Culture, History & Humanities — Online Courses

To understand China of our present means understanding China of the past. Explore the histories and legacies of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

We explore medieval attitudes towards the disease and the medical care available to sufferers. We also look at how the leper was depicted in art and literature before 1500 CE.

The course is about exploring Muslim history: What is Islam? Who is a Muslim? This course explores these questions through a study of the Quran, the Prophet and the socio-political and religious developments in the early history of Muslims. You may discover that there is more than meets the eye.

Come and revel in the sheer variety and possibility of poetic form, as we consider how form might shape what a writer has to say and how they say it. This course will allow you to explore the many shapes that a poem can take.

The 1960s saw the emergence of multiple “new waves” of international filmmakers and cinema movements. It wasn’t only the French directors of the “nouvelle vague” – Godard, Truffaut et al - but filmmakers from Britain (Lindsay Anderson), Italy (Pasolini), Africa (Sembène), America (Cassavetes), Poland, India, and Japan, all of whom seized on cheaper, lighter equipment to make vital and vibrant films, and whose subjects were compelling as well as contemporary.

Come and explore the journey of the Argonauts and discover Jason.

Explore the extraordinarily diverse world of writing about motherhood, looking at literary texts that have firmly rebuked any notions of motherhood as ‘merely’ domestic, and have instead made it the subject of serious literary writing, have explored major themes such as the body, trauma, gender, queerness, race and creativity, and have written diverse truths about the realities of motherhood. Writers include Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Ayò¿bámi Adébáyò¿.

Explore the role of critical theory within the field of art history, and learn new ways of thinking about art by focusing on feminism, post-colonial theory and the notion of the death of the author.

This course focuses on Flemish and Dutch (Netherlandish) art of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The course will examine well-known artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as the role of artworks and visual images in the formation of religious, class, gender and national identities, in early science, and in cultures of collecting.