Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Christopher Nolan is that rare thing: a director working in Hollywood who makes cerebral big budget blockbusters. You will doubtless know him for Oppenheimer (2023), Tenet (2020), Dunkirk (2017), Interstellar (2014), Inception (2010), Batman Begins (2005), and Memento (2000). But it wasn’t always thus. There was a time when Nolan was a UK-based filmmaker and scriptwriter producing rather different cinematic fare. Join us as we chart Nolan’s journey to the Hollywood big time. We will explore his key films and consider the aesthetic and intellectual legacy of his oeuvre.

This class explores classic texts of 19th century French and Russian literature, discussing literary style, themes, and contexts as a way of developing and sharing responses to celebrated European writing. Among the French writers examined will be Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud, with our Russians including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.

The short story has come to be seen as one of Irish Literature’s most celebrated forms of expression. From the early stories of George Moore and James Joyce, to modern classics by John McGahern, William Trevor and Claire Keegan, the short story has allowed Irish writers to pick apart the complexities of Irish society in powerful, precise and poetic terms. This course will explore some of the most iconic short stories of twentieth-century Irish literature.

Join us on a captivating exploration of human rights history! In our sessions, we'll explore pivotal debates and innovative ideas across different epochs and cultures. Don't miss out on this enlightening journey!

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?

When it hit UK TV screens in October 1990, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was more than just another US television series, it was as one critic describes it, ‘a seismic event in popular culture’ (Tobias 2020). In an era when TV aired live it was a must-see series with fevered pre-episode speculation and critical post-broadcast discussion characterising viewers’ engagement with this cult phenomenon. The mystery over who killed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) preoccupied TV viewers across the autumn and winter of 1990. For me it was the first live series that I watched from start to finish.

This course will explore the many fascinating archaeological sites and finds in the UK from the period of the first people in the British Isles c900,000 years ago, until the start of the Roman period c50AD.

Explore the transformation of London from the onset of Thatcherism in 1979 to its status as a global metropolis in the 21st century.

Two great plays by Shakespeare, two love stories, two pairs of tragic lovers: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. Discover how Shakespeare entered the hearts of one couple still in their teens, astonished by their new found emotions, the other in the autumn of their lives, worldly and experienced, but whose passion for each other drew two great powers into fatal conflict.