My exchange partner was having a cup of tea in my room yesterday afternoon, and we were talking about cultural differences between Princeton and Oxford. In Trinity College, single rooms come with two chairs, one of which my exchange partner was occupying; I, from my position in the other, noted how Princeton doesn’t provide you with a second chair—it’s almost as if the university doesn’t expect you to have people over. We got to talking, the two of us, about the kinds of social interchanges different kinds of furniture setups engender. At Princeton, where, in the absence of second chairs, many students bring their own couches, they might find themselves setting up their rooms so that the couch is angled towards a television, for DVDs or video games, or so that it provides enough seating for lots of people to cradle red plastic cups at a party. That’s usually in quads, though. Most single rooms in Princeton aren’t even large enough for a second chair. In Trinity (and, I can only assume, elsewhere in Oxford—I get the impression this is something larger than my college), meanwhile, where it is considered highly bizarre that American college students usually share bedrooms, my exchange partner and I were leaning towards each other on the edge of our chairs, drinking tea and engaged in conversation. Tea and sociability are standard hallmarks of the behavior in Oxford, I have found, to an extent that they are not in Princeton. People here are constantly wandering into each other’s rooms, are constantly putting the kettle on. People here take seriously the practice of socializing and of sociability. I don’t think that in Oxford you would be likely to hear the Princeton student’s common complaint that in order to see your friends, you need to schedule socializing into your calendar. Partly this is a function of the college system, and how small communities of people who live and eat in close proximity to each other are much more central to an Oxford life than disparate ties flung across a university campus. But I can’t help thinking it is also a function of the fact that Trinity puts two chairs in our rooms, and that when I arrived here, there was a teakettle sitting on the side table.

The performance of sociability, with all its rules and its rituals, appears organically in tea-time, but it is rigidly—and weirdly—enshrined in the institution of the formal dining-hall meal, which at Trinity occurs six days a week (the last of the six being an exceptionally formal meal known as “Guest Night,” to which I’ll come presently). The process of formal hall (as well as its frequency) varies from college to college, but my understanding is that at every college it is highly ritualized. At Trinity, you wear your academic gown over your regular clothes, the gown itself playing its own part to socially demarcate according (literally) to degree. You sit down to table, where the places are laid one next to the other so that you can’t sit in a corner by yourself; you have to join the crowd and talk to your neighbors. You can’t be late: at the time the meal is scheduled to start (or maybe a few minutes late, if high table—fellows (that is, faculty) and guests—is tardy to accumulate), a gavel is banged and the entire hall, amidst a scraping of chair legs, rises to its feet. The President of the college comes to the edge of the high-table dais; a Scholar (that is, a student who’s done well in her Preliminary exams) comes to the edge of the high-table dais from the other side, recites a Latin grace, bows to the President, the President says “amen,” the rest of us mumble an echo, and then we all sit down. We’re served a meal in a brisk and itself ritualized order: first the bread roll, then the soup or salad, then the meat or fish with its accompanying vegetables in an aluminum tray at the center of the table, then the pudding (dessert), which is usually drenched in an unbelievably sweet sauce. We drink water (once in a while a kid will bring a pint up from the college bar), and eat off utilitarian tableware. After an hour, we filter out in twos and threes—some to the bar or to a pub outside college, others back to their rooms to do work and consume yet more tea. It’s a bizarre thing, which has not yet ceased to fascinate me, so utterly different is it to what the college dining-hall meal is understood to be in Princeton. Pompous traditions of the gowns and the Latin grace aside, hall dinner demonstrates some interesting things about what social values Oxford feels is important: members of the college all dine together, all stand for grace together and all are served together. And yet members of the college are still served (I rather imagine the young women about our age who bring our plates and take them away must loathe we entitled brats), and members of the college are still insistently differentiated by degree, by the length of our gowns and the height of high table. One evening two weeks ago, I completely shocked my neighbors at the long, wooden table by mentioning that at Princeton, my college master waltzes into the dining hall at any old hour in gym clothes. Really: they didn’t know what to say in reply.

So far, all this is assimilable. Though elite universities as a genre may be more alike than they are different, there are nevertheless subtle differences—perhaps attributable to what happens when the elite-university model is filtered through the British and the American cultures respectively, perhaps down to the two institutions’ comparative age, perhaps down to the two different Christian traditions (and two different understandings of the role of religion in public life, see Latin grace, above) out of which the institutions respectively evolved. So far, all this can be subject to my amateur anthropologist’s eye—as tonight, when I met and made small talk with a couple new acquaintances next to whom I found myself sitting, and kept sneaking glances at the party at high table.

