Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Come and explore three pioneering tragedies of the early English Renaissance commercial stage (1585-1592): The Spanish Tragedy (1586), Arden of Faversham (1588-92), and Tamburlaine Part I (1587). These plays were to become the models setting the standard and blueprint for three influential sub-genres: Revenge Tragedy, Domestic Tragedy, and Heroic Tragedy. We’ll look at their dramatic inventiveness, creativity in handling sources, and why they enthralled contemporary audiences.

As well as expressing power, prestige and fulfilling symbolic functions, textiles have been intimately linked to the everyday lives of members all societies for millennia. On this course you will study the development of woven, printed and embroidered textiles of many kinds from around the globe and explore the significant roles they have played in the world’s material culture.

One of the most absorbing contemporary artists working in the UK today, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints startling ‘portraits’ of characters entirely derived from her imagination. Discover aspects of her artistic process and the ideas and themes behind her paintings on this course.

Have a taste of exploring the ancient Athenian stage, and how they still speak to us about the challenges we face today.

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.

When it hit UK TV screens in October 1990, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was more than just another US television series, it was as one critic describes it, ‘a seismic event in popular culture’ (Tobias 2020). In an era when TV aired live it was a must-see series with fevered pre-episode speculation and critical post-broadcast discussion characterising viewers’ engagement with this cult phenomenon. The mystery over who killed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) preoccupied TV viewers across the autumn and winter of 1990. For me it was the first live series that I watched from start to finish.

Why were images to do with the afterlife so prevalent in the Middle Ages? Come, face your eternal destinies and look at images such as the Last Judgement, skeletons, filthy flesh, worms, ghosts and Hell mouths.

Two great plays by Shakespeare, two love stories, two pairs of tragic lovers: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. Discover how Shakespeare entered the hearts of one couple still in their teens, astonished by their new found emotions, the other in the autumn of their lives, worldly and experienced, but whose passion for each other drew two great powers into fatal conflict.

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.

Explore the transformation of London from the onset of Thatcherism in 1979 to its status as a global metropolis in the 21st century.