London – City of Transformations
June 30, 2025 – July 20, 2025

English London is currently full and not accepting new applications. Waitlist currently closed. Please consider English Dublin.

Spend a few weeks living in London this summer, and get to know one of the world’s greatest cities as an insider, not just a tourist.

This is an opportunity to gain an intimate knowledge of London, discovering, walking and mapping the psychogeography of the contemporary capital while recovering the hidden traces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—such as the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor and the illuminated books of William Blake, which remain active nodes in the city’s cultural maps and provide major reference points in literature from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland to the graphic novel From Hell.

The program combines the study of the cultural history of London with the study of the shifting patterns of urban design and development in the city, comparing the great nineteenth-century transformations of the capital (for example Trafalgar Square, Regents Street) with more contemporary developments (e.g., Canary Wharf and the Docklands; the purged and reinvented sites of the 2012 Olympics; Shoreditch and the east end).

The program aims to trace and re-trace the many recurring patterns of demolition and development that have shaped London for two centuries, and an unfolding Romantic contestation of those changes that have persisted into the present.

Program enrollment is limited to maintain an intimate environment for discussion in the classroom and on the street.

Program Director: 

Professor Saree Makdisi, UCLA Department of English

Curriculum: 10-14 units

• English 169-Topics in Literature, circa 1700 to 1850: Romanticism and Revolution (5 units)
• English 182D/184-Topics in Romantic Literature/Capstone Seminar (5 units)*
• English 199-Individual Studies (optional 4 units)

*English majors who will have completed 4 upper-division English courses by the end of spring term will be registered in English 184 for capstone credit; all other students will be registered in 182D.

For more information, visit http://ieo.ucla.edu/travelstudy/English-London