What I found more difficulty coping with, however, was Guest Night, to which I found myself going on the Friday of the first week of term. One of my new friends happened to have an extra spot for a guest (though you are encouraged to bring guests to Guest Night, you’re not required, and indeed you can bring or not bring a guest or two on any night), and invited me to join him; I, because I am studying abroad and therefore always open to new experiences, accepted. It was one of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had, and yet I have perhaps never felt so uncomfortable at a dinner’s conclusion. At Guest Night (which costs about four times as much as regular hall), there are four courses—the same as the rich, luxurious ones served at high table—and most people will bring some wine up from the college bar. There are candles on the tables, and everyone dresses formally under their gowns: the boys in suits and long ties, I—for the first time since I played my last orchestra concert in June 2008—in a dress. After two hours at table (and not one, but two, graces!) our party repaired, like most people, to the college bar, where we drank port. It was there, sitting amidst at least fifty people in suits and ties and dresses and all of us in our gowns, sipping a glass of port, that I began to feel profoundly ill-at-ease. Earlier that day, after all, I’d been reading Marxist theory—and now here I was, doing my part to enshrine social inequality, having been waited on at table for an expensive meal and now drinking port in an institutional setting where it is completely acceptable, and indeed normal, to do all these things. I had, and am still having, a hard time processing this Friday night, and a hard time knowing whether keeping my American-academic-brat-turned-study-abroad-amateur-anthropologist’s ironic distance from it absolves me sufficiently from complicity in a really problematic system. This, it seems, is the dark side to sociability—and although I have now overcome the culture shock of that night, I am still trying to fit it into my understanding of Oxford, what Oxford means, and what it means for me to be at Oxford.

Though I was profoundly worried about this problem for a couple days, I snapped out of it the Sunday after Guest Night. I was sitting in the second chair in my room (though by myself), reading John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and trying to cram my brain with enough knowledge to write an essay about the theological debates of nineteenth-century Oxford. As I sat there reading, the clock turned 6pm—and then I started to hear the bells of the Trinity clock ringing, and then more bells out southwards and eastwards across the city, as college chapels, after tradition, called their members to Sunday Evensong. Far fewer students today, of course, come to chapel on Sunday evenings before hall than they did when Newman was an undergraduate here at Trinity, but through reading Newman and hearing the bells I felt a powerful jolt of connection to the past, and a powerful jolt of recollection of why I’m in Oxford at all. I’m studying abroad for the sake of exposure to a different culture and new experiences, yes, but I have come to Oxford because I study nineteenth-century British intellectual history, and intend to make a life out of learning and making and teaching that history. I have come to Oxford for the reasons that Spanish majors go to Spain and Russian majors go to Russia and Japanese majors go to Japan: I am in Oxford because the people I study were almost all connected to this university in some way, because the intellectual debates which raged across the nineteenth century took place within its walls, and because when I sit reading Newman I hear the same sounds of the city that he could hear while he was writing. I remembered that I’m an academic—and that when at a new university, you do as your colleagues do, and at the same time make sure your students know not to take their class privilege for granted.

Since then, my schoolwork has been accompanied by flashes of the characters who populated this same place a hundred and fifty years ago. Last week, as I finished my essay a few hours before my first tutorial, I thought of Symonds doing the same, 140 years ago and just over the next wall, in advance of his tute on Plato with Benjamin Jowett. Today, while reading John Stuart Mill in the Radcliffe Camera, I thought about Wilde’s commonplace book, which is filled with notes on Greek literature and German philosophy, and how he might have sat at a desk in the Upper Camera and read for Greats some of the same things (like Hegel) I have to be familiar with now. On my bookshelf sit late-19th-century editions of Symonds, both Arnolds, and Carlyle, borrowed from the Trinity library—undergraduates must have borrowed them a hundred and fifty years ago, too, when they were new and their binding wasn’t falling to bits from a century and a half of use.

There is nothing like knowing a place by being in it, nothing like seeing the walls that demarcate the closed circle of the Oxford intellectual scene in any century, nothing like watching gowns flap behind students as they cross a dusky quad to hall, nothing like sensing that Wilde and Symonds and Pater and Arnold and Jowett and Newman and so many others must have learned to talk and to write over cups of tea in tutorials and in hall and when their friends came over and sat in their second chairs. And there is nothing like hoping, as you struggle to adapt your American-honed historian’s skills to the problem of the Oxford essay, that Symonds would have had to work just as hard for his degree, but would have got just as much eager pleasure from looking out the window of his college onto Broad Street and listening to the chapel bells sound.

