiquette and cultural insights. Get ready for a wonderful adventure!

*Note: some familiarity with kana is is recommended when traveling in Japan, but is not required for this module.

Course Outline:

Week One
• Session 1: Greeting someone, saying thank you, expressing where you’re from, Kana practice.
• Session 2: Counting objects, days of the week, months, recognizing Kanji
Week Two
• Session 3: Buying things, at the konbini, recognizing Kanji
• Session 4: Getting around, recognizing Kanji
Week Three
• Session 5: Ordering Food
• Session 6: Arriving at a hotel and discovering the surroundings, recognizing Kanji
Week Four
• Session 7: Emergencies and asking for help, recognizing Kanji
• Session 8: Putting it all together with Dr. Robert Steed
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This is a reading-only module series for students of Japanese language who would like to improve their kanji recognition, vocabulary, and general reading skills in the language. The class is designed so new students may join at any point.

We will select a reading and take turns reading it together, word-by-word, sentence by sentence. Short stories, poetry, essays, manga, newspaper articles, blog entries and so on are all sources for material that we can draw upon, always keeping in mind that our selections should be suitable for Japanese language learners of intermediate level (approximately JLPT N4-to early N3 level, or having completed the first two Genki textbooks).

Recorded Series: All sessions of this series are recorded and provided afterwards to enrolled students in order to support the learning of the group.

Leadership is one of the most enduring and complex themes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. From reluctant leaders like Frodo to commanding figures such as Aragorn, Tolkien explores leadership not as a single style but as a dynamic interplay of voices, virtues, and choices.

This course examines leadership through Tolkien’s works using the GiANT 5 Voices framework, connecting modern leadership theory with literary analysis. Participants will identify their own leadership voice, analyze the leadership styles of key Tolkien characters, and explore practical leadership tools as they appear, explicitly or implicitly, within Middle-earth. The course culminates in applying these insights to real-world leadership contexts, helping learners grow as thoughtful, adaptable, and values-driven leaders.

This course is ideal for all readers of Tolkien, leaders, and lifelong learners interested in the intersection of literature, leadership, and personal development.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Session 1: Discovering Your Leadership Voice
	Session 2: Leadership in Tolkien's World
Week 2	Session 3: Leadership Voices in Middle-earth
	Session 4: Leadership Voices in Action
Week 3	Session 5: Leadership Tools
	Session 6: Tools at Work through Tolkien
Week 4	Session 7: Tapping into All Five Voices
	Session 8: How Would You Lead Middle-earth?

Focusing on The War of the Rohirrim, this module examines adaptation across mediums, cultures, and cinematic traditions. Students will analyze the film as an anime production, exploring its creators, aesthetic conventions, and cultural context, while also tracing its roots in Tolkien’s writings and Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth films. Emphasis will be placed on animation as a storytelling tool, character construction, visual language, and the challenges of expanding a mythic world through a new artistic form.

Old High German (OHG) is a group of Germanic dialects spoken in the Holy Roman Empire from the 6th to the 11th centuries, and although it does not have the same breadth of literature as Old English, it still boasts a number of fascinating texts, such as the alliterative poems Muspilli and Das Hildebrandslied and rhymed poems like Das Ludwigslied and Otfrid of Weissenburg’s Evangelienbuch. The language is necessary for a complete understanding of Germanic Philology, and the corpus offers important material for students of mythology, folklore, comparative literature, religious studies and medieval culture.

Every iteration of this module takes into consideration the language skills and interests of the students, and each month will focus on different texts and progress at a different speed. Anything from the Merseburger Zaubersprüche to the works of Notker Labeo is open for our enjoyment and edification.

Prerequisites: Participants should be familiar with at least one Germanic language (for example: Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German or Gothic).

Note: All sessions will be live recorded and shared with all enrolled students afterward for review and to allow those who cannot attend live to still participate in the class.

This module provides a broad survey of Oz's remarkable longevity as a franchise over the 20th and 21st centuries. We will discuss how Oz operates as a quintessentially American fairy tale that, like all fairy tales, is ripe for reinterpretation by each new generation.

Course Outline:

Week One
• Session 1: Introduction to L. Frank Baum and the Oz franchise/The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)
• Session 2: Bringing Oz to the big screen — The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)
Week Two
• Session 3: Oz as 1970s Musical Extravaganza -- The Wiz (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1978)
• Session 4: Oz as 1980s Dark Fantasy -- iReturn to Oz (dir. Walter Murch, 1985)
Week Three
• Session 5: Oz as Literary Fiction -- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
• Session 6: Oz Reinterpreted for the 21st Century: Wicked — Part One (dir. John Chu, 2024)
Week Four
• Session 7: Oz Reinterpreted for the 21st Century, continued: Wicked — For Good (dir. John Chu, 2025)
• Session 8: Oz as American mythology — screening clips of other Ozadaptations not previously covered, as we discuss the question "What makes Oz so pervasive in American culture?"
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“I tell you there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”

Let’s read George MacDonald’s darkest fantasy! Exploring his family’s haunted residence, Mr. Vane uncovers a portal to a strange mirror dimension. He plunges into a parallel realm where ravens speak, skeletons do battle, and sleepers dream of a world redeemed… And where Lilith, exile of Eden, holds dominion.

