Space for Reflection: The Wadham Experience 2025

Across two remarkable weeks this summer, Wadham College welcomed an international cohort of high-achieving professionals and leaders for a unique intellectual retreat. The Wadham Experience invited participants to step away from the demands of everyday life and immerse themselves in rigorous academic exchange, cultural exploration and thoughtful community.

As one of the participants put it, “Oxford is more truly an experience than a place.” The Wadham Experience distills that experience into a compact programme of academic and cultural sessions, organised around a theme. This year the college offered two distinct themes: Civilisation on the Edge and Attention in a Cacophonous World.

Civilisation on the Edge featured academic sessions and tutorials led by Wadham Fellows including Professor Peter Thonemann and Professor Tehila Sasson. These covered topics from Athenian democracy to John Maynard Keynes via the great social contract theorists of the early modern period. Participants were also treated to a discussion with Dr William Poole and the college librarian Tim Kirtley on Wadham’s role in the scientific revolution, as well as a print workshop at Christ Church College and a look behind the scenes at the Ashmolean museum.

Professor Thonemann noted: “The highlights for me were the intense and absorbing conversations, which developed over lunches and dinners, informal drinks and in the tutorials that closed off the week.” As this suggests, the intellectual energy flowed both ways, with participants and Fellows challenging and learning from each other over the week.

In Attention in a Cacophonous World, the focus shifted to questions about really looking and listening in an age of distraction. Tutorials and seminars led by Professor Eric Clarke and Professor Carolin Duttlinger, among others, explored the shape of consciousness and thought in artistic, ethical, and scientific domains. Once again there was intellectual cross-fertilisation with other activities including an art session at the Ruskin School, a tour of the college library’s treasures, and a visit to a luthier’s workshop.

Alongside intellectual exploration, these weeks were also about pause – cultivating space to reflect and connect. Mornings opened with yoga or quiet reading in the gardens; conversations begun in the academic sessions stretched through walking tours and into evening fireside chats with leaders in their fields, from theatre to AI. Evenings brought feasts in Hall and dinners in Oxford’s storied venues before late-night confabulations in the Wadham Experience common room. “The stimulus and enjoyment are reciprocal,” said Dr Jane Garnett, one of the academic leads. “As they explore, the participants energise us into asking different questions.”

As we look ahead to future iterations of The Wadham Experience, we hope more alumni will join us – not only to reconnect with College, but to rekindle that sense of intellectual adventure that first brought you here.

If you’re interested in returning to Wadham for a future Experience or would like to recommend someone to join, please get in touch with us via https://we.wadham.ox.ac.uk/