Explore History, Culture & Writing

This inspiring workshop, led by an experienced journaler, encourages students to explore a range of techniques and prompts in order to find an approach to life writing that suits them.



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

Where to you start when crafting an ingenious crime thriller? This fun, informative workshop explores character, plot, dialogue, pacing and atmosphere in the crime writing genre.



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

What is anime? What are the artistic and narrative features that make these films so instantly recognizable? This one-day film course will provide an overview of the history of Japanese animation cinema, its inextricable links with manga and its multi-faceted and varied productions that range from children’s films to genres such as cyberpunk and yaoi. During the course, we will watch and discuss clips from a variety of production companies and directors, such as Haya Miyazaki, the Studio Ghibli and Katsuhiro Otomo.

The Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) was a new kind of film noir set in Texas. A career later they returned to post-Civil War Texas to re-make True Grit (2010). This map of their USA trips through Raising Arizona (1987), then mainstreams to Fargo (1996), but somehow never far from Hollywood and its genres: Barton Fink (1991), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), or Hail, Caesar (2016). If their America was No Country For Old Men (2007), then where art they now? (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch).

Science fiction (SF) cinema of the 1950s drew on the social, political and technological concerns of the period, producing a rich body of films that reflect these themes. Looking at a range of American SF films of the period, this course considers the ways in which these films accommodate such issues, their function as popular, genre cinema, their production contexts, and the way that critics have understood them.



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

The Godfather (1972) defined an era of cult filmmaking and redefined the gangster genre. It had been turned down by Arthur Penn, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, and Fred Zinnemann—but they weren’t 31 and in debt. Coppola was the oldest of the ‘movie brats’ and had just hit a cultural nerve by comparing Michael Corleone to President Nixon just before Watergate broke, which led him to The Conversation (1974). He was the hottest young director in Hollywood. The Godfather not only changed his career but also the structure of Hollywood itself. No other American classic so repays repeated viewings. What would he—and Hollywood—do next? Well, he started his own Studio, Zoetrope, with Michael Powell as an adviser. (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time New Hollywood, Robert Altman, David Lynch and the Coen brothers).



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

Learn how to write a compelling non-fiction book proposal on this interactive and informative short course, which will demystify the essentials to give your project the best chance of success.



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