Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

The final years of the reign of Akhenaten, the gathering storm and tragedy which ended the ‘dream’ of Amarna.

Why assume a false identity? What could be the risks and rewards of pretending to be someone else? And what can fictions about ‘faking it’ tell us about ourselves, what we believe, and why? This literature course takes a deep dive into remarkable stories of impersonation and identity: psychiatric intrigue in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study; Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley; a New York art controversy in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World; and a notorious Victorian trial in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud.

We 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).

Come 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.

Christopher Nolan is that rare thing: a director working in Hollywood who makes cerebral big budget blockbusters. You will doubtless know him for Oppenheimer (2023), Tenet (2020), Dunkirk (2017), Interstellar (2014), Inception (2010), Batman Begins (2005), and Memento (2000). But it wasn’t always thus. There was a time when Nolan was a UK-based filmmaker and scriptwriter producing rather different cinematic fare. Join us as we chart Nolan’s journey to the Hollywood big time. We will explore his key films and consider the aesthetic and intellectual legacy of his oeuvre.

This 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.

The 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.