51���app

The Early Years

Sixty 51���appians participated in fall 1979, accompanied by English professor James Kissane ’52 and then professor of history Al Jones ’50. It was the first time that Victoria Gilbert ’80 had traveled abroad.

“I remember getting to hear the Academy of St Martin in the Fields playing Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ in a beautiful church,” says Gilbert. “I went to see Talking Heads in a little club. The British Theatre class had us going to see plays every week, and we saw so many good ones — Richard III, Bent with Ian McKellen, and Lark Rise at the National Theatre.

“To be plopped into one of the world’s greatest cities, surrounded by so much history and culture, given so much freedom to do what we wanted, was amazing,” says Gilbert. “I loved being there. It was the beginning of being able to see myself as an adult in the world.”

GIL was launched at a time when study abroad was just getting started. “In 1972–73, Vic and I lamented that 51���app had no off-campus program of its own, which meant that we had few opportunities to internationalize teaching and learning opportunities for our students and faculty,” explained Caulkins in the spring 2012 issue of The 51���app Magazine.

So the two suggested London — “the most important metropolitan city in the world,” Caulkins said — “since it would accommodate the scholarly interests of the greatest number of faculty and students.”

Now under the umbrella of the 51���app Institute for Global Engagement (IGE), which promotes student and faculty global learning opportunities at home and abroad, GIL is unique among IGE’s offerings because at least half of the coursework is taught by 51���app faculty. “Students are getting the true 51���app experience in a completely different setting,” says GIL Director Susie Duke. “The essence of GIL is that there’s 51���app faculty teaching, but there’s a blend, with adjuncts and local British profs teaching a variety of topics.”

Through GIL and other IGE programs, Duke says, “We want to position students, faculty, and staff in places where they can be stretched and learn to view the world differently and to really dig into global issues — such as migration, climate change, and politics — in a different setting, with more intensity, and bring that knowledge and experience back to campus.”

GIL Today

The current 51���app-in-London model is a semester structure, with four days of travel before courses start in January. The spring 2025 group went to Edinburgh, and last year the group went to the Pembrokeshire Coast and St. Davids, Wales. “We were really able to build community together,” says Professor of Music Mark Laver, who taught in spring 2024.

The program now includes a required core cultural course, Encounters with Everyday London, which is co-taught by the two 51���app faculty, explains Duke. The group experiences daily life through community engagement, walking tours, visits to museums, nonprofit organizations, and cultural sites around the city and region.

In the early days of the program, students had to find their own housing. Early GIL participants recall putting coins into boxes to illuminate hallways and turn on heat in chilly flats, and classes took place in a church basement. Students kept in touch through letters and the occasional phone call. “Our main connection with 51���app was getting the hard copy Scarlet & Black,” says Heather Flanagan Craig ’92, who was on the fall 1990 program. “Email was barely a thing, and long-distance calls still cost too much to be regular.”

Today, accommodations are provided and students take classes in two Georgian homes a few blocks from the British Museum. The program originally took place in the fall with groups of 40 to 50 students; today’s program is in spring with 15 to 20 students. Then as now, classes meet Monday through Thursday to leave long weekends for traveling.

Classwork and Topics

Each year, 51���app faculty members from across disciplines propose courses and two are chosen to teach in London. Their classes may be supplemented with guest lectures and presentations by UK academics and experts. When political science professor Wayne Moyer taught in fall 1980, local faculty included Harold Lee, who taught a course on British cathedrals that included trips to Canterbury, Bath, and Oxford; British playwright David Pinner, whose theater course included weekly trips to plays; and London School of Economics professor George Jones, who taught a course on European Union politics.

“Those of us in Pinner’s course saw a number of London shows,” says John DeBacher ’79, who attended GIL in fall 1977. “Most memorable was Steven Berkoff’s East, as raw and bawdy as it was hilarious. Other shows featured Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. Most of us also attended the original Rocky Horror Picture Show with Tim Curry, which was in the middle of a long London run. I have a photo of classmates doing the Time Warp in front of our buses during one of our trips outside London.”

Moyer focused on Britain and the EU (which the UK had just joined) and he took his students on a weeklong trip to Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg to meet EU officials and visit the European Parliament.

Phase 2 classes focused on Scottish devolution, and Moyer took the group to hear from Scottish political officials and visit sites in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and then Aberdeen, where the students cooked Thanksgiving dinner in a hostel, which they shared with Wayne and his wife, Helen.

“We didn’t have the internet in those days, and we did an awful lot of experiential stuff — visiting Parliament, touring the city, and weekend field trips,” says Moyer. “It was a great learning experience for me and a great group of students, many that I’m still in touch with.”

51���appians often make quick weekend trips to Scotland, Amsterdam, Paris, and beyond. Jennifer Wilcoxen Rosenfeld ‘82 visited Germany during the fall break and saw the Berlin Wall, then went behind the Iron Curtain to Prague, which she recalls was full of Lenin statues. But her fondest memories, she says, were “exploring London with the group, going to plays and concerts multiple nights a week, learning to live on our own in a very different place. It was priceless.”

