Night School Durham

Night School Durham Evening classes for curious adults in the Arts & Humanities / Affordable collective study out of Durham, NC / Online for now.

🔥🔥 New Class! Join us for “Where Is the Internet?” starting August 19th - signup at nightschoolbar.com 🔥🔥Instructor: Jen...
06/23/2026

🔥🔥 New Class! Join us for “Where Is the Internet?” starting August 19th - signup at nightschoolbar.com 🔥🔥

Instructor: Jennie Rose Halperin | 4 Weeks | Wednesdays | August 19 - September 9 | 7:00-9:00 | 719 N. Mangum St, Durham NC

The internet is big and getting bigger. Satellites, cell towers, undersea cables, server farms: the tools we use every day rest on physical infrastructure built over the past thirty years at a scale that’s impossible to comprehend. With the rise of AI, data centers have become the shadowy non-place at the center of public discourse. But the entire system is a growing resource drain, and the costs of networked infrastructure are often under-explored.

How does the internet actually work? Who decides how it gets built and governed? Why does each new technology demand exponentially more energy, water, and land? And what would it look like to build differently?

This interdisciplinary course traces the physical web from the cable landing station to the computer screen, drawing on journalism, internet history, critical infrastructure studies, and political theory. We’ll examine the people, institutions, and standards that shape the network, which is far from an inevitability. Every new technology is a chance to build another way, but only if we understand how the current system fits together. Students will leave with a working map of the Internet’s physical and political architecture, sharper questions about its trajectory, a clearer understanding of its benefits, and a vocabulary for imagining alternatives to the massively networked problems produced by online lives.

🔥🔥Join us for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Reading Group, starting July 26th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥Joh...
06/22/2026

🔥🔥Join us for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Reading Group, starting July 26th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Reading Group
Instructor: Lindsey Andrews | 3-Weeks | Sundays | July 26-August 9 | 7:15-9:15 PM | 719 N Mangum St., Durham, NC

From the publisher: First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

🔥🔥Join us for Political-Economy: Tools for Critiquing Capitalism (Summer Intensive), starting June 28th - Sign up at nig...
06/19/2026

🔥🔥Join us for Political-Economy: Tools for Critiquing Capitalism (Summer Intensive), starting June 28th - Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

Instructor: Leigh Campoamor | Specific Days in Jun-Jul | In-Person, Durham, NC

It’s no secret that capitalism is harmful. But how exactly does capitalism work? Why does it create vast inequalities? And why do so many people see it as the only way? How have people contested capitalism over time, and what can we learn from this in the age of billionaires?

Join us for a one week intensive—three class sessions of 2.5 hours each–to explore the basics of political-economy: the study of the production and distribution of wealth and its social implications.

Our first session will focus on what Marx called “primitive accumulation”–the original hoarding of resources. We’ll cover core concepts of anti-capitalist critique, such as surplus value, class struggle, and the division of labor, and examine how capitalism works in relation to race, gender and geography. In the second session, we’ll study how capitalism reproduces itself through a process feminists have called “social reproduction.” We’ll explore how capitalism relies not only on wage labor, but also on the unpaid caring labor traditionally reserved for women in the context of the patriarchal nuclear family. The third session will interrogate neoliberalism, the dominant form of contemporary capitalism which links the economic to the personal by coupling market freedom with individual freedom. We’ll study neoliberalism’s conceptual origins and how it has exacerbated global inequalities while reducing us to atomized and precarious subjects. We’ll look to diverse examples of resistance and ask: if capitalism has brought us to our current moment of crisis, what openings does it leave for creating more liberatory ways of being in the world?

