Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Come and revel in the possibilities of expression and form offered by poems across time, guided by lively group discussion and tutor expertise.

This course will consider Claire Denis’ importance as a filmmaker by exploring in some detail a number of her key films from Chocolat (1988), I can’t sleep (1994), Beau Travail (1999), White material (2009), and High Life (2018). Claire Denis’ transnational postcolonial work, from Djibouti, South Africa to multi-ethnic France, deals with themes of migration, human desires and fears. Her films are renowned for being filmed mainly on location, for playing with many cinematic genres and languages and they are internationally acclaimed.

Explore Realism in the nineteenth century, focusing on Manet as its key example, considering such issues as social and political change, formal and subject developments, theoretic interests and artistic influences.

King John is remembered as a murderer, treacherous, and a loser; ‘a bad king’. On the plus side, he was probably the cleanest medieval king around, carrying a tin bath wherever he went travelling!

Learn how Russia’s past is remembered, contested, and rewritten in the present day. This study day explores Soviet and imperial legacies, historical narratives, and how memory is instrumentalised to shape national identity, politics, and contemporary conflicts.

What is a short story? Come and discuss its characteristics, its length, design, mood and style. What distinguishes it from other kinds of short narrative? We’ll compare short stories to other forms, such as myths, legends, anecdotes, fabliaux, parables, fables, and ‘tales’. We’ll look at some of the greatest practitioners including Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, and O’ Henry.

The early 2000s saw the emergence of a number of Swedish and Norwegian crime series onto UK TV screens, including Wallander (dir. various, 2005-10), Forbrydelsen/The Killing (dir. Various, 2007), Borgen (dir. various 2010) and The Bridge (dir. various 2011), all broadcast on BBC4. The popularity of these dramas led to one critic to refer to them as ‘Nordic noir, the gift that keeps on giving’. Similarly successful were the film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s hugely popular Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009 and 2011), The Girl who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009). This one-day course will explore the history, context, development and reception of these TV dramas and films while also considering the various processes of adaptation and remaking involved in their production.

This course is an introduction to theology – reasoned discourse on the Christian understanding of God, his nature, and his relationship with human beings and the created order.

Come and revel in the possibilities of expression and form offered by poems across time, guided by lively group discussion and tutor expertise.

200 years after one of history’s most famous puzzles was deciphered, tour around the British Museum’s new Decipherment exhibition and learn how the mystery of Hieroglyphs was unravelled with the Rosetta Stone, with other archaeological clues, and with a bit of genius. The morning session will be held in our Covent Garden campus; after lunch you will visit the British Museum.