Explore History, Culture & Writing

2019 was marked by the death of a true mistress of world cinema, Agne`s Varda. We will introduce you to her oeuvre, from La pointe courte (1955) to her final work, Varda par Agnes (2019), exploring her status as a ‘feminist’ icon. The digital was central to her later career, making her, perhaps, a multi-media artist rather than just a film director.

Want to know more about the history of the Ottoman Empire and its legacies in the modern Middle East? Join us on this course to get an introduction.

Going to Türkiye? Done our Ottoman courses and looking for your next course? Why not join this course and explore the history of Turkey since its formation to its recent renaming to Türkiye?

This study day will present and examine three contemporary approaches to reading the Bible. Feminism, post-colonial and ecological debates have had much to contribute to recent interpretative trends of the Bible. We will examine three clusters of biblical narratives, each one focusing on one of the contemporary issues. This will be done through the literary study of a number of biblical texts.

German Expressionism influenced Hollywood horror after itself being influenced by early Swedish Nordic noir. Along with F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang was one of the key figures of German Expressionist cinema. Their influence crossed borders and is alive today in cinema tropes, camera techniques and narrative themes still used by filmmakers, game designers and artists. Their films changed moviemaking forever as directors and set designers created a nightmare environment of unnatural perspectives and distorted images in early films such as Nosferatu (1922 F.W. Murnau), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919 Robert Weine), and Metropolis (1927 Fritz Lang) which led to Dracula (1931 Tod Browning), Spellbound (1945 Alfred Hitchcock) and Blade Runner (1982 Ridley Scott). American pulp fiction shaded this into film noir in The Killers (1946 Robert Siodmak) and Double Indemnity (1944 Billy Wilder), films created by directors who had fled the land of German Expression. It had come full circle.

This course aims to make Stein’s thought more familiar by examining her contribution to a philosophical-phenomenological understanding of faith and religion.

Look at the least known episodes in London's history, Lundenwic (AD 600-900) and Lundenburh (AD 900-1000).



Includes an introductory lecture, museum visit and guided walk.

This course will provide a brief introduction to the history of film spectatorship, tracing its origins in the silent era up to the present day. The course will explore a number of films in detail, includingThe Truman Show (Peter Weir 1998 US), Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore 1998 Italy), The Matrix (Wachowskis 1999 US) and others.

We explore poems written by three highly original English women poets. Their styles of writing are unique as they respond to the stresses of their lives, and to their position as women, with wit and humour. Their resilience shows them as the reverse of Smith’s famous line ‘Not waving but drowning’.