Explore History, Culture & Writing

A guide to contemporary films directed by women, examined through a psychoanalytic lens. An opportunity to discuss the ways in which cinema can continue to evolve to more authentically depict female desire, fears and subjectivity.

2019 was marked by the death of a true mistress of world cinema, Agne`s Varda. We will introduce you to her oeuvre, from La pointe courte (1955) to her final work, Varda par Agnes (2019), exploring her status as a ‘feminist’ icon. The digital was central to her later career, making her, perhaps, a multi-media artist rather than just a film director.

Explore a selection of films from the early days of European cinema, and later, that draw on a range of key genre traditions, but which have also acquired significant critical reputations, with their memorable visual qualities and unsettling narratives lending them an enduring place in both cinema and popular culture. Strange tales and dark dreams to fascinate, horrify and astound you.



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

Want to know more about the history of the Ottoman Empire and its legacies in the modern Middle East? Join us on this course to get an introduction.

This study day will present and examine three contemporary approaches to reading the Bible. Feminism, post-colonial and ecological debates have had much to contribute to recent interpretative trends of the Bible. We will examine three clusters of biblical narratives, each one focusing on one of the contemporary issues. This will be done through the literary study of a number of biblical texts.

Ring (1998) established a 'J' horror phenomenon but the genre really began with Gojira/Godzilla (1954) and evolved through a series of popular, cult, and art house works featuring monsters, evil spirits, haunted videotapes and psychological terrors. This course explores a selection of key works in Japanese horror cinema, past and present, their critical reputation and impact on the horror genre.



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

German Expressionism influenced Hollywood horror after itself being influenced by early Swedish Nordic noir. Along with F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang was one of the key figures of German Expressionist cinema. Their influence crossed borders and is alive today in cinema tropes, camera techniques and narrative themes still used by filmmakers, game designers and artists. Their films changed moviemaking forever as directors and set designers created a nightmare environment of unnatural perspectives and distorted images in early films such as Nosferatu (1922 F.W. Murnau), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919 Robert Weine), and Metropolis (1927 Fritz Lang) which led to Dracula (1931 Tod Browning), Spellbound (1945 Alfred Hitchcock) and Blade Runner (1982 Ridley Scott). American pulp fiction shaded this into film noir in The Killers (1946 Robert Siodmak) and Double Indemnity (1944 Billy Wilder), films created by directors who had fled the land of German Expression. It had come full circle.