Our core of resident British faculty are joined each semester by a cadre of Visiting American faculty members from our home University of Evansville and our fine Partner Colleges.  A semester at Harlaxton is often a “life-changing” experience for faculty members as well as students, if responses of Harlaxton faculty are any guide.

Why Teach Abroad?

Well, why not?  It is the only chance most of us will have in our entire lives to live in a magnificent stately home like Harlaxton Manor, to do the work we most love, and to do so under the most favourable of conditions. 

As with students, our personal vistas as faculty members are broadened, our human sympathies deepened, and our engagement with our whole world expanded.  There is opportunity to meet British and European scholars in our own disciplines, to visit British universities, and to experience the rich education always brought by travel—our own “Grand Tour,” as it were.  Further, we can share this experience with our families: spouses and children are welcome and usually become fully engaged, in their own ways, with the life of Harlaxton Manor and Harlaxton College, as well as with local schools and communities.

Teaching Here

Working within the context of, and supported by, the core interdisciplinary course in British Studies (required of all students, taught by a team of resident British faculty members, and usually attended by all faculty and many spouses), each Visiting Faculty member teaches three three-credit courses in his or her own discipline.

Classes are small. Academic support services are the best you will find, anytime in your career (with allowances for the fact that we are not a large technical university). Committee work and faculty politics are virtually non-existent. Days and weeks are enriched with travel and cultural opportunities. Library and technological resources range from adequate to excellent. Students are good. Colleagues are supportive. So for most of us, it is an opportunity to return to our first love of teaching—and in a most beautiful of settings.

Visiting Faculty members and families have “rooms” or “flats” in the Manor itself, usually in one of the elegant State Bedrooms—though each of these historic rooms is fully equipped with connecting point and wireless technology. Meals are shared in the Refectory. The family flats have small kitchens, but why cook?

Services of nurse and doctor are available. Shuttle buses run on regular daily schedules into our market town of Grantham as well as to the mainline railway station there. Shuttles deliver us to and from church. Local schools cooperate with our families and provide a very special experience for faculty children.

It is good faculty development. It is a good way to live!

Other Information

Other pages of interest might include:

• Practical Tips for Visiting Faculty, a collection of “bits and bobs” shares the experiences of others who have come before you and seeks to help you with what one writer has called “the daily bookkeeping of existence” in a sometimes-strange land.
• The Faculty Handbookis a guide to the academic life as conducted at Harlaxton College.
• Want to know more about the type of faculty member that chooses to teach abroad, then check out our Faculty Profiles.
• Lastly, why not check out the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions.