Penn Abroad has discontinued funding for the Penn English Program in London, bringing an end to the English department’s study abroad program.
According to English faculty members, the decision to end the nearly two-decade-old program housed by King’s College London was made abruptly by Penn Abroad at the start of the fall 2025 semester. Though students majoring and minoring in English will still be able to study at King’s College under a typical exchange format, students and alumni who spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian expressed disappointment towards the termination of the program.
In an interview with the DP, English department Chair Zachary Lesser said faculty were not consulted before the decision was finalized. He added that he had been in conversation with Penn Abroad over the summer about possible cost-saving measures, but that “the final word came down unexpectedly.” Although the department hopes the program could return someday, it will not be active for the foreseeable future, Lesser said.
PEPL combined full immersion at King’s College with a weekly Penn-taught course that exclusively brought PEPL students together to study live theater productions in the city’s West End. The program also included faculty-led excursions to cultural sites across England.
Students took three courses at King’s College, lived alongside King’s College students in residence halls, and met weekly with a Penn faculty member for the Theater in London course. The program typically included a graduate student as well who would pursue their own academic work while also serving as a resource for the cohort.
In a written statement to the DP, Penn Abroad stated that the English Department’s London program has been folded into a new exchange program with King’s College. Under this format, English majors and minors can continue to study at King’s College during the fall or spring semester, enrolling directly in up to four English courses.
Lesser explained that while most study abroad programs follow one of two models — either full immersion in a foreign university or taking home-institution courses abroad with faculty from one’s own college — PEPL combined “the best of both worlds.”
“Many students told us that it was the peak experience of their career at Penn,” he added.
Lesser said that while the new exchange program with King’s College will still be a “great experience” for students, it won’t be “everything.”
The DP spoke with three students and alumni who are currently participating in or have previously participated in PEPL. All three individuals spoke positively of PEPL and expressed disappointment with its discontinuation, arguing that the restructured King’s College exchange does not offer the same sense of community or depth of engagement that defined the original program.
Penn junior and English major Julian Williams — one of seven students currently studying in the final PEPL cohort — said the group learned about the program’s discontinuation while together at a play last week. The news prompted a long discussion among students about the program’s value and the importance of keeping it alive.
Williams described the program’s small cohort and close faculty involvement as central to its impact, noting that it created a sense of community often lacking in other study abroad experiences.
“There’s a lot of study abroad things where you’re kind of thrown in by yourself,” he said. “The fact that there’s a professor, a TA, and then a cohort of other students with me — it helps create a community that I probably wouldn’t have [in another program].”
He said the weekly theater course introduced him to the art form for the first time and broadened his interests in ways he had not anticipated. Williams said that future English majors will miss out on “the cultural capital that this program offers.”
Jennifer Jahner, who served as PEPL’s graduate assistant during the 2009-10 academic year and was a 2012 Ph.D. graduate of Penn’s English department, described the program as a crucial aspect of both her academic career and personal development.
“One of the reasons why I chose to come to Penn was the hope that I would have that year available to me,” Jahner said, now a professor of English and dean of undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology.
The opportunity to conduct archival research at the British Library and other London institutions was “completely transformative” for her research, Jahner said.
“It would have been a totally different dissertation, and my career track would have gone in a different way had I not had that time,” she said.
Beyond academics, Jahner highlighted the importance of faculty leadership and the graduate student’s role within the program. She said the graduate student often served as both a peer and a mentor, helping students navigate life in London while pursuing their own research.
“We were all, in different ways, students together,” Jahner said.
She added that the faculty member served as “your first port of call if anything is happening for you, positively or otherwise,” creating “a Penn family.”
Speaking from her own administrative experience, Jahner said that she is “deeply, deeply cognizant” of the “budget challenges” challenges faced by institutions. However, she urged Penn to reconsider the decision’s finality.
“I would hope, genuinely hope, that if this is the budget answer of the moment, that it is not the final answer for Penn in London,” she said.
2024 English program graduate Noah Lewine participated in PEPL during his senior fall. Lewine described the value in the theater component of the program, emphasizing the rarity of having a renowned theater professor curate months of play-going, which was “not really a thing that you could recreate in any other way.”
He highlighted the breadth of the experience — from seeing a moving one-woman show titled Elephant that exceeded his expectations to enduring what he described as “maybe the single worst performance I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” Lewine said both experiences were “equally important and valuable,” allowing students to engage with different forms of theater and develop their own preferences.
Lewine added that the program fundamentally changed his relationship with theater. He explained that he rarely attended theater showings before the program — but due to the program, he now regularly attends plays.
He would be “hard pressed to find a lot of people who can say that an abroad program had a more positive impact on their general life.”
Lewine expressed disappointment with Penn’s decision, describing it as an effort to “continue to devalue and dilute the experience that actual undergraduates on their campus have on a daily basis.”
As a double major in English and ancient history — fields he acknowledged the University may not see as lucrative — he found the faculty and classes “unparalleled.”
“Watching the administration continue to undervalue [the humanities] and cut away at them is really disappointing and honestly heartbreaking,” Lewine said.