2025 marks the 10th meeting of the Belfast Summer School.
You are warmly invited to join us in Belfast from Monday 21st July until Friday 25th July 2025. If you’re unable to attend in-person, we’re meeting online from 30th June until 11th July 2025.
From humble beginnings …
Ever since I attended the London Summer School as a student in 2005, and taught at the Lampeter Summer Workshop in 2011-2013, I had dreamt about organising a Summer School in Belfast.
My colleague, Kerry Phelan, and I spent a weekend together in early 2015 to plan the Summer School. With the support of the Classical Association in Northern Ireland, I booked a church hall close to Queen’s University. I sent a few emails, posted on social media, and crossed my fingers.
12 students enrolled in Beginners and Intermediate Classical Greek classes. Kerry and another colleague, Stephen McCarthy gave guest lectures, and we ended the week by presenting certificates to the students.
The Belfast Summer School was born!
The following year, we added Latin to the syllabus and relocated to the Open University in Belfast. After that we moved to Queen’s University Belfast, where we continue to meet.
The Belfast Summer School has gone global
The pandemic put paid to in-person teaching for two summers, and the Belfast Summer School courses moved completely online. This proved to be an opportunity to expand our horizons: since location was no longer an issue, students from around the world were joining our programmes.
We scheduled classes at times which would work for participants in a number of time zones: UK and Ireland, western and eastern Europe, the middle east, far east, USA, Canada, south America.
Some students were joining classes early in the morning, others late at night, and we made it work!
Each year we host a number of guest lectures, both online and in-person. We have welcomed some of the biggest names in Classics, such as Caroline Lawrence, Michael Scott, Roy Gibson and Elton Barker. You can watch most of these on the Youtube channel.
After the success of the online venture in 2020, I began offering year-round online continuing courses in Latin and Classical Greek, and standalone courses on various themes focusing on the ancient world.
Since 2022, the Summer School has offered both online courses and in-person courses.
To date, the Belfast Summer School has welcomed over 430 individual students online and in-person, many of whom attend year after year, from 28 countries across all five continents.
If you choose to join us in Belfast, be warned: it’s not all study! In the past, we’ve had group outings, and we have our Summer School Social at the best pizza restaurant in Belfast. The in-person Summer School provides an opportunity to build our Classics Academy community. My favourite memories are those of having some craic in the café at lunchtime, intriguing questions following the guest lectures, and relaxing over dinner with everyone.
What would you like to see at the Belfast Summer School in 2025?
Tell me here: https://forms.gle/JGCfywUwtPBtoobR8