Schedule:
Sunday 6/28, 6:30-9:00PM
Tuesday 6/30, 6:30-9:00PM
Thursday 7/2,6:30-9:00PM

Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva Reading Group starts soon! Sign up at www.nightschoolbar.comInstructor: Lindsey Andrews | ...
06/10/2026

Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva Reading Group starts soon! Sign up at www.nightschoolbar.com

Instructor: Lindsey Andrews | 2 Weeks | Fridays | June 19 & 26 | 7:00-9:00 PM ET | 719 N. Mangum St, Durham NC

Clarice Lispector’s 1973 epistolary novel is slight but powerful. At just 88 pages, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be as it meditates on the role of the artist and creator, experimenting with a form that questions the very possibility of form. It’s as much philosophy as it is fiction, and best read in community to get the most out of it. Join us for a two-session class to explore this now-canonical Brazilian novel from one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century.

From the publisher: Where do the limits of language lie? This text is an experience—not a reflection—regarding those limits. To venture beyond them, in search of the “space between the lines,” the female voice speaking to us must enlist the aid of music—and, above all, painting—to draw closer to it: that central core of lived existence that Lispector pursued throughout her entire body of work.

A vague epistle addressed to a silent recipient, Agua Viva constantly transcends the boundaries of that broad family of “letters of heartbreak” to which it, in part, belongs. Moving beyond mere passion, the text aims—employing every weapon at its disposal: word, color, and note—directly at the very heart of life, and defies death through its staunch defense of joy.

🔥🔥Join us for Experimental Fiction: A Generative Writing Workshop (Summer Intensive), starting June 7th - Sign up at nig...
06/01/2026

🔥🔥Join us for Experimental Fiction: A Generative Writing Workshop (Summer Intensive), starting June 7th - Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

Instructor: Christa Westaway | Daily | June 7-13 | In-Person, Durham, NC

Where do stories come from? How can a storyteller create an entire world from a feeling, a question, or an image? In this one-week workshop, we’ll draw on our own experiences and use experimental techniques to transform them into fiction. We’ll try out language games and get inspired by short experimental fiction in order to draft vignettes and flash fiction stories. During class time, we’ll read a variety of very short fiction to ask what counts as a story while trying out genres from realism to surrealism to science fiction. Craft lessons will address character- and world-building, incorporating research, and writing evocative description and dialogue. By the end of the week, you’ll have a fully revised short book of your own fiction. You’ll build a rigorous writing practice, flow through drafting, workshopping, and revising, and engage a dedicated collective of readers to manifest your own stories.

Participants are asked to read Leonora Carrington’s short story, “The Debutante” from The Oval Lady in advance. No other reading/preparation is required outside of listed meeting times. Optional readings will be provided.

🔥🔥Join us for Podcasting: Writing, Recording, & Editing for Audio (Summer Intensive), starting June 21st - Sign up at ni...
05/30/2026

🔥🔥Join us for Podcasting: Writing, Recording, & Editing for Audio (Summer Intensive), starting June 21st - Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

Instructor: Audrey Smith | Daily | June 21-27th | In-Person, Durham, NC

Do you have a story that’s meant for a medium beyond the page? Ever wondered how podcasters prepare for and conduct interviews, incorporate music and sound effects, or even identify the types of stories that make for great audio in the first place?

Welcome to Literary Podcasting, a weeklong summer intensive where you’ll learn the fundamentals of writing, recording, and editing nonfiction narratives for audio. Drawing inspiration from the spheres of personal essay and memoir, audio journalism, and radio drama, we’ll practice techniques that will help you craft compelling narratives, showcase your unique storytelling voice, and engage a wider community of listeners.

While no prior experience is necessary for this course, there are a few key requirements: access to a smartphone for recording, a computer for editing (a laptop is preferred so that you can work both inside and outside of class time), a pair of wired (i.e. non-Bluetooth) headphones that can be used with both devices, and willingness to download and install free editing software onto your computer.

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT! Join us for HIV/AIDS in the American Imaginary, starting July 28th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥HI...
04/30/2026

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT! Join us for HIV/AIDS in the American Imaginary, starting July 28th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

HIV/AIDS in the American Imaginary
Instructor: Tatiana McInnis | 5-Weeks | Tuesdays | July 28-August 25 | 7:00-9:00 PM | 719 N Mangum St., Durham, NC

The stories generally told about the early days of HIV/AIDS rely on stereotypes of gay promiscuity, drug use, and urban spaces in the U.S. Timelines of the HIV/AIDS pandemic largely trace the beginning of the US outbreak to the late 1970s, culminating with the CDC’s 1981 report about a rare form of pneumonia identified in gay men in Los Angeles. More recently, these stories center pity for people living in the Global South, relying on misconceptions that the pandemic ended with the introduction of HIV treatment.

