Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Are you interested in art and want to get more out of looking at art and exhibitions? Want to know what an art historian does? Develop your interpretative skills by exploring at how art is made and what social and cultural factors construct our understanding of it.

Not sure whether creative writing is for you? Give it a try on one of these fun and supportive short courses covering the basics of fiction and poetry. Increase your confidence and produce work through guided exercises and discussion.

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form – narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound – alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Discuss a differently themed group of paintings each week in front of the pictures. An opportunity to understand our national collection in greater depth.

Discover portraiture and the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. Different periods and styles are discussed each week in front of the portraits. Includes visits to the current temporary exhibitions.

Explore the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum. We visit different galleries each week looking at the decorative arts, paintings and the transfer of design ideas across the centuries.

Explore the works of British artists and their relationship to the legacy of academic painting and the art of continental Europe between 1880-1918. Who led developments and how does the art of the period reflect the times?



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

A survey of Western art from the Gothic to the Victorian age, discussing Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism, and the ideas shaping each period.

They were called ‘foreign films’ in the fifties, the first films to emerge from Europe and further to a wider British and American audience: Bicycle Thieves (1948 Vittorio De Sica) Rashomon (1950 Akira Kurosawa), Pather Panchali (1955 Satyajit Ray), Seven Samurai (1954 Akira Kurosawa), The Seventh Seal (1957 Ingmar Bergman), Plein Soleil. They played at The Academy Oxford Street or The Everyman Hampstead. Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you discover a whole world of amazing films. Too many filmgoers are scared off by the notion of international cinema. In cultural shorthand, ‘foreign film’ was a euphemism for snootiness, a stereotype that kept audiences from experiencing some of the greatest movies ever made. Once you open yourself up to them you’ll find there’s nothing to be intimidated by.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.