Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Nearly seventy countries still criminalise gay sex. Why is this? This course will attend to this question by examining the links between sexuality, colonialism and postcolonial gay rights.

The history of the cinema is a rich, rewarding and dynamic area of study. Cinema, because it is both an art form and an industrial product, can be studied from several different historical perspectives. These have included investigations into the history of technological development associated with cinema’s origins and its subsequent development, but historians have also explored its evolution into an art form. They have written about important individual figures or influential groups and have examined specific films in great detail. Historians have also examined the national, cultural, political and social contexts that might offer insight into the cinema at a given historical moment. They have examined the changing demographic and viewing habits of spectators and explored the mutability of cinemas themselves. With so much to consider and so many different approaches to take, the history of cinema continues to evolve. As such this advanced level film studies course will explore what it means to study film history, examine the various methodologies that one might take, while at the same time looking at relevant filmic and cinematic examples.

Why assume a false identity? What could be the risks and rewards of pretending to be someone else? And what can fictions about ‘faking it’ tell us about ourselves, what we believe, and why? This literature course takes a deep dive into remarkable stories of impersonation and identity: psychiatric intrigue in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study; Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley; a New York art controversy in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World; and a notorious Victorian trial in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud.

The saying 'No Brain, No Pain' is hardly controversial. But is having an experience or—indeed—entertaining a thought nothing else than neural activity? In this course we will look at this and some related philosophical questions. NB There will be no class on 02/02/25.

Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are household names of contemporary British fiction. But how did their careers begin in the 1970s and 1980s? And how do their early efforts stand up today?

Who am I? Is there such a thing as “my true self”? These and related questions will be looked at from various philosophical perspectives.



NB There will be no class on 27/05/24.