Study Abroad: Life Changing

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Every summer for nearly ten years, English lecturer (and Emmy Award-winner) Michael Olmert has taken 12 to 16 Maryland undergraduates on a grand - and intense - three week adventure to England. It has an official title of course -"Study Abroad in London and East Anglia." But the title hardly does the course justice. As Olmert says, his students "seem staggered by how much their intellectual horizons are expanded. And I'm as certain as I can be, it's not me; it's London, a place that once changed my life forty years ago."

This summer, Olmert wrote to University President Dr. C.D. "Dan" Mote, Jr. about the trip and the impact it has on his students. It is an outstanding example of how Study Abroad - one of Dr. Mote's goals for every Maryland student - can change lives and help students look at the world in a new way.

The London and East Anglia Study Abroad Course (Honors 318)
By Michael Olmert
Department of English

English Lecturer Mike Olmert with his students in Oxford - pointing to a building at Christ Church College made famous in a movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

The course has six focal points: British HISTORY, LITERATURE, DRAMA, ARCHITECTURE, ART HISTORY, and ARCHAEOLOGY. The course meets every day (no break days) at 9:30 am and we spend the next 13 hours together. We walk and I talk and point and they take copious notes. We go to museums, historic houses and sites, galleries, lectures. We also do behind the scenes tours with scholarly friends of mine at the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Linnean Society, Parliament, the National Theatre, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and archaeological sites.

We go to the house museums of Keats, Dickens, Darwin, Sir John Soane. We pay special attention to Roman and medieval London. We go to about 15 churches, four cathedrals, a Christopher Wren-style 18th-century synagogue, two medieval castles, and two ruined monastic sites.

	Archaeologist Helen Paterson in the village of Castle Acre lectures about the ruins of a 12th century priory.

For a contrast, we also spend 3 days in the tiny East Anglian town of Castle Acre, where the kids live among a 15th-century church, a ruined monastic priory of the 13th century, and a Motte-and-Bailey castle. They attend (and enjoy--Jews, Muslims, and Christians) evensong at Canterbury and Norwich cathedrals. When we're in London, we go to a play every night; last year we went to 17 plays (no musicals!). The kids get to stand up on their hind legs in Parliament and place their hands on the dispatch boxes (I have a tame MP who gets us a special private tour).

They visit with scholars working on the Sir Joseph Banks papers; they see the William Smith 1815 "Map that Changed the World" at the Geological Society. They hold in their hands the plant specimens that Linnaeus worked on in 1735. Or the botanically perfect plant collages that Mrs. Mary Delany, a friend of Dr. Johnson, made in the 1770s. After they return to the States, they write 30 pages of papers for me: three short ones and a 12-pager on a topic of abiding concern to them that they picked up in England.

This truly is a life-changing course. They will never be the same. One Maryland student, English major Ginny Sampson (B.A., 2002), took this course in the summer of 2001; she was just awarded her Ph.D. in English (Romantic Poets) from Durham University in 2007. Many others have also returned to England to get fine MPhils or MAs: Doug Kern '06 and Jennifer Brooke '05 just did. A number of others are studying there now. Based on her undergraduate paper that Hannah Baker '04 wrote for me after this course, she convinced the editors of "The Oxford English Dictionary" to move back the earliest use of the unusual verb 'to botanize'--because she'd seen it in a Mary Delany letter. Baker went on to get an MA in English at College Park and is now working on a Ph.D. dissertation at York University in the UK.

Maryland students enter the Church of St. Lawrence in Castle Rising, Norfolk, England.

This is the sort of intense immersion that no semester-long course in the states can ever reproduce. Every day, I kid you not, students say to me: "I want to spend the rest of my life studying the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Then, the next day it's Darwin, or the Archaeology of Shakespeare's Rose, or modern infill architecture, or Roman Britain, or St. Thomas More, or the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the amazing JMW Turner collection in the Tate Britain gallery. And it's the same when they see Oxford for the first time. Or the Avebury Stone Circle. Or when one of them gets pulled up on stage at the Globe during a performance of a Shakespeare play they've only just read on the plane coming over. It's constantly stunning.

Of course, it's demanding and tiring; and I've no time for my own research and writing. But I love it. There's something about talking for 3 weeks straight from no notes - apart from the building or historic site before you. I love it. And I'm quite prepared, like Macbeth, to 'die in harness,' teaching this one....

Michael Olmert holds a Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Maryland. He is a frequent contributor to Colonial Williamsburg Magazine and has often appeared in Smithsonian Magazine and The Washington Post . He is also a prodigious screenwriter who has won numerous awards, including three Emmys. Olmert, a specialist in English literature, has been engaging students at Maryland for 20 years. He was inducted into the Maryland Alumni Hall of Fame in 2005.

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