A Master's Year in the Schwarzman Centre

While studying this past year as a master's student in Victorian literature, most of my time was spent learning and studying in the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Previously, I spent the 2023-2024 academic year as a visiting student in English here in Oxford, an experience that landed me within the English Faculty’s former home in the St Cross Building. While I came to love the English Faculty’s former home for its unassuming brutalist aesthetics, the round classical arches that first welcomed me into the illuminated atrium of the Schwarzman Centre visually affirmed the University’s commitment to and belief in the humanities. 

It's been incredible to have a centralised space for the arts and humanities to come together. Sitting in the building's common spaces, I've encounter musicians, philosophers, historians, English students, and theologians. There is a distinct shared energy brought by these individuals, informed by their fervent intellects and hunger for a humanities education. 

The building serves as a space where true interdisciplinary learning and collaboration becomes possible. My orchestra rehearses in the downstairs recital hall. I've attended a Modern Languages research symposium on the ground floor. I often walk past groups of AI researchers conversing over cups of coffee. This excitement not only for one's own discipline, but for the humanities at large, pervades the building's seminar rooms too, which have served as the physical home of my learning this past year. 

Throughout the building's classroom spaces, my peers and I have presented on novel aspects of Victorian literary criticism, encountered 19th-century manuscripts, listened to seminars by some of the field's leading scholars, and debated our differing interpretations of seminal works. But to have these discussions within the space of the Schwarzman is to engage with the greater beating heart of the humanities in Oxford—a force now centred in and emanating from the Schwarzman Centre itself.