Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses
Explore our extraordinary range of History, Culture and Writing courses and lectures. We offer both introductory and specialist in-depth courses to suit all levels of interest and experience, from ‘How to read a film’ and World literature, to Creative non-fiction writing courses and American history and Politics courses.
Our tutors are experts in their fields and experienced educators; many have published, teach in universities or share their expertise in the media. Tutors share their knowledge and passion through presentations, readings, interactive discussion and exercises, analysis, and other activities.
Many students return to take more courses, telling us they enjoy being part of our City Lit Learning community.
Our popular courses often sell out quickly, so we invite you to browse and book your place now.
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- ''Feasting with Panthers": reinventing Oscar WildeCourse start date: Tue 21 Jan 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Alexander Fairbairn-DixonCome and explore, debate, discuss a range of modern literature representing the life of Wilde. What compels poets, playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters to re-tell his story?
We’ll examine how a range of writers from 1880-2023 have reinvented Oscar Wilde as tragic hero, fool for love, Irish rebel, Queer icon, and martyr for art, considering the ways in which these representations have propelled him to enduring global stardom. We’ll ask, ‘What lies at the heart of his charisma and subversiveness?’.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - First Poets of the Modern City: Baudelaire, Whitman, Laforgue, EliotCourse start date: Tue 28 Jan 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Laurie SmithWe explore how Baudelaire, Whitman, Laforgue and Eliot were the first poets to express in detail both the exciting
opportunities and the emotional and spiritual damage of life in the modern city. We will look in particular how Baudelaire’s poems and Laforgue’s translations of Whitman into French influenced Eliot’s early poetry, culminating in The Waste Land (1922).Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Masterpieces of World LiteratureCourse start date: Tue 28 Jan 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Rebecca JonesCome and join us for a fascinating introduction to texts often considered ‘masterpieces’ of world literature, as we read texts from across centuries, languages and national borders, both within and beyond the English-speaking world. Reading major authors such as Miguel de Cervantes, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy, amongst others, you’ll leave the course with a new appreciation and understanding of the world’s rich literary heritage in all its diversity and complexity.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Introduction to Egyptian and Arab cinema
Course start date: Tue 18 Feb 2025Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Gillian McIverAre you curious about world cinema? Do you want to learn more about a dynamic but often neglected region of cinema culture – the Arab world? This course will introduce you to some of the classic films of the of the Egyptian cinema and its stars like Omar Sharif, including The Land (1970) and Cairo Station (1958), alongside recent films such as Chaos, Disorder (2012) and Lebanese film Capernaum (2018). Each session will include a film screening, short lecture and group discussion.Full fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00 - Women in art: 1900-1960 Course start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Elizabeth EyresOn this course we shall explore and examine the considerable, and significant, contributions of women painters and sculptors to the avant-garde art world during the first half of the 20th century. - History of ideas: human rights - from John Locke to John RawlsCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Cristina PaternoJoin 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!Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - Masterworks of 19th Century French and Russian literatureCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThis 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.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - The History of the Irish short story: from James Joyce to Claire KeeganCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThe 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.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - First Novels Revisited: Amis, McEwan, Barnes, IshiguroCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardMartin 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?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Immortal Longings: Romeo and Juliet and Antony and CleopatraCourse start date: Tue 6 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettTwo 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.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Americans in Paris: Writers Writing in The City of LightCourse start date: Tue 13 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Alexander Fairbairn-DixonExplore how three pioneering American writers wrote about their lives in Paris. Taking three different forms of life-writing together, memoir, autobiography, and roman a clèf, we’ll consider how Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes depict a particular place and time. How did they portray the sights, sounds, streets and salons of Paris? What was it like to be a writer, breaking new ground, in the City of Light?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Modern Short Crime Fiction: 1950 to present timesCourse start date: Tue 13 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: William BradyFrom Victorian ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ to the pages of mid-twentieth-century American Pulp Magazines, the history and evolution of the Crime genre has always been bound up with that of the short story. This course explores how this short-form legacy has been celebrated and sustained by Crime Writers from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. Short form narrative has proved an apt vehicle for emerging and established Crime Writers to experiment with the form—crafting suspenseful, mysterious and beguiling tales of the unexpected.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Radical Black FeminismCourse start date: Tue 3 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
This course explores radical black feminism through changing expressions of Black women’s radical practices of self-liberation and resistance to slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy and their intersecting systems of oppression.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Women in art 1800-1900 Course start date: Tue 14 Jan 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Elizabeth EyresDuring the 19th century female painters and sculptors gained greater prominence, although a career in art was still challenging for women artists. In this course we examine their work and how such progress was achieved. - Capitalism and its discontents Course start date: Tue 21 Jan 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Christian MichelDo we know what capitalism is? Without this knowledge, we can neither harness its potential, nor reform it, nor smash it and move beyond.Full fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00
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