Dr. Hamish Williams

This module covers some of the basic skills which will improve your academic, scientific, and professional writing. ‘Academic Writing Skills’ is ideal for those who are looking to start an undergraduate or postgraduate course, to resume/advance their academic career, or simply to improve the objectivity, accuracy, and clarity of their writing style. Eight individual lessons cover the following topics: how to structure your academic essay; how to argue in an academic essay: evidence, logic, analogy, and other reasoning skills; how to conduct a literature review; how to use citations and references accurately and effectively; things to avoid in academic writing (Part I and II); how to reduce subjective style; how to write successful funding proposals. Hamish Williams (PhD in literary studies) has written 4 books (academic and fiction) and published over 25 academic articles and chapters.

While the idea of establishing an ‘actual’ utopia has been disparaged since the first half of the twentieth century from socio-political perspectives (e.g. the failed age of ideology from 1917-1945), literary and related cultural narratives have a long history of imagining and representing utopia (also paradise, the golden age, etc.). These utopias often function to criticize the problematic social norms and climates of their times as well as providing progressive imaginings for a better future, often based on certain ideals or virtues. In this module, we go on a chronological tour of different representations of utopia, including: the paleolithic utopia of hunter-gatherers (e.g. as discussed in Harari’s Homo Sapiens) (before 10,000 BC), the Bronze Age utopia of Minoan Crete (4000-1400 BCE), Plato’s mythical island of Atlantis (ca 400 BC), the pastoral utopia of the Roman poet Virgil (ca 40 BC), the New World utopia of Sir Thomas More (1516), the Enlightened, reasoned utopia of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Tolkien’s fantasy utopia of Númenor (ca 1940), and more.

When one thinks of ancient, pre-classical civilisations, one thinks of Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, and, not least, Minoans. The Minoan civilisation, discovered around 1900 by English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, has often been styled as the first major European civilisation, equally proficient in technology and the arts, with a sea empire spanning across the Eastern Aegean. But how much of what we imagine about the Minoans is truthful and how much is modern mythmaking?

In this module, we will examine the immense impact which the discovery of Minoan Crete and its integration with the classical myths of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth has had on literature, movies, the arts, and even computer games. We will examine the works of Sir Arthur Evans, Pablo Picasso, Nikos Kazantzakis, Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Poul Anderson, and Stephen King, among others. In so doing, we will explore such key 'Minoan' concepts and phenomena as: the sublime, utopianism, feminism, irrationality and the unconscious, mythmaking, and European identity.

Based on the preceptor's edited volume, Tolkien and the Classical World, this module takes students on a tour of the classical influences and ideas on the life, writings, and thought of English fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, while also introducing seminal Greco-Roman texts to those without any classical background.

Based on Hamish's recently published book Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics, this new module takes us on a tour of utopian and dystopian places in The Fellowship of the Ring, journeying through the pastoral bliss of the Shire, the sublime encounter in Woody End, the perilous Old Forest, the abandoned ruins at Weathertop, Elrond's paradise in Rivendell, the abandoned wilderness in Hollin, the undergound realm of Moria, and the timeless utopia of Lothlorien. In every class, our approach will be to read together important passages and discuss the representations of different spaces and societies in Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring.