Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

This online course introduces a selection of fairy tales from the First Golden Age of Children’s Literature, occurring in the latter half of the 19th century until the early 20th century. We will focus upon L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863).

This course introduces and critically examines the concept of a Black or African Latin America through the region’s history, philosophy, activism, politics, diaspora, memory and culture.

Explore how historical, political, and economic factors have shaped Global South economies. Analyze trade, governance, urbanization, poverty, sustainability, and challenges, fostering a holistic understanding of their development within the global landscape.

This one day course brings together evidence from interviews with the ever decreasing number of original arrivals to the UK from Uganda, following Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972.



Using oral history we ask questions of what we can learn from the personal testimony of individuals and what unique insights this gives us.

London is one of the world’s great cinematic cities. It is a city that has been captured on film since the advent of moving pictures. It is also a city whose own story has been profoundly shaped by film. This course will tell the history of London’s depiction onscreen, and how that depiction has impacted on the city itself over the course of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.







Dr Alexander Sergeant is an award-winning film historian and theorist. His varied research interests include the history of popular culture, particularly within the US, and the intersection between film and philosophy. He is the author of Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (2021), and co-editor ofFantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums & Genres (2018). He is the co-founder of the popular website Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast.

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

Compare and contrast the afterlife beliefs of the five major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Explore how these ideas developed and influenced each other.

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.

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 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 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.