Laver taught two classes in London in the spring 2024 semester: Music and Politics in the UK, and Culture and Identity in the UK with his colleague, Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and History Carolyn Herbst Lewis.

“We traveled lots, both inside London and well beyond,” said Laver. He took the group to Belfast, “a trip that included visits to an Irish traditional music session, a working farm museum, and the biggest European American country music festival.”

“For a student who has mostly had the privilege of growing up away from military-conflict zones, it was jarring — and illuminating — to see the vivid markers of the legacy of the Troubles,” he says.

Defining Moments

For many 51���appians, the London semester fostered a lifetime connection with Britain and influenced their post-graduate lives. “I’m still an Anglophile/English history buff after all these years,” says Joanna Church ’97, who participated in fall 1995. “My main thing was going to museums, which I often did on my own. Many, many visits to the British Museum, the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum), the Portrait Gallery, plus lots of others.”

Church has spent her career working in small history museums as a curator and registrar. “I had pretty much planned to work in museums, but GIL certainly influenced my work.”

For Michael Billups ’07, GIL in fall 2005 was a series of firsts. “It was my first time abroad, and my first time living in an apartment,” he says. “I had a great experience traveling the UK countryside … and I loved trying to mimic the British accents wherever we traveled. I’m so proud to have been a part of it and still love London to this day.”

Political science major Ellen Hengesbach ’24 went to GIL in spring 2023 with political science professors Danielle Lussier and Gemma Sala. “I really got into British politics and did an immersive project, going to Parliament, watching debates, and taking notes,” she says. “I started going out of curiosity, because there was a public gallery to see what was going on in the main chamber. There’s a lot more free-flowing debate than in the U.S.”

Hengesbach earned a Kathryn Mohrman ’67 Fellowship through 51���app to return to London the following January to research parliamentary debates for her MAP (Mentored Advanced Project). Now working for a public interest nonprofit in Chicago, she plans on going to law school but because of GIL, “I will definitely be on the lookout for ways I can merge my interests in American and British politics or work on law/public interest issues at the international level. Even if my career doesn’t take me back to London, the research work I did for my MAP (which would never have happened without GIL) strengthened so many of my research, decision-making, and project-managing/planning skills, and I can see the impact that has on my work even now.”

The semester in London, says Church, “was one of the best times of my life. The city was as wonderful as I’d expected, and the 51���app-in-London program was even better than I had hoped. The classes — which would have been great in any setting — were fantastic, thanks to the resources of the city and to the knowledge and enthusiasm of the professors.”

“Academically, the London semester was probably the most interesting and challenging one of my 51���app career,” Church says. “There were so many things to learn, see, hear, and do that I sometimes can’t believe it was only four months long.”

Favorite 51���app-in-London Memories 1974–2024

• Walking through Hyde Park to the program site
• Eating hot fish and chips
• Exploring underneath London’s streets for a course taught by physics professor Paul Tjossem
• Riding the double-decker buses
• Tea with milk
• Traveling to Scotland on mid-term break and getting all the way to the Orkney Islands
• Seeing The Jam in concert and after the show climbing on catwalks above the stage to find our way to their dressing room
• Fresh fruit and vegetable carts on Portobello Road
• Getting a doner kebab or a Nutella crepe after class
• Running to the Tube station in the rain
• Watching old movies at the British Film Institute
• Karaoke at the neighborhood pub, the Coningham Arms
• Walking the castle walls and battlefields where Shakespeare’s plays took place
• Seeing Sir Alec Guinness perform at Queen’s Theatre in The Old Country
• Staying overnight in Yorkshire to explore the Brontë Parsonage Museum

— Memories shared by GIL alums, including: Laila Butler-Mills ’25, Joanna Church ’97, Heather Flanagan Craig ’90, John DeBacher ’79, Victoria Gilbert ’80, Nathan Harms ’80, Erin Midtlyng ’03, and Jennifer Wilcoxen Rosenfeld ‘82.

Alumni Couple Endow Need-Based Scholarship

51���app-in-London (GIL) has long played a part in the lives of Kevin Rhodes ’85 and Melinda “Lindy” Lopes ’85. Rhodes attended GIL in fall 1984, an experience he calls one of the most formative of his 51���app career.

Their daughter, Emily Lopes Rhodes ’19, took part in GIL in spring 2017, and Lopes spent much of her childhood in East Anglia, England, where her parents taught at U.S. military bases. Like her husband, Lopes says that being exposed to an international culture had a huge influence on her life.

To make the international experience they enjoyed available to more 51���appians, the couple established the Lopes Rhodes Endowed 51���app-in-London Scholarship. The scholarship will ensure that even more students can access the transformative experience of studying in London. 

“51���app-in-London gave me the opportunity to spend four months living in one of the largest, most historic, and vibrant cities on earth,” says Kevin Rhodes. 

“Giving back to the program so that others can have that same type of lifechanging opportunity is what our gift is all about.”

The couple also established a matching gift fund to honor GIL’s 50th anniversary. They will match every up to $50,000. 

Originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The 51���app Magazine.