Culture, History & Humanities — Online Courses

This interactive lecture outline course explores the doemstic political, social, and cultural divisions that have occurred in the United States since the end of the Second World War.

This class introduces you to a range of themes and issues in European cinema, including art cinema, national cinema, movements and new waves, authorship, popular cinema and genre, along with key developments in European film history. We will also be thinking about key films and filmmakers, the canon of European cinema and its cultural status, and a range of critical accounts of European cinema.

Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism are pivotal movements in the history of modern art – encapsulating all the promise and peril of the 20th century’s devastating birth, and even helping rewrite perceptions of space and time.

(Re)discover France's complex politics during the Fourth and Fifth Republics, and the social challenges and tensions the country faced both at times of growth and modernisation and of crisis and doubts.

Since the inception of film, the medium has been borrowing from literature, transforming novels, plays and poems into audio-visual experiences with varying degrees of success. Through a range of classic films, we will examine the techniques and practices available to filmmakers in the adaptation process, as well as the challenges of translating a story or concept from one form to another.

Discover the history, politics and intellectualism that fuelled the Italian Renaissance. Explore the art of Giotto and his peers from a new perspective.

Do we perceive time or the passage of events? Einstein famously considered time – or the distinction between past, present, and future – as an illusion. We examine subjective time or how we experience time, discussing the roles of memory, emotion, and narrative.

Discover the ways in which homoeroticism found its way onto Ancient Greek vases and how its depiction flourished in the ancient world.

Mythical beasts, fruity swags, strange shell forms, odd expressions, the bizarre dream and fantasy subject matter – there is more to Renaissance art than meets the eye. Come and discover the strange work of Paolo Uccello, Carlo Crivelli, Piero di Cosimo, Ercole de’Roberti, Dosso Dossi, Cosmè Tura and Francesco del Cossa.