In fact, the HIV/AIDS pandemic began much earlier–with the 1969 death of a 16 year old black teenager, Robert Rayford, from AIDS related complications. And today, there is an expanding body of literature and art made by and for people living with HIV/AIDS. This class seeks to expand upon and contest conventional stories by examining the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it is represented in a diverse range of media including oral histories, poetry, short stories, and TV shows. Focusing on HIV/AIDS’s disproportionate impact on communities of color, we’ll examine the politics of death, survival, resistance, and representation of an American plague.

Authors/creators explored may include: Essex Hemphill, Danez Smith, Tony Kushner, Rebecca Makkai, Susan Sontag, Rafael Campo, Catherine Cohen, Mary Fisher.

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT. Join us for How to Write a Screenplay: A Generative Writing Workshop, starting July 27th. Sign up at ...
04/29/2026

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT. Join us for How to Write a Screenplay: A Generative Writing Workshop, starting July 27th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

How to Write a Screenplay: A Generative Writing Workshop
Instructor: Sowj Kudva | 5-Weeks | Mondays | July 27-August 24 | 7:00-9:00 PM | 719 N Mangum St., Durham, NC

We connect with ourselves and the world around us through story. And today, film is perhaps our most important storytelling medium. In this class, we’ll learn how to shape narratives for the screen. Through a series of creative activities, the class will help you find your innate sense of narrative—your unique voice—and introduce you to the craft of narrative expression for fictional screen media.

You will learn the fundamentals of screenplay formatting, writing, and theory. Alongside screenings and discussions that will demystify visual storytelling, you will also write your own short screenplay. No prior writing skills are required, just bring yourself and the stories you carry with you.

Let’s write together!

04/29/2026

Get ready for the Emerald Isle. Take a trip to make new friends and see the wild beauty of Ireland. We’re traveling August 15-21, and you can come too. Learn more and sign up at nightschoolbar.com

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT. Join us for Conspiracy, starting July 26th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥ConspiracyInstructor: Leig...
04/28/2026

🔥🔥NEW CLASS ALERT. Join us for Conspiracy, starting July 26th. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com🔥🔥

Conspiracy
Instructor: Leigh Campoamor | 5-Weeks | Sundays | July 26-August 23 | 5:00-7:00 PM | 719 N Mangum St., Durham, NC

From politics to pop culture and from medicine to the media, people have conspiracy theories about everything. It’s easy to think of these ideas as silly or misinformed, but actually, they give us a lot of information about how people understand the world that we all share.

Many scholars have argued that conspiracy theories are ways for people who experience systemic harm to claim agency by critiquing and telling new stories about those in power. Others argue that conspiracy theories are tools used by the elite to mask the actual conspiracies from which they profit. After all, what is capitalism if not a giant conspiracy? And what is the “Epstein class” if not an elite group of conspirators who benefit from “fake news” like Pizzagate and climate change denial?

In this class, we’ll study conspiracy theories as well as their pop cultural and scholarly interpretations in the US and beyond. But we’ll also turn a critical eye on these interpretations. We’ll pay attention to how people talk about conspiracy theories and what this reveals. Why and when do we use the term “conspiracy theory” to describe others? What makes us more or less likely to sympathize with certain conspiracy theories and not others? What can studying conspiracy theories and their critics tell us about our own claims to truth, and the distinctions we make between “knowledge” and “belief,” or “rational” and “irrational”?

Address

719 N Mangum Street
Durham, NC
27701

Opening Hours

Wednesday 5pm - 12am
Thursday 5pm - 12am
Friday 5pm - 12am
Saturday 5pm - 12am
Sunday 5pm - 12am

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