It’s just a few hours short of a week since I left America, and already my last glimpse of suburban New Jersey as friends waved me goodbye from the train platform seems years away. I took my last Princeton exam this morning, had my first Oxford class yesterday, and now I sit in a chair in my bedroom, procrastinating on reading Marxist theory and making yet another cup of tea (the fourth since lunchtime) in order to fight off impending exhaustion—my last Princeton exam, after all, was at 9am, a fact which I remembered when I went home at 4:30 because I was dozing off in the Upper Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera while struggling through Gramsci.

The instant I got over the jetlag, everything here began to seem so absurdly normal that all the little superficial differences very quickly faded into insignificance. Yes, we wear academic gowns to dinner and stand for a Latin grace before we get served three courses at table. Yes, all the buildings are old, and many of them are quite beautiful. Yes, I have to write an essay or two a week, and read them to my tutors. Yes, I now live in one of the strangest cities in the world, in which dreaming spires abut supermarkets and overpriced coffeeshops and ordinary people’s houses. Yes, everyone drinks a lot, and (as my Princeton advisor said in his parting advisory speech to me) drinking to excess is not correlated with anti-intellectualism the way it is in America. Yes, English dessert is very weird. Yes, I’ve met people who went to Eton and Harrow and Winchester. Yes, I still keep forgetting to look right then left when crossing the road.

But for all this, I look back on a day like today (after I finished my exam) and think fondly on the lazy scholarship that has characterized every one of the past six first weeks of term, and to which this first term away from America is no exception. At lunch, I talked historical theory and academic gossip with a graduate student; at dinner, I adjudicated the high-spirited and frivolous arguments of a gaggle of freshers (18-year-olds seem younger and younger every time I interact with them). Between, I watched the sun break out from behind the clouds and stream in glistening stripes through the enormous windows of the Radcliffe Camera, and I bumbled my way through Gramsci and Lukacs and kept running back to college for tea breaks. People keep asking me about America, expecting me to tell them how different my life there is. But what has this blog been for the past two years but a record of books read and dining-hall meals had?

Of course, many of the reasons the two worlds mirror each other so closely have to do only with elite education systems and with nothing else. Princeton is to America as Oxford is to England; in some sense, elite education has nothing whatever to do with the rest of the world, and the cast of characters and ways of life are much the same. There are the dryly humorous grad students, there are the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshers, and there are the boatloads of students from privileged backgrounds with little self-awareness who spend a lot of time partying, very little time studying, and plan to go into investment banking the instant they can tick the boxes of the rigamarole that is this silly little liberal arts education. Though I shouldn’t in the least be surprised by it, I have to confess I hadn’t expected to find this last category to quite such a degree in Oxford. I had forgotten how sealed-off my circle in Princeton is from most of the rest of that university, and I hadn’t realized just how constant the cast of characters is that makes up the whole of a university, not just the most alabaster stones in the ivory tower (if you know what I mean). I am quite sure I have spent more effort in the past week brainstorming just how to sift through these sets to find the students with whom I want to be friends than I have on my schoolwork. It took me almost a year to do the same in Princeton, and I don’t have that much time here. I’ve been fighting with all my willpower against my natural shyness, employing all the social skills I’ve learned in the past two and a half years to seek out like-minded people—from gentle small-talk questions to my best attempts at humor to the tried-and-true strategy of gravitating to LGBT social events. I’m working hard at this—friending people on Facebook to make sure I learn their names, plopping myself down next to new people in hall—and I find it starting to bear fruit.

But these efforts to make friends have also begun to teach me a larger lesson, which also returns us to the point of the nature of the academic world. You see, if I have discovered anything in the semester that ended this morning when I sat my last exam, it is that I am a teacher in my own right, one with real academic identity and ability, who is going to live a life of teaching and research forever. This sense of identity and of vocation seems, recently, to have done something I would never have thought possible a few months ago: it has eradicated the gnawing torture of self-doubt which once characterized my inner life. Suddenly every moment I spend in my room is not wasted; suddenly every moment I spend frustrated with an ignorant, sexist, and homophobic Oxford-version-of-a-bro becomes a teaching moment; suddenly I am always loving what I do, because I need not constantly have everything be perfect to know that I am still a good person who is doing the right thing for me and for the bits of the world which I have the power to affect.