A mesmerizing allegory of death and salvation, Lilith exerted a powerful influence on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. H.P. Lovecraft hailed MacDonald’s novel for its “compelling bizarrerie.”

The Art of Healthy Living is an interactive wellness module designed to help participants create sustainable habits that support physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Through a holistic approach, the course explores nutrition, movement, rest, stress management, relationships, and healthy habit formation.

This course is ideal for those who are looking for practical and sustainable tools to improve their lifestyle, build healthier routines, and develop a more mindful and balanced approach to everyday living.

Course Outline:

Week One
• Session 1: What Does “The Art of Healthy Living” Mean?
• Session 2: The Art of Nutrition
Week Two
• Session 3: The Art of Rest: Sleep, Rest & Recovery
• Session 4: The Art of Movement
Week Three
• Session 5: The Art of Stress Management
• Session 6: The Art of Healthy Habits
Week Four
• Session 7: The Art of Relationships
• Session 8: The Art of Creating a New Healthy Living Plan
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One of the most crucial elements of education for millennia was teaching the ability to harness the potential of the memory. From the time of Homer until the 19th century, bards and bureaucrats both would have used established methods to organize and categorize their thoughts and remember crucial pieces of information. The legendary memories of men from Homer to Cicero to Shakespeare had less to do with their unique genius and more to do with their application of ancient methods of memorization, that can still be learned today. In this module, students will learn the ancient memorization techniques that allowed bards to recite thousands of lines of poetry and Shakespeare's actors to perform dozens of complicated monologues, and discover its applications to life in the 21st century.

Descend into the medieval ‘Dark Zone,’ a world beneath the surface where dragons coil, cave-witches curse, and the earth itself becomes a site of danger, revelation, and transformation. This course plunges into the rich subterranean imagination of Old and Middle English literature, tracing caves, hollows, and underground spaces from the tenth through the sixteenth century.

Moving between sweeping thematic frameworks and analytical close reading, we will examine how caves function as mythic thresholds, spiritual testing grounds, and spaces of exile, prophecy, and refuge. Through attentive readings of canonical and lesser-known texts, students will discover how medieval writers used the underground to think through fear, faith, gender, power, and the limits of the known world.

Course Outline:

Week One
• Session 1: Let’s go spelunking! Plato’s Republic, Jung and more
• Session 2: Primordial ‘Earth halls’ in Old English poetry
Week Two
• Session 3: Subterranean worlds in Beowulf
• Session 4: Arthurian Caves
Week Three
• Session 5: Mapping Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's Green Chapel
• Session 6: Saturn’s “derke cote”: occult caves in Chaucer’s poetry
Week Four
• Session 7: Anchorites and cave-witches
• Session 8: Wookey Hole: a case study of a cave, history, and cultural imagination through time
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This module explores the first book in the series, which started it all: The Hunger Games (2008).

Series Outline:

What lessons do the Capitol and Districts have to teach us? What warnings should we heed? What road leads from here to Panem? Over the course of five months, participants in these SPACE modules will read and discuss a modern classic of dystopian storytelling, The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins.

In this hybrid series, each week will include one lecture and one live discussion. The lectures will examine the inspirations behind, allusions in, and questions posed by that month's novel. In live discussions, participants will share their insights on, interpretations of, and reactions to the story. Together we will consider why this series has spoken to so many readers and explore how its messages remain relevant today.

Students will be asked to read one book over the course of each month in whatever format they choose. All of these novels are available in print, ebook, and audio format.

(Warning: The Hunger Games series include descriptions - for a young-adult audience - of substance abuse, physical abuse, violence, and death.)

Series Outline:

• Module 1: The Hunger Games (2008)

• Module 2: Catching Fire (2009)

• Module 3: Mockingjay (2010)

• Module 4: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020)

• Module 5: Sunrise on the Reaping (2025)

This module explores the first book in the series, which started it all: The Hunger Games (2008).

Series Outline:

What lessons do the Capitol and Districts have to teach us? What warnings should we heed? What road leads from here to Panem? Over the course of five months, participants in these SPACE modules will read and discuss a modern classic of dystopian storytelling, The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins.

In this hybrid series, each week will include one lecture and one live discussion. The lectures will examine the inspirations behind, allusions in, and questions posed by that month's novel. In live discussions, participants will share their insights on, interpretations of, and reactions to the story. Together we will consider why this series has spoken to so many readers and explore how its messages remain relevant today.

Students will be asked to read one book over the course of each month in whatever format they choose. All of these novels are available in print, ebook, and audio format.

(Warning: The Hunger Games series include descriptions - for a young-adult audience - of substance abuse, physical abuse, violence, and death.)

Series Outline:

• Module 1: The Hunger Games (2008)

• Module 2: Catching Fire (2009)

• Module 3: Mockingjay (2010)

• Module 4: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020)

• Module 5: Sunrise on the Reaping (2025)