Explore History, Culture & Writing

Explore 1920s Paris from the perspective of experimental art movements. From textile design to surrealism, abstraction to neo-classicism we look at how the city of Paris was an active collaborator in the art of the era.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

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 will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

An introductory course providing an overview of the development of the visual language of Islamic cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Join us to explore three works of life writing set in Paris and Berlin between the wars, where café culture, the adventure of the streets, bohemian life, and nocturnal temptations offer opportunities for artistic, personal, and sexual freedom. Set in post-WW1 Paris and pre-WW2 Berlin, writers, artists, and adventurers find themselves entangled within the moving fabric of unpredictable social and political changes. Writers include Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys and Christopher Isherwood.

Myth permeated all aspects of ancient society and much the same can be said today. Investigate the relevance and perseverance of the Greek myth and why these tales continue to fascinate.

Since cinema's earliest days, literature has provided movies with stories. But there is another way of looking at film: through its relationship with painting, the oldest of the art forms.



We’ll look at paintings by Friedrich, Titian, Hopper, Bacon, Delaroche and many more. We’ll view Red Desert, Pan’s Labyrinth, Easy Rider – looking at realism, surrealism and more.



As you can see, all of these are quite different! Let’s see how movies connect us to art history.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

From the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, to Prohibiton and the Depression, this online intertextual course explores the political, social and cultural context of 1920s America through a study of literature, history, music, film and art of the period. With different tutors for each specialism, the course provides a 'taster' in each subject as a gateway to further study in understanding this fascinating period in American culture and society.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

A reading group focusing on the Argonautica by the Greek poet Apollonius of Rhodes (in English translation).



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This unique and wide-ranging course provides a broad introduction to the three major languages of the Ancient Near East, which together traverse a vast history of four millennia. In them were written some of the great landmarks of world literature, such as the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Sumerian Descent of Inanna.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami became celebrated and championed internationally, at film festivals, by film critics, on the arthouse cinema circuits. He came to be seen as a director who had revitalised international cinema – Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped that “cinema began with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.” Yet, despite all this international acclaim, the deep Iranian roots of Kiarostami remain often misunderstood or even ignored. This course shall cover the long and rich career of Kiarostami, one inevitably formed by an Iranian context and set of cultural references, and closely examine the different phases of his work, the recurring stylistic and thematic concerns, and his trajectory from little-known Iranian filmmaker to global auteur director.