I spent my last couple weeks in Princeton desperately trying to discern where I would find the culture shock in Oxford. In a sense, I have found it in the sameness—and in a paradox: for Oxford both is and is not an academic paradise, and like at Princeton, I will have to work very hard to ensure that I can make it be one for me. The wonderful thing is that now I know how to do this. The last time I landed in a new university, I was 18 years old, had never lived away from home, and had no inkling of how I would relate to the world as a grown-up. A very great deal has changed since then, and now I land in Oxford able to appreciate the air of desultory scholarship and the tea and sociability; to negotiate just the right amount of amused detachment from the pomp and circumstance of gowns and grace; and to transform alienating social situations into ones I can control.

It is far too early yet to say what the outcome of all this will be. But I am certain that even in the same old routine of bedroom, library, and hall there is a great deal of potential waiting to be realized, and that I am certain to be learning now the skills of academic self-sufficiency I will need for the rest of my life.

Besides, getting to spend so much time in old buildings is wicked cool.

We’re coming to you live from Trinity College, Oxford, now, broadcasting to the internet at 19.21 GMT, which in our mind is 14.20 EST after an all-nighter. It’s been a crazy two days of travel, made subsequently easier by the best Princeton friends anyone could ask or hope for; a very nice professor of Renaissance art and architecture on the train to the airport; a Virgin Atlantic clerk who let me go a couple kilos over on the baggage weight limit; the porter here at Trinity who helped me carry three suitcases up two flights of narrow spiral staircase when I was too exhausted to move another step; and the social generosity of my exchange partner and his friends. I’ve been installed in one of the rooms Trinity puts up visitors in, which, if it does look a bit like a hotel, did come with an electric kettle and a little fridge and bed linens. For this I am profoundly grateful, as am I for my first Trinity hall lunch (not yet as magical as Rocky, but certainly aesthetically more authentic…), for the warm climate, for the fact that I’m in a city where picking up groceries and whatnot is dead easy, and for the fact of course that it’s not just any city, but the city of dreaming spires. I mean, seriously: the fridge is making a bizarre noise and I can’t figure out how to work half the functions of my new phone, but I’m in Oxford!

It’s going to take a while to get the hang of everything here, whether culturally, socially, or bureaucratically, and this is going to be hindered somewhat by the fact that I hate to seem like the dumb American. Tomorrow I am having a library orientation, registering with the college nurse, and meeting with one of my tutors. I also need to schedule a meeting with the senior tutor, deal with various fiscally-related things in the bursar’s office, put money on my Bod Card (Oxford’s version of the prox, which Trinity uses to debit you for food), shop for more sundries, and make various eagerly-anticipated social calls. But none of these things will teach me the social cues of a new culture, and so I’ll have to watch and learn. It took me years to feel as if I’d got Princeton culture down—I hope I can do Oxford in weeks, as I don’t have that much time!

I’m beginning to suss out some of it, though, and most interestingly to realize that things that various Oxbridge-educated or -influenced people I know do are not idiosyncratic, but part of the culture. It’s early days yet (term hasn’t even started), but it seems that as a matter of course, you really do spend your day meandering between the library and the dining hall and various friends’ rooms, where you’re made a cup of tea and are sociable; from anecdotal evidence, you seem to spend your nights being raucously alcoholic, but that may be either selection bias or my delicate American’s sensibilities judging too much. In any case, I, who am so embarrassed about standing-out-like-a-sore-thumb-ever, am so grateful that I’ve already learned the Oxford words, that I can use my cutlery the British way, that I know how to make a cup of tea, and that (surprisingly enough) I haven’t had a meltdown from exhaustion and disjuncture yet.

I haven’t much idea yet as to how my academics are going to work out, except for a sneaking sense of nervousness that I’m going to have problems because I haven’t been able to prepare any work in advance of my tutorials and seminars, and I of course missed all the introductory meetings last term. But I expect all shall go much the same as it does in Princeton, and that I shall continue to read books about 19th-century cultural history and work on the Symonds project, except that I’ll be able to look at archives as well, and to go to Blackwells to stock up my bookshelf, which is looking depressingly empty just now.

It’s all so very slightly off, just barely different enough that you know you’re not in a culture you know well and can navigate. The trick is not to let your American accent embarrass you and trip you up, and to remember that you’re a scholar doing the right thing for her education who is mature and intelligent and therefore sensitive to cultural differences.

More to come….