Princeton University and the Princeton English Department successfully completed another summer of the Bread Loaf School of English and Oxford University initiative.  In the summer of 2013, four of our outstanding rising seniors attended the Bread Loaf program at Lincoln College, Oxford.  Adoley Ammah-Tagoe, Vivienne Chen, Dorathea Thomas, and Albertine Wang engaged in an intensive six weeks of literary study and independent research towards their senior theses.  They each took a graduate course taught by an Oxford/Bread Loaf faculty member on topics ranging from “Atlantic Crossings, 1798 - 1900” to “The Aesthetic Life of the Nineteenth Century” to “The Modernist Novel” and “The European Novel.”   Princeton also sent Professor Sarah Rivett, a member of the English faculty, to run a proseminar on thesis writing and research.  The proseminar included a trip to the Bodleian Library to view such treasures as Tolkein’s manuscript drawings and the correspondence of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.  We also visited the Ashmolean Museum for a fantastic private tour that focused on the politics of representing art and material cultures.  Venturing beyond Oxford, we spent a Friday afternoon in the wonderful gardens of Blenheim Palace and a Thursday evening in London for an exclusive silent night tour of the Dennis Severs’ House.  With its world-renowned libraries and wealth of cultural history, Oxford is the ideal setting both to prepare students for thesis work and to foster their intellectual growth as internationally adept scholars and citizens.

"Being a Princeton Bread Loaf Fellow was without question the best way I could have spent the summer before my senior year. The program provided total academic immersion for six weeks, with a great balance of independent thesis research and guided instruction from our Oxford professors. All four of us benefitted from building relationships with resident faculty. Our courses expanded and changed our thesis topics in different ways, even when the subjects were not directly related. Additionally, the chance to research at Oxford's peerless Bodleian library was an amazing part of the summer. Research at the Bodleian is truly thrilling. I experienced so much intellectual growth as I poured through the expansive collection and shaped my ideas into a thesis topic with Professor Rivett's help. The Oxford summer was the perfect way to begin my senior thesis research."

Adoley Ammah-Tagoe ‘13