Explore History, Culture & Writing

We live in a world that still defined by different forms of imperial subjugation, but the former colonies and metropoles remember the colonial and imperial past very differently. Join us for an introduction to how the different communities and populations around the world remember and live with their imperial pasts.

In this course, we will explore the development of a specifically feminist practice of philosophy and how it stands to expand our understanding of existence and lived experiences. Philosophical contemplation of the nature of being and reality has often overlooked essential aspects of what it is to be an embodied subject in the world, from the specificity of feminine bodies and experiences like birth, to the forms of alienation and oppression that can shape our identities and relations with others. Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s famous axiom that woman “is made, not born”, we will delve into the thought of an array of feminist philosophers who have elaborated, not only the question of what a woman is, but the areas of life that have been excluded from masculinist thought and thus become the domain of feminist enquiry: from embodiment and phenomenal experience to the environment and alternative modes of knowing and relating to it.

Step into the world of murderous, usurping kings and those who were fortunate only to endure captivity. In considering royal deaths we ask: who had an argument with a poker; who was killed by a pig, and who died on the toilet?

In the twenty-first century, feminist theories of othering and oppression, identity and relation, sex and sexuality come into new life. From trans-medicine and Artificial Reproductive Technologies to climate crisis and internet activism, feminism remains at the forefront of struggles for a more just and inhabitable world. This course will explore how feminist thought is undergoing interesting transformations to meet these and other challenges of our times.

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



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

Explore American art during and just after World War II. From abstraction expressionism to social justice in photography and printmaking see how the US's unique context created the foundation for experimental and transgressive art.

Explore how the Tudors cultivated the art of magnificence in the form of pageants, tapestries, paintings, jewellery and dress to detract from what was essentially a weak dynasty.

The beautiful city of Venice has attracted writers as diverse as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound and Jeanette Winterson. These writers eulogised Venice as a city of art and culture, praising its gorgeous Gothic palaces and shimmering waters. In this course we look behind the myth, exploring the fascinating and surprising stories behind these Venetian visions.